Why I love Morrison and Vallely's Bible John (and you should too), by Kelly Sheehan

I have just looked at a panel from Bible John. The picture is odd, as if the original image has been held up to a fun house mirror, and the new distorted version reproduced on the page instead. A woman, covered in menstrual blood, sits in a truck. She is facing the reader. Behind her a man in shadows is also looking our way. I have read this comic many times before. Here, in the light of day, in my home, I read the speech bubble emitting from the woman's mouth -”My name is Pat McAdam”- and I feel a cold shiver. This comic scares the shit out of me every time I read it.

Bible John ran in Crisis magazine from March through to August 1991 and has not been reprinted since. Subtitled A Forensic Meditation, the series is an examination of a series of murders that occurred in Glasgow during the 1960s. It was written by Grant Morrison, illustrated by Daniel Vallely and lettered by Elitta Fell.

Read in one sitting, Bible John induces a shallow pooling of dread in the pit of your stomach. A distinct feel of unease enters the room. Grant would probably tell you to burn some sage, chase off that bad ju-ju. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

The early episodes explore the basic facts of the case: dates, names, times, places. Accompanying these details is a faint prickling on the back of the neck-hackles raised by tragic circumstance and vague synchronicity.

The weirdness, the serious voltage of occult electricity, really starts to generate in Episode Four. The exploration of the facts, (just the facts), has run its course and Morrison and Valley conduct a séance. Two hours into their experiment, the glass on the ouija board starts moving and the parameters of what you thought you were reading begins to waver.

As it turns out S.T.U.A.R.T can’t help and somehow that’s really disconcerting. There is a sense of something inexplicable pushing in on the séance, something with it's own agenda. When I get to this part I can't help but wonder if S.T.U.A.R.T.s now in the room with me, reading over my shoulder.

After the séance, the series seems haunted. Danny Vallely experiences a disturbing dream, the dream where he sees and hears Pat McAdam.

Links seem to build up between the Bible John killings and another murder case from around the same time. Here are real names and events seemingly plucked from the psychic ether: Thomas Young, a convicted murderer and rapist; Pat McAdam, the seventeen-year-old victim of an unsolved murder.

In the end, the disparate elements don’t quite add up and the search for Bible John peters out on the side of the road next to a clapped out car. The ghostly, tentative connections forever obscured by time.

(There is nothing else in comics quite like Bible John. Comparisons are often drawn with From Hell, but apart from murder as an underpinning and Iain Sinclair’s strong influence on both comics, the comparisons do not really add up. Bible John is its own spectral beast, marking its unique territory with chills and prowling, haunting, your head well after you turn the final page).

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A fellow Kiwi, Kelly Sheehan creates some excellent little comics with his brother Darren. One day we will might be able to have lunch without descending into a mutual gush-fest over Game of Thrones or Cam Kennedy...

Why I love Donald Westlake's Trust Me On This (and you should too), by Alan David Doane

Writing as Richard Stark, Donald Westlake created some of the most ice-cold, supercool crime novels ever, the Parker series of heist procedurals about a sociopathic criminal who cares for virtually no one, but has a commitment to his work that is breathtaking to behold.

You can get something of a feel for the world of Parker in the graphic novel adaptations by Darwyn Cooke, or the movies that have been made from the books like Point Blank with Lee Marvin, but really, Westlake’s Parker novels are best experienced in their purest state – by reading them all, in order. By the last handful, Westlake’s prose has become staggeringly economical, even as Parker has developed in some unexpected but fairly logical ways.

But Parker’s world isn’t the only one Westlake explored. He wrote many novels, under his own name, as Richard Stark and under other pseudonyms. Probably my most favourite Westlake novel, published as part of the Hard Case Crime series of novels (perhaps the most consistently excellent genre fiction imprint ever), is Memory. A heartbreaking narrative about a brain damaged man who has a life to return to, but over the course of the novel he forgets more and more of that life until all that lies ahead of him is an unrewarding life of almost incomprehensible bleakness. The joy of reading Memory is the confidence with which it’s written and the level of detail Westlake injects into the story about the day to day life of the protagonist.

Not all Westlake’s work has blown me away, however – the Parker novels inspired a sort of comedic parallel series about a thief  named Dortmunder, and as with some of the other Westlake writing I have encountered, these novels are too tongue-in-cheek for me to be able to immerse myself in them.

Sometimes Westlake’s sense of humour works for me, though, and that’s the case with the most recent Westlake novel I have read, Trust Me On This. Written in the 1980s, and discovered by me hidden away deep in the stacks of crime novels in a used bookstore in upstate New York (and priced at a reasonable four dollars for a used but not abused hardcover copy), Trust Me On This focuses on a young woman who aspires to be a journalist, but somehow finds herself working for The Weekly Galaxy, a very thinly-disguised stand-in for The National Enquirer.

