|
|
|
Column:
Special Feature
Extended Flashback: 2007 in Review
By Adam McGovern
|
|
(Continued from Page 4)
Best Franchise (auteur):
B.P.R.D/Hellboy/Lobster Johnson by Mike Mignola & John
Arcudi (writers); Guy Davis, Duncan Fegredo & Jason Armstrong
(artists); Dave Stewart (colorist); Clem Robins (letterer); and Scott
Allie (editor) [Dark Horse]
Not unlike the signature Lee/Kirby FF in content (though far
from it in texture and tone), the lucid nightmares of the B.P.R.D.
minis were endlessly fertile in imaginative constructs (new
characters, secret worlds) and outlandish yet plausible meta-science
and alternate history, with a de facto family of misfits who stand in
for those with whom we’re each thrown together and try to make
sense of the world. Hellboy: Darkness Calls gave a true sense
of titanic moral forces at play and inconceivable physical and mystic
phenomena made visible, in struggles which conveyed genuine scale and
violence which communicated real consequence; lots of comics pledge to
change the world as we know it, but this book showed that the
universes of action-adventure and ancient folklore can collide into
authentically new genres. Lobster Johnson was a great pulp
metaphor for the wonder and terror that the quantum demon of nuclear
power brought to a time of deco skylines and remote villages that now
seems like a fairy tale. Thanks to Mignola, Arcudi, Davis, Fegredo,
Armstrong, Robins, Stewart and Allie, the art-blockbuster has arrived.
Comic I Gave Up Reading
Quickest:
A several-way tie. Killing Girl, though adorned with
astonishing Frank Espinosa artwork (at first, and then an astonishing
Espinosa imitator later on), turned on the plot point that a cop would
not know his fiancée had a sister and that the sister had been
kidnapped and would then mistake the sister for the fiancée
(kinda makes you think the FOP were a little unfair to Ice-T). Dropped
after: 1 issue. The Order is finely drawn and wittily written;
unfortunately it’s clearly a corporate contract to secure some
character copyrights and serve up a domesticated version of
X-Statix. Impeccable but airless. Dropped after: 1 issue. The
Vertigo comics with resonantly conflicted characters and tensely
troubling moral choices (like Scalped and The
Exterminators) I devour. The ones with rotely unlikable characters
and foregone downbeat finales (like Faker and Un-Men) I…
dump after 1 issue each!
Humor Medal: Ty Templeton,
writer, Howard the Duck (with artist Juan Bobillo) [Marvel]
The infinite implications and compound annoyances of the
too-much-information revolution were covered by Ty Templeton like a
cosmic search engine in his Howard the Duck miniseries,
satirizing the many ways in which everything is displayed and nothing
is revealed in a culture of mass diversion as Howard tries to resist a
malevolent mutant pundit secretly seizing the media and singlehandedly
replacing the life of the mind with the life of the mouth. Templeton
uses a fictional conspiracy to spoof a real-life consensual ignorance,
stirring in the snap content of the moment (Britney, taser-dude) with
a five-minutes-from-now insight and nodding to our fake-reality
empire’s founding fathers (jurists drifting off to watch
themselves on TV during their own important trials in a logical
extension of Judges Wapner and Ito). Howard conversely can’t
escape a certain viral video of himself and later can’t escape a
Gitmo-like Initiative prison (not coincidentally the only place
without cameras to make it real for people); as the
year’s last issue (and the first-to-last in the mini) concluded
he’d been declared a non-human and sentenced to the ultimate
compulsory exposure in a zoo. It was the funniest series of 2007, but
if it doesn’t sound like it, Templeton has done his job —
you wouldn’t think secret prisons, undue process, xenophobic
fever, narcotizing leisure and a neutered news media had a lighter
side, but being taken seriously is any system’s greatest
strength, and amidst poker-faced potboilers like Civil War
you’ll find some of the most truly sober statements from those
who’ve got to be kidding.
