The Professional

The latest 'Dig the Long Box' column went up this week at Read Comic Books. I reviewed one of my all-time favorite single issues, The 'Nam #8. I'm trying to approach this column with a little more transparency than some of my other writing which isn't easy for me. When it comes to 'I' statements in critical writing, 'I' am not a fan.

About a decade ago, I shot an interview with the journalist and novelist W.C. 'Bill' Heinz, if you've never read Heinz's The Professional -- the book Hemingway called, ''the only good novel about a fighter I've ever read'' -- by all means, go, read. Heinz talked for over three hours. He had a very deliberate way of telling a story. He started at the beginning and like the trained newspaperman he was, he took us through every detail. When asked about his role as a combat journalist in World War II, he spent twenty minutes describing leaving the port of New York for the war in Europe -- thank God we were there for a long-form interview, Mr. Heinz, bless him, did not speak in sound bites.

Heinz wrote about sports for the New York papers back when there were 10 dailies in New York with multiple editions. If it was a game played on a court, field, ring or racetrack, Bill Heinz wrote about it. And in his spare time, Heinz wrote novels like MASH, yes that M*A*S*H. He was a stud.

During our interview, Mr. Heinz used a phrase I'll never forget: ''prose poem.'' He was recalling an NIT game he had covered back when the NIT was ''the tournament'' for basketball and the NCAA was for chumps. So Heinz goes on about his prose poem, how beautiful it was, how elegant, how pure -- all this, mind you, about a basketball game. He hands the story to his editor, the editor reads it and looks at Heinz nonplussed. He hands it back to Heinz and says, ''yeah, yeah, fine, fine, Bill, but what was the damn score?'' In all that poetic prose, Heinz never gave the final score.  

I think about this story when I read on-line comic book and movie criticism. I'm all for a personal essay full of anecdotes, longcuts and obdurate opinions as long as said details add to the story; 'Montaigne' it up, all I ask is to give me the damn score.

The column on The 'Nam #8 starts with one of those 'hey-look-at-me-type' anecdotes' about the time I saw Platoon in the theatre. It takes me five 'graphs before I give the damn score, but so be it. FYI The 'Nam #8 is a yardstick by which all other comics should be judged. How's that for an endorsement?

I've gotten great feedback about the column, so far. It seems 'the kids' they like the personal touch. I'm curious to see if I can remain Mr. Cellophane as I continue the Long Box column or if I fall into my more comfortable mode as the detached (although passionate) critic. For now, I'm a be me.

A hat tip goes to Read Comic Books godhead, Tyler Goulet, a true professional, who continues to cheer me on in tweets and emails. Thanks, Tyler. Dig the Long Box #2: The 'Nam #8  

Great Whites, Gouges and Gewgaws

I was a triple threat  this week with three posts going up on the same day, two on Comics Bulletin and one on Read Comic Books. When it rains it pours.

 

The Massive demands to be read in singles. Go with whatever nautical metaphor feels appropriate -- 'full speed ahead,' 'anchors away,' 'shake a leg' -- for this masterpiece in the making. Wood invests such stakes in this comic, there's urgency with this title that most comic books can't, don't and won't ever muster. The Massive #11 also has sharks in it, Great Whites and the 'bad fish' of all 'bad fish,' Megalodon.   I'm not convinced Wood's use of 'Meg' works, but I'm the wrong guy to ask, I saw Jaws: The Revenge, in the theatre.

 

Kill Shakespeare: Tide of Blood #3 arrived right on time to celebrate the anniversary of Shakespeare's, birth, next year is the big 450 (!) and death, 397 years since Bill S. shuffled off this mortal coil. I admit I am probably too close to review Kill Shakespeare with any kind of cool journalistic detachment. Personal bias or not, believe me when I tell you, this is a great comic. Belanger, McCreery and Del Col are telling a phenomenal story in a creative and surprising way in which the script and the art strengthen and reinforce each other it's a wonder of storytelling.