The Galaxy is located at the end of a long, empty, sun-battered stretch of road in Florida, and on Sara’s first day, she drives by the scene of a murder. A dead man lies half-in, half-out of his car, a bullet in his brain. She continues on to The Galaxy, reports what she’s seen to the guard at the front gate, and then nearly forgets what happened as she is immediately tasked with one crazy tabloid newspaper story after another, until somehow she begins to suspect that there’s more to that roadside murder scene than she suspected, especially given that neither the police nor anyone else at all has any idea what she is talking about. It’s as if the murder never happened, so far as she can determine.

Of course eventually she finds out the truth, but the murder is almost a subplot to Westlake’s primary concerns in Trust Me, which are to lay out in loving and very funny detail the personalities and activities of an incredibly diverse, jaded and bizarre group of writers, reporters, editors and one seriously intimidating and iconoclastic publisher.

Westlake walks a fine line between satire and slapstick in Trust Me On This. A long sequence late in the novel involving the family of a recently deceased country music superstar strains the boundaries of credulousness, but does not violate them. On the other hand, a sequence in which Sara has to go to great pains to fraudulently report on the birthday party of 100-year-old twins after one of them inconveniently expires a few hours before the party, is hilarious in both its circumstances and the detail to which Westlake lays out Sara’s desperate conniving.

There’s even a bit of romance that flowers between Sara and her editor, who strongly suspects the wool may have been pulled over his eyes vis a vis that birthday party, and the love story between Sara and Jack provides both a solid ramp-up to the unexpectedly violent conclusion, and the hilarity of the novel’s final pages, in which we see just how much Sara has learned about the batshit crazy industry into which she has been welcomed.

Trust Me On This isn’t the greatest crime novel ever; despite murder, attempted murder, and other crimes and misdemeanors, the narrative is far more concerned with establishing characters and seeing what happens when they set out to fulfill the weird and often unethical or outright illegal assignments they get from The Galaxy. Westlake keeps the reader grounded and engaged by mainly concerning himself with Sara and her character arc, but pretty much everybody in the novel gets at least one good, funny line that plays off of the increasingly strange goings on, The funniest sequence in the entire book comes very late indeed, when a police officer betrays editor Jack’s trust. Jack’s response made me laugh out loud, which novels almost never make me do, and also revealed even more about Jack’s character than we had previously suspected.

Whatever Westlake’s strengths as a writer, and they are legion, the biggest weapon in his arsenal across every genre he worked in was his ability to create believable characters and then show us their lives. In Trust Me On This, the writer allows us to invest in people (tabloid newspaper writers and editors) generally regarded as beneath contempt. I won’t say he makes us glad such people exist, but he does humanize Sara, and Jack and the rest, and he does allow us to see into an off-kilter world of parallel-universe small-j journalism where you can believe jogging causes nymphomania, or beer and potato chips can help you lose weight. The novel was written and published at the height of popularity for newspapers like The National Enquirer, and Westlake was no doubt all fired up about revealing the dirty secrets of how such trash publications plied their seedy trade. He wrote Trust Me On This with passion and great humour, and a couple of decades on it’s still a fun and compelling read, and an interesting side-road off of the main highway of what we think of as Westlake’s stock-in-trade, the hard-boiled crime novel.     

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Alan David Doane was the first person to say nice things about this blog, and even though the baffling popularity of Geoff Johns' comics and the whole Before Watchmen thing has almost driven him to justified despair,  he just started doing his link blog again. Hooray!

Why I love the current Marvel Universe (and you should too), by Joe Rice

So Bob's on vacation with the missus, and he asked if I'd like to write some sort of fill-in for his blog. Bob and I have known each other for years now, writing together, talking comics together, pushing each other forward, and even getting sloshed in real life when he visited the States. I haven't really written about comics at length for a while. I used to be at Comics Should Be Good, and I semi-recently did a few pieces where I brought non-comic-diehards to a comic shop, got drunk, and read comics and reviewed them. I remember writing with Bob back at Listen To Us,We're Right (I still love that title), back when I was pretty sure I was running out of things to say about comics. He was great there, but has really come into his own on this labor of love.

But you know that much, at least, don't you? If you're still here past that introduction it means you're actually here to read about comics and want to get on with it (or you are bored at work and there are no new videos of cats doing things very catlike or very uncatlike). Bob said to write about something I love that not necessarily anyone else is talking much about. Well what I love is talking about and examining the elbow-pits of third string superheroines. You can always tell the ones with the really filthy elbow-pits. Oooooh, baby.

Well now I'm just obviously avoiding my real topic. I doubt anyone remembers anything I used to write, but I was very indie-centered, "Let's push comics," 99.999999% of supercomics suck and loudly so. And I still think these things. Sergio's Funnies might the my favorite comic on the shelves these days, and every Love and Rockets makes my loverocket rocket lovingly. So there's a part of me almost ashamed to so publically state something I know so dearly in my heart to be true.

I fucking love Marvel Comics. Not just the Stan/Jack/Steve stuff. I love TODAY'S Marvel Comics. It took me a while and it took some twists and turns, but my monthly reading list has been almost completely conquered. No, I'm not actually embarrassed to say this, because I know it's not crazy and I know they're not bad comics. Just ...to write at any length about this is to risk diving into super fanboyism, and not in the nerdy stereotype way, more in the "true believer" way ...like someone with a vested interest in one faceless corporation over another.