Toiling in Obscurity Award: Ian Harker
Sarah Silverman meets Peter Bagge (figuratively, I mean, but that
would make a great Marvel Team-Up too) in the minicomics of Ian
Harker, whose poison pen, stapler and xerox machine are producing some
of the most hilarious deflations of pretentiousness that anyone has
dared. From past years’ masterworks like the emotionally
dystopian Charlie Brown update and act of intellectual-property
warfare Ultimate Peanuts and the irreverent counter-fantasia on
authoritarian-lefty mythmaking The Epic and True (asterisk) Life
Story of Che Guevara to his ongoing Oslo series starring
his alter-ego Mr. Asshole, Harker makes highly moral and intellectual
parables by cranking the political incorrectness to 12 and stomping on
the knob. In 2007’s Oslo 2 Harker needs all of 15 pages
to skewer the self-obsessions of art-comics’ celebrities in a
sequence where his own characters literally come back to haunt him
while the background presence of his relentlessly supportive wife
makes clear that, in Mr. Asshole’s life, it ain’t the
artist who’s tortured. Merrily obscure, Harker is not to be
ignored. [www.angelfire.com/comics2/ianharkercomics/]
Ian Harker
Talent Deserving of Less
Recognition?
No clear winner, just an observation. A venerable history for the
medium and a
youth-culture context of the moment have combined to give the comic-creator dynasty
more prominence than ever. Taking over the family business is common
in the world of newspaper comic strips, typically in an
apprentice/executor capacity (like Chris Browne on Hagar) once
the elder cartoonist is retired or gone, but there may be no time when
there have been more children of well-known comic-book creators going
their own way and gaining notice in their youth. The collaboration
between Mike Mignola and his very young daughter a few years back was
a gem of sophisticated fancy, comparable to the handful of haunted and
charming songs and instrumentals Adrian Belew did with his daughter
two decades ago; Andy Kubert and John Romita Jr. have been around for
years but each did some of the most important mainstream work of 2007
(Kubert’s dynamic and historically astute Batman and
Romita’s near-hallucinatory Eternals and World War
Hulk), though Andy’s brother Adam did nothing similarly
distinguished that year. Aline Kominsky Crumb stood tall out of the
shadow of husband R. Crumb in ’07 but together their name and
rep shelter daughter Sophie Crumb from a critical scrutiny her work
might not otherwise withstand. Jack Kirby’s grandson Jeremy was
notably not ready for primetime in a version of Captain Victory
earlier this decade, but daughter Lisa acquitted herself admirably as
a driving force in the writing team on the King’s posthumous
Galactic Bounty Hunters in 2007. Leah Moore, grown daughter of
Alan, appeared as a fully-formed professional several years ago and
with co-writer John Reppion used an uncommon catastrophic imagination
and ear for characterization to stand out from the advancing horde of
zombie thrillers in 2007’s Raise the Dead; she leans on
genre conventions more often that she should (or the old man would),
but she’s a significant talent with a sure future. At
by-the-book DC, the son of inker Tom Palmer (Tom Jr.) and
granddaughter of penciler John Buscema (Stephanie) each eschew the
built-in stardom of their forbears and are making a real mark as
up-through-the-ranks editors; in an overlapping dynasty, Nic
Cage’s teenage son Weston seems to have a lot of good ideas, and
both of them know how much of the heavy lifting to leave to veteran
comic sage Mike Carey in the Voodoo Child series he writes and
the Cages co-created. Alexa Kitchen, under 10 years old when her book
Drawing Comics Is Easy! (Except When It’s Hard) was
published in ’06 and nominated for multiple awards in ’07,
was the beneficiary not of her dad Denis’ fame as an underground
comix pioneer and a history-making artist’s rep and publisher
but of an indie aesthetic that exalts the cultivated simplicity of a
childlike, anti-virtuoso style; the choices made by a Lynda Barry or
Lilli Carré to get there are conceptually textured and
artistically rewarding in ways that a promising actual child may
eventually reach but can only benefit from letting grow up in private.
Encouragement, at too soon a stage, can be the enemy of striving, but
in an indifferent universe artists need both, and a cult of
dues-paying is not necessarily the formula for the best comics; TV
writer Christos Gage and rockstar Gerard Way were utterly untried in
this medium but there are few if any observers who aren’t
thankful they arrived (Gage in 2004, Way just months ago). Romita Jr.
took a decade or two to fully mature and Gage and Way were simply
well-prepared for their shot; at any age, there’s virtue and
mutual rewards in judging your moment and waiting your turn.
Next: Page 6 of 6
—CCdC— Read all of ComicCritique.Com’s columns, old and new,
at our columns archive!
|
|