 

'New Ideas, Old Mutants' generated enough buzz that the good Canadians at Read Comic Books asked me to write a 'Long box' column for them. My first effort is the Rocket Raccoon limited series from 1985. In another 16 months or so parents everywhere are going to be awash in more Rocket Raccoon whimsy and Groot gewgaws than you can shake a marketing campaign at. These four issues are so oddball in proportion and so out there in every conceivable way it's hard to believe a mad scientist type didn't come up with it -- and believe me, Bill Mantlo was mad in all the best ways. His story is tragic, but his legacy will live on in Rocket.

Review: The Massive #11,

Review: Kill Shakespeare: Tide of Blood #3,

Review: Rocket Raccoon

Old Mutants, New Ideas: the Omnibus

The Whole Megillah (and I'm not even Jewish)

When a fellow writer notices you haven't updated your blog in a while … it's probably time to, you know, update your blog. Never let it be said I don't listen to advice or fold like an origami swan when it comes to peer pressure.

 

I promised I would use Interested in Sophisticated Fun? as a catchall -- I remember saying something as pretentious as the library of Alexandria (shiver) -- for my writing, it was a 'blog promise,' but still … I wrapped 'Old Mutants, New Ideas: Bill Sienkiewicz's New Mutants' about a month ago. I surprised myself when I found I still had something to say about Sienkiewicz, mutants, Claremont and all the rest when I hit 'send' on the last post. The best kind of writing is when you surprise yourself. I never try to dwell on anything the 'guy's in the basement,' as Stephen King says, send something up, don't marvel meat, just write.

One of the surprises in my final post, New Mutants #31, was how I was somehow able to work in the ad for Robert Bell. I sent away for the 'Marvel Comics Price List' and pored over the pages when it arrived in the mail. It was a catalog, nothing more, nothing less. It was talismanic somehow, containing secrets, comics I couldn't find in my friendly neighborhood comic shop. I probably only ordered from the catalog once, maybe twice -- I think I bought an oversized collection, a Marvel Treasurey Edition (?), of the first five or six issues of Thor, after it switched over from Journey into Mystery. Those Kirby pages are magic. Magic that came from Coral Springs, FLA. Who knew.

So, here is the whole megillah, the kit and the caboodle, all in one place. Thanks to everyone who commented, sent tweets and retweets, etc. Special thanks to Jason Sacks at Comics Bulletin and the always reliable Danny Djeljosevic who kept me on schedule. And a tip of the cap to Bill Sienkiewicz -- if we ever meet the first, sir, the first round is on me. Here, as they say, is the 'Full Run':  

New Mutants 18, New Mutants 19, New Mutants 20, New Mutants 21, New Mutants 22, New Mutants 23, New Mutants 24,

 

New Mutants 25, New Mutants 26, New Mutants 27 New Mutants 28, New Mutants 29, New Mutants 30, New Mutants 31

 

Mic Check, One Two, One Two

Podcasts, Eel Mansions and Storm Dogs

I got to 'live the dream' (sort of) these past two weeks by guest-hosting on two of my favorite comic book podcasts: The Two Headed Nerd Comicast and Panel Culture. As much as I would like to host my own podcast or fill-in on a semi-regular basis … it's a lot of damn work.

 

In my experience, a successful broadcaster (especially in radio) needs two things: the skill to never run out of things to say and a sense of amity. Silence is the killer and so too is insincerity. If you can't fill the space or if you show any sense of phoniness, you're dead. Neither of these 'casts have to worry about such puny problems. So, my thanks go to Joe and Matt and Charles, Owen and George for the opportunity for this ink-stained scribbler to be both 'internet famous' and 'BIG in Canada' in the span of about seven days.