But here's the thing ...I only feel like that when talking to other comics fans. My previously-mentioned "normals in comicworld" articles were borne from a real absolute interest I've growingly noticed among "the outside world" about this hobby I love so much. I got asked about comics by non-fans on dates, for Chrissake.

Point being, when I'm asked to talk about comics and what excites me, after I get past the general and what is obvious to anyone reading this, most likely (the juxtaposition of words and images, playing with time and space, auteurism AND collaboration, etc) I always end up talking about the current state of Marvel Comics. And this is not due only to Avengers being A Huge Big Deal.

I believe that a huge part of this comes from two intertwined factors: a) a relatively hands-off editorial staff; and b) the idea of the "architects" or whatever ...a group of skilled, smart writers more or less "in charge" of the universe as a whole. Now, of course, there are still editorial mandates, but everything we've read from both DC folks and Marvel folks make Marvel seem almost like a paradise relatively, these days. Have you read George Perez talk about the editorial interference that drove him off Superman? Gah, but, again, I don't want to make this a Marvel vs. DC thing. I've got no horse in this race, I just want to read smart/fun/thrilling/scary/whatever comics.

So, anyway, at Marvel, you've got Bendis, Brubaker, Hickman, Fraction, and Aaron working with editorial above, and other talent semi-below(?) to create direction and coordinate ideas. These guys have some serious indie cred from before and during their time at Marvel. And whether you like them or not, together, they certainly know how to tell a story. (Side note: I once read a complaint that none of the "architects" are on the artist side of the creative team. I don't think that's fair ...Bendis, Brubaker and Hickman all have worked as artists, but drawing monthly action comics isn't quite their forte.)

So these guys getting together every now and then to bounce ideas and plan for the future? This is a good idea. This is how it should be done, not a simple editorial "WE NEED MORE LONGSHOT" followed by "LESS LONGSHOT NO MORE WELL MAYBE A LOT MORE NOW LESS" or something like that. Get smart people, each of whom brings their own skillset and background into a room and have them work together and then have them "share out."

I have long loved me some Morrison comics, but when it comes to his current Action run, I have no idea what the hell he's doing, and, clearly, neither do any of his coworkers. Sure, I get giving Morrison a free reign. Have him supported by other high-quality writers who know what he's up to at least, not 90s Marvel Murderer's Row flying blind.

OK, someone's already thinking "THE EVENTS OH GOD THE HORROR THE EVENTS!" Is Marvel too event-centered? Sure, probably. I mean, they have to do what sells I guess, and as long as it produces interesting stories, I don't care if it's an event. And even back to Civil War--the idea of which was monumentally stupid and required a lot of weird logic bends--allowed for some good stuff to be produced. Right now I'm thinking of the rise of Luke Cage in Brian Bendis' New Avengers work of the time. Guy went from being a joke to a major player all the while being sharply written. Since then, the events have had ups and downs, but all of them had some pretty amazing bright spots AND set the stage for a year or so's worth of other stories. In a way, these events keep us from the dodgy repetitiveness of silver age superhero work. I mean, yes, it's mostly the illusion of change, but at the very least arcs are set up and possible.

I mentioned Bendis. He's probably the most divisive of all these big writers. I'm not sure if it took me time to like him on Avengers (really the first thing of his I read) or if it just took him some time to get the feel for it, but for the last couple of years or more I have always looked forward to his superhero work, from Ultimate Spidey to all those millions of Avenger comics he writes. I like that he writes the Avengers as people who are superheroes, and who eat and joke around with friends. It feels more authentic to me.

You've got Hickman working on this years-long Fantastic Four epic ...the semi-recent climax thereof had me actually making audible sounds of appreciation as I read it. Fraction going in opposite directions in Thor and Iron Man, and Jason Aaron just absolutely KILLING it in Wolverine and the X-men.

Another thing they've been doing that I've loved is the "partner writing" as a way of bringing up newer writers. Gillen works with Fraction for a while then takes over his own books. I remember when Hickman was "Bendis' partner" on Secret Warriors. Brubaker brought Fraction in, I think I recall. This is a ridiculously simple but effective idea. If you're going to have a shared universe, have the writers work together. Dan Slott may write Spider-man, but he can use help from other writers on their topics, too. (Speaking of Spidey comics, they've been really good. REALLY good. Thoughtful, fun, and still clearly building to something while spinning off great concepts.)

Now you've got Remender on the rise. Honestly, anyone that can make both Flash-Thompson-as-Venom AND X-Force work has got my vote of confidence.

Now this doesn't even start to delve into the talent on Marvel's writing bench. Gage, Parker, DNA, Wood (way to lose talent, DC), Van Lente, Casey ...the Marvel bench is mad deep, yo. And art? Holy God, where do they keep finding these great new talents? Pichelli, Rivera, JRjr, Immonen, Bradshaw ...I'm not going to sit here and type every name out but come ON these are some gorgeous looking books.

When you have all these people (and more, of course) working together, there can be a cohesion unavailable to other methods of doing ...this, I guess. Marvel superheroes, from their roots, were grounded not only in a more naturalistic mindscape, emotionally, but were grounded together, socially. They knew each other previously or met each other later on or worked together or served on teams together or fought or what have you. And that's still all there, giving a depth unnecessary for the enjoyment of the stories, but it's still there if you're looking for it. When Johnny Storm dies, it affects Peter Parker. When Johnny comes back ...somewhat different, it is meaningful because it is different.

I was talking to a friend lately ...talking about all the relationships across the MU. Why, for instance, Captain Britain has a place in X-Men lore, or Scarlet Witch's place in the grand scheme, or, hell, Quicksilver (just try to relationship-map that guy). The fact that these disparate things can not only co-exist but actually build upon each other ...the slow burn friendship between Peter Parker and Log--James--Wolverine, for instance, is kind of amazing. From the old 80s "WE CAN'T TRUST EACH OTHER!" to the complicated thing it is today. And let's not forget Ben Grimm ...

Anyway, I was talking to a friend about this and we started talking Defenders, a comic I'm REALLY enjoying these days. And there's good old Namor ...still a great character after all these years. Who else has been an Invader, an invader (small case), a Defender, an Avenger, an X-Man, a member of the "Cabal" and the "Illuminati" ...I've heard comics fans say this sort of complicated continuity is what keeps other people away. Not true, from what I've seen. This sort of thing, this layering of relationships, this intertwining of stories and genres and ideas ...this is what people come away excited about when we talk comics. What better way to exploit this than such collaboration and creative co-planning?

So Marvel's going to shake things up now. I am sad to see the Bendis-era Avengers pass. I am sad Hickman is leaving Fantastic Four. I am sad Brubaker is leaving Cap A. But I'm excited. Hickman's meticulous planning and methodical approach to detail for a year or two of Avengers stories? YUP. Bendis doing "cosmic" and the original X-men as time travelers? Uh, totally didn't see either coming, but I'm in with a grin.

The best part is, you don't have to get sucked into every little nook and cranny if you don't want to. The current Marvel Universe is as immersive as you want it to be. Want to stick to off-beat tales of regret and discovery? Just stick to Defenders. Want some one-off action explodeys? Hulk has your back. Scheming, planning, and excellent character work? Try Thundarkavengerbolts (SEE WHAT I DID THERE???). And if you want to get balls deep in the most deeply-coordinated yet widespread fictional setting around, then go nuts. Read Daredevil for beautiful but haunting heroics, then switch to Spidey always trying his hardest while poor li'l Loki is also always trying his hardest ...

It's a pretty damn good time for Marvel superhero comics. It's really--

Hm. Remember when Morrison was going on about the complexity of the DCU and how it would reach sentience and he was seeing it already start to influence our existence? He was so close, wasn't he? But DC gave their infant universe mindwipe. Who is it invading the mainstream now? Guys, I had a mother from the class I teach freak out about frickin Thanos. Thanos, not Hulk, Spidey, or even Iron Man. Thanos.

Don't get caught up in corporate politics or your own hangups. Look around at what Marvel has. Find what sounds fun to you. I mean, really, do I give a shit what you're reading? No. All I'm saying is I have been having a goddam great time reading Marvel for quite a while now, and that's about as close as I get to human emotion without drugs.

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Bob note: Joe Rice is a genuine Kentucky Colonel, (which I find massively impressive), and the biggest single influence on my blog writing (which is slightly less impressive). He was called the Dadamerican when I first met him, but I always think of him as Rocket Fish.

Tidying up for guests at the Tearoom

I still get an incredible amount of enjoyment out of sorting out what books I’m going to take with me when I go travelling. It’s important.

I once got stuck without reading material two weeks into a 48-day trip around Europe, full of endless boring motorways where you couldn’t see anything, so you might as well read or sleep. I had Robert Fisk’s gargantuan War For Civilization, and I thought that would last me and I got through it in about a week. Even though I managed some emergency Hiaasen on the trip, and got temporarily hooked on the mad super-warriors of Steve Erikson’s fantasy books, I also resorted to a Harry Potter book and the only James Patterson book I’ll ever read. It got quite dire there.

So I do put some thought into this. I need something thick and dense, that will last hours in airport waiting rooms and endless train stations. A deeply thick paperback with close type and masses of interesting information is always best, but I also need some sleazy and easy fiction, and some sort of comic.

This time, when we go to the UK for three weeks, I’ve got it down to a Doctor Who reference book that I only got halfway through during two weeks around the States and a history book about the 14^th century, because I suddenly have a pressing need to know what life was like in 1399.

I don’t know what cheesy novel I’m going to take, or whether I should just pick one up on the go, but I’ve already packed away the second issue of From Hell, because the hotel we’re staying at in London is right beside one of the Ripper murder spots and the comic makes a terrific guidebook.

I know I could just get an electronic device and have dozens and dozens of books to choose from, but where is the fun in that?