As if podcasting isn't enough of a collaborative act, I also spent time last week in an attempt to one-up Daniel Elkin and Justin Giampaoli on an essay about Eel Mansions by Derek Van Gieson. I've tried to avoid small press publications if only because I know if I give in I won't be able to stop myself. Small press comics may be more hit-and-miss, however, when they hit, watch out. At (only) thirty-eight pages, Eel Mansions is a monster. We wrote almost five thousand words about this black and white beauty of non sequiturs, in-jokes and out-and-out weirdness and there is still more we could have talked about. Eel Mansions is a giver and for $7 shipped it's a steal.

 
Last, but not least, my bi-monthly contribution to 'Shotgun Blurbs'-- Justin's column on Thirteen Minutes dedicated to creator-owned work -- went up this week. I wrote about Storm Dogs from Image Comics by creators David Hine, Doug Braithwaite, and Ulises Arreola. David Hine is a thinker. (re)Reading Storm Dogs gave me insights into how far Hine has gone to think about the setting and characters he and Braithwaite have created. He backdoors the world-building in the same ways Lucas did with 'Star Wars' with offhand mentions to past events which only further the reader's imagination.
 

Hit the hyperlinks for more: Storm Dogs, Eel Mansions, Two-Headed Nerd, Panel Culture.

And do yourself a kindness, huh? Go to Uncivilized Books and buy a couple of copies of Eel Mansions.

Review: LP

See The Music

LP spins a deep cut, a romance of the authentic; a story deceptive in its simplicity and deep in its intention. Imagine what 'Surfs Up' or 'Cabin Essence' sounds like to Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks in that spring and summer of '66; or how, on instinct, David Lynch knows, knows, it has to be an ear in 'Blue Velvet.' LP operates on that level.

 

Curt Pires writes LP as a kind of open source code, an invitation to collaboration that gives more than it takes. Pires's prose is genuine with the right amount of uncanniness built-in to spur the reader into inquiry -- a kind of 'Rashomon' in the style of its storytelling and cartooning.  

On its shellac surface the story tells of an apathetic drugged-out worn-out rocker, F., and his supernatural 33. Either wearing socks and abed in a gangbang, alone in a crowd or taking a tire iron in his map, F. looks right for the space, mutable in every aspect. F. goes places, he is a cipher, a zero, a complete non-entity, a man who holds none of the secrets or answers. Instead, F. acts as the access point, the key. What F. provides Pires is the means, not the end.

There is a grungy, lived-in thrift-store quality to Ramon Villalobos's art, not cheap or disposable, far from it; Villalobos is a find. His character designs and backgrounds track in the raw and the organic. Art so full of energy and so alive it attains a synesthetic quality -- that's right, Villalobos's art has a smell to it and a taste -- an artist whose talent lets the reader see the song.

Like Pires's story, Villalobos's art lives at the margins, a singular style both visceral and built up over time, callused. There are details in the art, an Aladin Sane reference here, the serrated edge of a sneaker logo there and a scrap of half-remembered lyric, all elements that make up the mix. It's like this story has been out in the æther and Villalobos and Pires act as translators, speakers for a collective unconscious. LP tracks in the mythic.

Villalobos draws a lot of gateways, panels dedicated to doorways, entrances and exits (there's a difference). F. is forever on his way to somewhere else, in transition and impermanent -- a traveler of both time and space; this in-between-ness and emphasis on access riffs on LP's open-ended quality. When the record takes its solo, Villalobos uses three standing rectangles and turns them ever so much as allow whatever exists in that other place, the world of the record, to bleed through into this world. Like some Lovecraftian Old God's menace, pseudopodia (signals) shoot across dimensions and go from grey-green to red and then to black -- it is analog, it is messy, the message is clear: don't fuck with the messenger. You don't choose the record, the record chooses you.  