We’re off to the UK for a few weeks now. We’ll be going to Skara Brae and the Reading music thing and some Edinburgh festival shows and the Lake District and soaking up the kind of history that we just can’t get at home, and I’m just as excited about trying to find a comic shop in Inverness, or what the second hand bookstores in the college towns are like, or getting the final four episodes of Nikolai Dante in one concentrated dose.

I know what I’m here for.

Apart from one regrettable attempt at comedy, I usually shut down the blog when we go on an overseas trip and everything goes dark for a month, but things won’t be so drastic this time.

This time, I’ve got some guest bloggers who will be offering up some desperate defences of things they love that are unappreciated, forgotten or misunderstood. We all know that feeling.

Posting might be a little sporadic, but there should be a new one every five days or so, and the first one will start early next week, with a guest post by a genuine Kentucky Colonel, who has probably been the biggest single influence on the writing on this blog.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I gotta go pack. And decide if I’m going to take that Miracleman book or not.

Batman wins!

There is a guy at my work who does these great little cartoons to let off steam, but we’ll never be friends, because he doesn’t like Batman.

Well, of course he likes Batman – everybody likes Batman. But he doesn’t think Batman’s a good superhero, or even a superhero at all, because he doesn’t actually have any powers.

He said this to my face nearly a year ago, and I’m still silently fuming about the wrongness of this point. And I’m not just saying that because, when it comes down to it, Batman is my favourite superhero of all time, I’m saying it because it’s just plain wrong.

It’s not the first time I’ve encountered this attitude, but it always baffles me a bit. You can have a different favourite superhero – even Drax The Destroyer is somebody’s favourite hero – but to not even acknowledge Batman as a superhero is a sin.

I mean, if you’re looking for superpowers as a criteria, Batman is the fittest man on the planet and possesses a fierce intelligence, along with the strongest willpower in the universe. That’s pretty fuckin’ super.

But really, the only way to work out who is the greater superhero is in the usual superhero way - imagining who they could beat in a fight. So we’re going straight to the top, because if Batman could beat the greatest superhero of them all, he could beat anybody.

And everybody in comics – from indie kids to jaded farts – knows Superman is the greatest. He’s the first, and the most iconic. There were heroes with strange powers before him, but he was the first superhero, and set the standard for the rest. Superman is everything that is right with America, and a symbol for fairness, compassion and a firm hand against bullying. He’s the greatest superhero, and Batman will totally take him in a fight any time.

(I’m also doing this because I’ve had to make this argument a dozen times, and now I can just silently point to this post and point out that I Am Right About Everything.)

WHY BATMAN WILL ALWAYS, ALWAYS BEAT SUPERMAN

By Bob Temuka

Aged 37 and a half

Make no mistake, Superman could just zap Batman with his supervision from space, leaving a bat-shaped smear on a Gotham alleyway. In sheer power, Superman always wins. He could crash the moon into Earth if he wanted, he could break Batman’s bones with the sonic wave from an armpit fart.

But Superman doesn’t play that game. The fairness that makes him a genuinely aspirational character means he wouldn’t resort to such scorched earth tactics. Even if he was being mind-controlled by that dick Brainiac, there would be some kind of subconscious protection from this sort of thing.

So even though Superman could just pick Batman up and throw him into deep space before Bats has a chance to think, he wouldn’t do that. He’d try to make it a fair fight, even if he is awesomely more powerful.

Besides, Batman would know if he’d pissed Superman off. Another of his not-quite-superpowers is an unparalleled sense of deduction, and he’d see signs that Superman was gunning for him. Maybe he didn’t reply to his Valentines Card this year (“Dear C. World’s Finest Forever. Love, B.”) or maybe Superman said something at the last Super Friends reunion, but nobody noticed because Jayna got drunk again and kept taking her top off.

Batman would know. And he would be taking precautions against a surprise super-attack, and he certainly wouldn’t be wandering around in th open, waiting for a laser from heaven to reduce him to ashes.

So no matter what, Batman would know it was on, and this is why he always wins – he can plan for anything.

This obsession with outthinking an opponent before the target even knows they’re an enemy has been used against Batman (most recently in the JLA: Doom cartoon film adaption of a Mark Waid story), but it also works. Batman always wins, because he’s always thinking ten steps ahead of anybody else.

So when Superman comes for Batman, you just know that Batman has a Kryptonite shank that he’s going to embed in Superman’s kidneys, or some kind of red sun generator that makes Superman as powerful as a slightly perturbed girl guide.

A combination of willpower, planning, physical strength, lateral thinking, obsession, loads of hard cash and sheer genius means Batman can beat anybody, from Squirrel Girl to Superman.

Superman doesn’t stand a chance.

I’m certainly not the first to point out this fact, and there have been plenty of examples of the two heroes having a throw-down, dating all the way back to their earliest adventures.

But there’s actually never any clear winner when the two clash, because DC can never afford to piss off their Bat-fans, or their Super-fans, or anybody. You do get some sort of result in things like Elseworlds books, although the defeat of Batman in something like Mark Millar’s Red Son is weirdly ambiguous, suggesting that the Bat In A Hat got what he wanted all along.

There is also a fairly definitive battle in The Dark Knight Returns, but again, it’s unclear who really wins. Superman is the last guy standing, or is he just playing his part in some larger plan?

In fact, the Dark Knight Returns is a perfect example of Batman’s winning-by-planning. At the end, old Bruce realises he can’t beat still-powerful Clark, so fakes his own death to try something new. He tears it up and starts again, and even though Superman knows he’s been played in the final pages, he lets Batman have his victory.

It feels good to get that out of my system, and I only feel a little foolish about the geekiness of it all, and will undoubtedly feel a bit more justified the next time I get into one of these stupid arguments.

Life is full of these stupid little arguments, and while it’s always fun to get into a good debate, some things - like the fact that Batman will always beat Superman - are irrefutable.

The perfect comic: Love and Rockets # 28

I always have real difficulty settling on one answer when people ask me what my favourite comic is, and I even have an extraordinary amount of trouble when I get asked who my favourite superhero is. But if somebody asks me what my favourite single issue of all time is, there is really only one answer.

It’s Love And Rockets #28, by Los Bros Hernandez, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s the perfect comic.

It was published in late 1988, which makes it nearly 25 years old, (although I didn’t actually get around to reading it until three or four years later). It’s a Jaime-heavy affair, with four complete short stories from him in the issue, although Beto compensates for the lack of pages by producing one of his best comics ever.

Both of the brothers were between bigger storylines – Jaime was in a long and fruitful interlude period between the more structured Death of Speedy and Wigwam Bam, while Beto had just floored everybody with the stunning Human Diastrophism, and was about to hit with the one-two punch of Poison River and Love & Rockets X.

In this period between these Important Works, the brothers Hernandez crafted touching little stories of life, love and art – stories that, all these years later are still funny, moving and alive.

Beto’s sole contribution to #28 is his Frida Khalo comic – a 12-page biography that is both informative and haunting.

I know there are at least three people who will scowl heavily at me if they catch me using the j-word, but it’s the juxtaposition of the art and words that takes a straightforward story (of a fairly extraordinary life) and makes it a transceendelty beautiful.

There are no speech balloons in this comic, just caption boxes telling the factual account of the life of Frida Khalo, using the tone of the dispassionate scholar to recall her tragedies and triumphs.

But the art – which Beto apparently just made up as he went along, with little planning or forethought – is staggering, a dark-humoured and surreal remix of Frida’s art through his own head. Beto has Tonantzin wander through, portrays real-life events as if they are half-forgotten dreams and represents the lady herself represented as a graceful deer, brought down by savage hunters.

In any other comic, Frida would be the undisputed masterpiece. Although it still arguably is, Jaime’s work in this one issue is just as stunning and worthy of recognition.

It’s just four little stories, none longer than six pages, but everything that makes Jaime’s work so appealing is on display in this one comic. There is the humour of good mates, and the tragedy of lost chances, and the beauty of just hanging out.

The comic is bookended by two funny and beautiful stories by Bizarro Xaime No 1, and both still make me laugh. Boxer, Bikini or Brief has Ray slowly and inevitably losing his shit at the art board, Danita’s poise when posing and Maggie’s tremendous ideas about her own posing. Lar Dog: Boy’s Night Out #1398 has more than a hint of melancholy – the idea that for some people, getting really fucked up every night and getting into fights is as good as it’s ever going to get – but still cracks me up: the way the model assumes Lar Dog is coming on to her when he honestly couldn’t give a shit, or “He must have had at least eighty-nine beers tonight”.

And, just for more laffs, there is also some Li’l Ray, and Jaime’s kid stories are always odd and adorable.

And, of course, issue number twenty-eight has also got Tear it Up, Terry Downe, which is still my favourite four pages in the extremely rich history of L&R.

Thirty-six panels, and not a single bit of space wasted. A staccato story that streches over a decade or so, and never feels rushed or cramped, with Jaime capturing perfect moments of love and despair and confusion and more love.

It's short, but remarkably efficient. It sums up all the beautiful complexities of Jaime's work, as it shows the life story of one of his characters - a staggeringly gorgeous and totally stuck-up woman - in all its infinite complexity, unearthing silent motivations that explain severe actions.

It also showcases Jaime's wonderful way with words - one of my my very first internet aliases was 'Stevie Teevee' - and features his art just as Jaime perfected his art style, all heavy blacks and gorgeous lips floating in space.

It was also a magnificent reference work - #28 was the first proper issue of L&R I ever bought, and figuring out the relationships between Maggie and Hopey and Terry and Del fuckin' Chimney was made a whole lot easier with this short story, even if there are still hidden depths to these characters that are still being hinted at in Jaime's current comics.

So yeah - it’s a personal thing. I love this comic because it's a brilliant comic, but also because I fell in love with it at one of the most brilliant times in my life. There is a very faint tomato sauce stain on the panel of Terry and Hopey in the bath, which has been there ever since me and a girl named Lisa were sitting on the grass at Timaru's Maori Park Pool, eating hotdogs and reading comics in the wonderful summer of 92/93.