Pires is a George and he wears 'the quiet Beetle's' influence on his (record) sleeve. In a book thick with boffo depictions of the slaughter of dog-headed bent-eared henchmen and bare-chested punks with shaved heads and smeared mascara, the most memorable image is of a lotus-legged F. as he opens his third eye in search of what has been taken from him. Villalobos splits F. down the middle (an intermediate illustration if there ever was one) half of him in this world and the rest in the next. A heading at the top of the page, outside the panels and inside the narrative reads: ''withinUwithoutU.'' No album cut is perhaps deeper in rock-and-roll than the lead track on side two of 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.' Pires and Villalobos don't cotton to the singles, they're on their own stone groove.

 

LP fulfills the promise of all great art: to translate the personal into the personal.

Curt Pires and Ramon Villalobos are on tumbler and Twitter here and here.

Mo' Mutants, Mo' Problems

The New Mutants Marathon … continues

I ran the 400m in High School, the quarter mile. If I had any sort of strategy it was to work the corners like a 'crafty' veteran pitcher or a hooker.  The third corner is a bear and the last corner breaks most runners and then it's an all out sprint. I'm about to turn the fourth corner on my New Mutants writing project and I can feel my body dig for the extra gear I'll need on that last straightaway.

This week my essay on The New Mutants #25 was posted to Comics Bulletin. It wraps up a tasty narrative pretzel about Rahne and Bobby inheriting the powers of Cloak & Dagger. Tandy and Tyrone, unburdened and ready to leave the life behind, decide to do the 'noble' thing again take up the … err … cloak and dagger.

There are two B-stories in this arc that involve Selene and the Hellfire Club and Magneto and Aleytys "Lee" Forrester that are plain kooky. To be honest, the one about Selene, The New Mutants #23, is kinky and as I write in the piece an eye-opener for me at the time. The other plot thread with Magneto and 'Lee' takes place on an island somewhere in the Bermuda triangle. As Magneto and Forrester approach this Cthulhu-inspired getaway, Sienkiewicz scrawls 'Cockrum' into the cracks along the sea wall. The man is not without a sense of humor or history.

 

I don't know if anyone has coined the term 'the Sienkiewicz face,' if not, you may want to register that domain name or tumbler tout de suite. The New Mutants #24 makes a case for the face. This being the New Mutants the faces are often in anguish or some kind of distress. My favorite is one of Magik (natch) as she and her teammates figure out what to do with Rahne and Bobby. She's got this enigmatic smile that says discomfort and hints at barely contained roiling rage.

Next up, is the arrival of David Charles Haller a/k/a Legion, perhaps the most powerful mutant ever imagined and therefore problematic in every way.

The other piece that came out this week at Comics Bulletin is the January edition of 2 for #1. Jamil Scalese and I along with this month's mystery date, editor extraordinaire, Danny Djeljosevic take on The Black Beetle #1, Adventure Time with Fiona and Cake #1 and Young Avengers #1.

Ensconced as I am in Marvel's merry mutants, I find myself more and more drawn to the Marvel universe. Marvel NOW! is marketing bullshit and yet I keep thinking if I was thirty years younger, Young Avengers would have been my jam like The New Mutants was back in the day except Sam and Bobby never shared an open-mouth kiss like Wiccan and Hulkling.

According to Blogger, this marks my forty-ninth post to Interested in Sophisticated Fun?. It's only fitting as I near the tape on my one year anniversary that I try to make it an even fifty, which (almost) averages to one post per week, my goal when I began this new universe.

Time is irrelevant when it comes to writing. What we write lives after us (we hope) and when it comes to the act itself, writing ain't no sprint, it's a damn marathon.

Review: Captain Marvel #9

Idiosyncratic Routine

''Book like that,'' says my LCS guru, ''fanboys don't support 'em. Too bad too, I've always liked that character and Andrade's art is badass.''

 

When I swore off buying Marvel and DC cape comics ten months or so ago, I gave myself an out, kind of, which I now call 'the Cloonan clause.' If a favorite artist like Becky Cloonan works on a Marvel or DC title, there is no reason to throw the baby out with the corporate comic bathwater. Somewhere David Brothers weeps. So be it.

 

I read an editorial Jessica Boyd wrote on Stash My Comics about Captain Marvel. Boyd passionately writes about the comic she loves and the archenemy of all comic book superheroes -- not named Batman or Wolverine -- cancellation. Boyd lists DIY paraphernalia fans have made in support of Captain Marvel, everything from ID cards to t-shirts to knit caps. I was curious to see what all the hub-bub was (bub) so I thought I'd give it the 'flip test' next time I was at my LCS.

And then it hit. I saw Filipe Andrade's art and it was like when Michael Corleone first sees Apollonia. I was struck by the thunderbolt. Cue the Cloonan clause.

I always choose idiosyncratic art over house-style, always; and perhaps that's my cross to bear when it comes to corporate comics, an aversion to the same sameness. Lucky for us, heroes wear costumes, right, or how else would we tell them apart? Comic books are enough of a ghetto and walling off one kind of reader from another goes nowhere. Captain Marvel #9 flies above the fray to challenge corporate comic book conformity and we are all better for it. 

Nobody knits a hat unless they believe. From what I can tell, Captain Marvel is an idiosyncratic comic, so much so, it feels like it could be creator-owned. Writer Kelly Sue DeConnick has made Captain Marvel personal and people connect to something with character, something handmade. DeConnick has made Captain Marvel a philosophy and therefore dangerous, perhaps that's why the sales figures are low even though fan interest runs at a pique.  

Captain Marvel #9 begins with a refrain: ''Women in Uniform.'' It's the chorus from an obscure 1978 single by the Australian glam rock band, Skyhooks, which was covered by Iron Maiden in 1980 and released as their third single. If that isn't idiosyncratic, I don't know what is. Apparently 'Women in Uniform' is Tony Stark's preferred ringtone and he hacks into Carol Danvers cell phone to make it so -- my guess is Tony prefers the Maiden version. Up the Irons! What a way to start the day. This impromptu hack sets up Danvers's day and puts the story in motion.

This is the only DeConnick comic I've read so I will reserve a stronger critique of her writing until I learn more. She's good with quips and one-liners; and when paired with the visual flair of artists like Andrade and colorist Jordie Bellaire -- Captain Marvel may be Bellaire's best work -- DeConnick would do well to invoke her inner-Larry Hama and let the pictures tell the story.
 

Andrade understands the elasticity of a comic book superhero -- the uncanny ability their bodies have to change shape to suit the moment. I guess this is a problem for those who want their superheroes to be realistic, you know, when they fly or shoot laser beams out of their eyes, 'cause that's what you want with that sort of thing, realism and an obeisance for the laws of physics and thermodynamics. Yeah. Critiques of comic book artists like Andrade always come with caveats like ' the art is not for everyone.' Out of curiosity, when has art ever been universal? This kind of critical crutch exhausts me. Each to their own, I guess.

If the script calls for a hero to punch a dinosaur in the face or execute a roundhouse kick on a couple of tuffs, I say go for it, add some flair, why not; these are superheroes after all, they can take it.

DeConnick's day-in-the-life script calls for a lot of character moments, interactions with super-people and civilians alike. Andrade finds the humanity in each character. There is pride, woe, and joy in the three faces of Rose, a woman to whom Carol brings breakfast. Rose's face looks like she's on loan from a Bill Plympton short; and then there's the eager look of the cab driver whom Danvers recruits to bring her cat to the vet so she can fly off and be a hero. Even for their exaggeration, Andrade's characters look different, unique … like people. Andrade's cartooning has style, yes, and isn't that what one wants in an artist, looks and brains?    

 

I don't knit so I'm out on a Carol Danvers signature hats Etsy site. My loss. However, I'm in on Captain Marvel. Maybe the 'Carol Corps' will cut me an ID card: Carol Corps: Special Andrade Division.