The Hernandez Brothers have been at the top of their game for 30 years, producing scores of brilliant stories. Their latest work is every bit as good as their older stuff and, as ever, I'm desperately keen to read the next issue of Love and Rockets.

But no matter how good the new stuff is, there is always a place in my comic-lovin' heart for L&R #28. It’s the perfect comic. Who could ask for more?

All sorts: Beyond, Sightseers, Finder, The Score, Solaris, Reset

This week, I have been mostly watching Parks & Recreation, and reading more Back Issue magazines.

But there is still plenty of time for all sorts of other stuff.

Beyond was a minor Marvel mini series from a few years back, by the much missed Dwayne McDuffie and Scott Kolins. It came out right at the same time as all that Civil War nonsense, and was spectacularly out of fashion at a time when Reed Richards was being a suspicious dick towards Spider-man at a bloody funeral.

No wonder it’s held up so much better than most of the Marvel titles at that time. Beyond is still a pleasantly nostalgic read, and even though it’s just another six-issue comic designed mainly to give characters like Hank Pym, Firebird and Deathlok something to do.

It’s intentionally hitting those nostalgia buttons – targeting specific vibes of time gone by. Pym and The Wasp have been fighting the good fight since the sixties, there is some very silly, very seventies cosmic shenanigans, an eighties dash of treating it all with super-seriousness, (and just the slightest touch of realism) and a nineties tendency to throw a bunch of random characters from the back catalogue together and treat them like actual human beings.

So I ended up liking Beyond much more than I thought I would when I finally got around to it recently. It had almost no impact on the Greater Marvel Saga, but it’s all the better for it, and manages some sharp characterisation (It’s the only comic where I’ve ever liked The Hood, and it also uses the only version of Deathlok I’ve ever given a damn about).

McDuffie was always so good at these straight-up superheroics, with his work only suffering when it was hammered into some Grand Editorial Vision, and Beyond is the perfect example of this.

It’s one of my favourite times of the year right now, when the NZ International Film Festival rolls into town.

I don’t go as crazy as I used to, but I always see half a dozen films each year – usually a mix of weirdo horror, supreme arthouse, worthy re-release and some kind of music documentary. I already saw Cabin In The Woods with an appreciative audience last week, and a magnificently loud and brilliantly huge print of The Shining yesterday, and Killer Joe last night, which managed to be even more spectacularly trashier than I expected.

But my favourite film of the festival so far is undoubtedly Sightseers. I’ve made no secret of my fondness for Ben Wheatley’s films, and after the fucked-up gangster shit of Down Terrace, and the fucked-up horror shit of Kill List, Sightseers is the fucked-up romantic comedy shit.

It’s really horrible, and really funny, and I’m always after that in a film. It’s got tender moments of madness, some achingly beautiful natural landscapes and some remarkable gore. It has somebody getting their face bashed in with excruciating detail while there is a passionate reading of Jerusalem on the soundtrack, a wicked ending and a giant fucking pencil. It’s about ley lines, and politeness, and broken people finding some kind of happiness.

It’s just about everything I want in a movie.   

It’s a shame that the thing that makes Carla Speed MacNeil’s Finder comic so interesting – that fact that it’s so complex, impossible to categorise and difficult to even describe – are the same things that make it hard to get into in the first place.

I mean, I’m 350 pages into the first big collected volume, and I have no fucking idea what’s going on.

But I want to know more, and that’s always a good sign.

On the other hand, the latest Parker book by Darwyn Cooke – The Score – is effortlessly smooth and goes down like good whisky. There is less of the storytelling experimentation that Cooke used to hook the reader in the first two books, but the more straight-faced the storytelling is, the more effective it is.

It only took me a couple of decades to get around to watching Andre Tarkovsky’s Solaris. It was totally worth the wait.

Tarkovsky reckoned the main purpose of the scene on the highway was that it would drive all the stupid people out of the cinema, but it’s brilliantly intense cinema, even when nothing is happening. (And very, very funny – of course a modern Soviet filmmaker would have a hard-on for a modern traffic system.)

And the bit at the end with the dripping water is driving me crazy. Top stuff. Now I’m off to watch Stalker.

For a new Peter Bagge comic, the four-issue Reset min-series ended on a surprisingly sweet note. Bagge is getting soft, man.

His kinda town: Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland

Harvey Pekar always had a lot of things going on, so it’s no surprise that there are more of his excellent books coming out, two years after he died.

A new one came out a couple of weeks ago, and is all about Mr Pekar’s take on the complexities surrounding the state of Israel, and there are likely to be more. Harvey was always working on something, and there is still a life’s worth of writing to be re-appreciated and unearthed.

But even if there is more to come, his outstanding book about his home town is a proper Final Work From A Great Talent, as Harvey reflects and ruminates on his town, and his life, and the way they mix together.

Ego can be defined by geography, and if you live in one place long enough, you’re going to become intertwined in ways that are impossible to overcome.

Harvey Pekar could not be more Cleveland if he tried – he shared with the city those feelings of aching loss for the past, fierce pride for the present and slightly upbeat resilience for the future. He was broken down a lot of the time, but not completely. Harvey liked to moan a bit, but he was still always enthusiastic about the things he loved, and he loves his city.

His book about Cleveland – beautifully drawn by Joseph Remnant, whose consistency is above average for a Pekar book - mixes personal nostalgia for the town with historical lessons, a look back at the founding of the city, and the day his favourite baseball team took out the championship, and the day he met his first wife. It’s another rambling comic by a rambling man, and that’s what makes it so enjoyable.

Harvey doesn’t just dredge up dry history, he goes straight for the details of the things he loves, like a decent second hand bookstore, and the sadness of nice neighbourhoods descending into slums, and more baseball, and his mate Toby, and the way you can still eat the ancient filling in the pipes of an old Twinkie factory, or the quiet beauty of a walk in the park.

I never liked Harvey's comics until a couple of years ago - they always seemed so clumsy and stilted, but then I realised that was part of the point.


Now, I can't get enough of Harvey's work, and I feel a little bad that I'll never be able to tell him how much I appreciate him. His comics are snapshots in time, and have a voice that is absolutely distinct.

It's not just the way he captures the voices of the people he meets (although his skill at choosing just the right quote that sums up a person is unparalleled). His books after the last few years have had that sense of tired anger at injustice, but also a pleasant and cosy vibe - he just wants to have a yarn with somebody in his books, and isn't too bother if nobody is really listening.

 
It’s this sense of warmth, along with those these witty lines and brief asides, and the glimpses at the lives of the interesting folks he meets along the way, that make Harvey’s comic so charming, right to the end. He can make wide and general acknowledgement towards the loves of his life, or how easily he manages to maintain a frugal breakfast.

The Cleveland book is all over the place, which is always when Harvey was at his best, and a fine testimony to a man and his city. We’ve heard some of these stories before, but it’s nice to hear them again.

Even if there are a few more Harvey Pekar books to come, this gentle and harshly fair book sums up the man’s life perfectly, and will stand as an enduring work.

Fast-forwarding to the good bit: Invincible volume 14 - The Viltrumite War

While The Walking Dead has shuffled its way to the top of the sales and a sea of critical opinion with all the relentless drag of an undead horde, Robert Kirkman’s other long-running series also keeps trucking along.

Invincible – the story of a super-powered teenager who discovers he’s descended from an alien race of enormous assholes with incredible power – is approaching its 100th issue, and even though it hasn’t inspired any insanely successful TV show, it has been comfortably telling its story at its own pace.

Kirkman’s comics can be shambling, silly and very, very predictable, but by God, the man has a work ethic, and he sticks to the story he wants to tell, when other writers are distracted by new and shiny things. And this perseverance can really pay off. Three or four trades of the Walking Dead can climax in shocking fashion in one brutal moment, and years and years of set-up and development can lead to unexpected rewards in Invincible.

Or you could just skip most of it and get straight to the point. That works too.

I read the first six or so trades of Invincible a couple of years ago, thanks to the wonderful local library, and they were pretty enjoyable. A pleasantly old-school comic, with clear, open and cheerful art by Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley, that also takes some extremely gory liberties with the human form as superheroes smash through bodies, sending blood and guts flying everywhere.

Invincible’s main appeal – outside of these intense action scenes that would pop up out of nowhere – is its main characters. There was the occasionally painful Kirkman cliché - often involving characters who run off in tears for plot reasons, only to stumble into something REALLY HORRIBLE - but Mark Grayson is a genuinely likeable character who always tries to do the right thing, with a vast range of goofy and powerful background characters.

It was a pleasant read, even with those insufferable book titles (They’re all eighties sitcoms! Hilarious!), but it was also easy to let it slip away as more and more books came out. I lost track after those first half dozen, but didn’t miss the comic that much.

And then, at least two years after I last cracked open an Invincible book, I saw the fourteenth volume on the shelves of the library. It’s called The Viltrumite War, and I quickly realised it was the culmination of the main stroyline for Invincible, as everything finally comes to a head, in an all-or-nothing drive to finally rid the universe of the cruel and terrible Viltrumite race.

Even though I missed eight volumes of the story, it wasn’t hard to follow what was going on. There were new characters, and new alliances and all that, but it was easy to keep up with the general play. I’m sure there are all sorts of story bits I just wasn’t getting, but all the character dynamics were clear.

And it was incredibly satisfying. There really is a huge amount of resolution, some balls-out superhero action, lots of lovely little character beats, and one last little twist at the end. It delivered on the promises first raised in the earliest issues of the comics, as the story finally faces an inevitable oncoming storm.

I’ve actually enjoyed Bill Willingham’s Fables comic more ever since it dealt with the whole evil empire, and moved on with life. The final battle against the Big Bad came and went, and new adventures and adversaries came along. It’s been accused of becoming a bit pointless, but my favourite stories are always a bit pointless and my affection for Fables has only grown over the past couple of years.

In a similar vein, I’m also glad that Invincible has not hung up his groovy goggles, just because he defeated the ultimate enemy, because the future is more unpredictable and uncertain, and that always generates good drama.

I’ll try not to let eight books worth of stories slip by before I check in again.