A Smart “Dumb” Comic or Putting Out A Fire … With Gasoline!: Benjamin Marra’s Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror)

Cartoonist: Benjamin Marra

Publisher: Fantagraphics
 

KEITH SILVA: There are comics and there is Benjamin Marra’s Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror).

Think of an off-brand Regan-era actioner too big for Kurt Thomas and too small for Michael Dudikoff. Imagine it’s directed by the non-union Panamanian equivalent of Joseph Zito. Now add to this make-believe midnight movie with its sure-to-be-astronomical body count, novelty deaths, leaden one-liners, and ka-rah-tee with the most hardcore pan-sexual sex like … ever. Whatever such a movie would look like comes close to what’s in the pages of Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror).

The story goes George W. Bush orders the formation of a top secret team of Foreign Service agents as a big ol’ ‘Merican FUCK YOU!!! after 9/11. These ‘Terror Assualtors’ hold licenses to kill and one mission: defeat terror (4EVA). One agent, codename: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror) takes this mission to the EXTREME because … why do you hate America so much?

Perhaps, big, dumb, and full of cum acts as a better description of this comic. Such critical shorthand gets at its inherent crudeness, but lacks the satirical charm, artfulness, and subtlety of something so indulgently indulgent and so blatantly blatant. Marra wants to honor the silly extremes of 80s action movies and hardcore porn and dumb it way down so it becomes whatever the reader wants to see: political parody, sexual satire, or so mundane and so geeky as to question the fundamental show-and-tell binary of comics.

So dumb. So smart.          

Marra’s fellow Fantagraphics stablemate and friend Dash Shaw often talks about the “dumbness” of a line. It’s a philosophical approach to cartooning that attempts to inform the reader through a lack of affect. Shaw says, “so much of illustrative drawing is about showing you what something is and simultaneously telling you how to think or feel about that thing. What the dumb line does, I think, is completely remove that from the equation. Everything is drawn with the same even-ness, or thickness, or lack of nuance … and finally you’re allowed to think for yourself! Finally there’s room for conflicting thoughts and feelings.”

The world of Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror) is nothing but a collection of cubes in the guise of buildings, everything looks like a facade. Dumb. Cars look like tissue boxes with wheels and the difference between a desk, a video camera, a pack of cigarettes, and a bed is slight. The design of the characters maintains Marra’s distinct hip pinball machine art as drawn by underground comix legends like Art Spiegelman or Bryan Talbot. But the character’s movements are stiff and stolid as if Marra has never seen how human bodies move except in the pictograms of Airline safety cards. Dumb. The exception is when his characters take off their clothes: Marra’s men have six pack abs, long veiny hardons, and bulging scrotums that look like they’re smuggling cue balls in there. The women retain a constant 36-25-40 body shape with nipples that look like they could cut clear through adamantium. Even in the throes of the zesty enterprise of sex, the motion remains stiff, but the sex is “hawt” regardless of who’s zooming who. Even at his nadir of his career Steven Seagal was never asked to fuck a dude while jerking him off and crash land a jumbo jet (well, at least half of one) at the same time. Dumb.

It’s hard on the reader to take anything in Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror) with any scrap of seriousness. Harder still is to avoid reading into the extreme situations of terrorism: hijacking, an invasion of the US and the war on drugs. It’s satire, sure, but what’s Marra’s point? With his blond hair, aviator sunglasses, John McClane-badassery and John Holmes’s sexual prowess, special agent O.M.W.O.T. is one cool customer. Isn’t he also a walking piss-take of American jingoism, fear-mongering and ignorance, not to mention a big cock in every way. If this comic fell out of the sky into the Afghan badlands or the mountains of Changang like some Coca-Cola bottle would it be taken as truth? Of America’s depravity and lack of morals? Is this the real ‘dumbness’ of this comic? Or should readers sit back in their red ‘Make America Great Again’ hats, tuck into a cheeseburger, chase it with a Budweiser with a tube of lube within arm’s reach and just enjoy the thrill of it all?               

DANIEL ELKIN: You’re asking leading questions again, Silva, pushing prosecutorial procedures out the emergency exit as this Airbus A380 is stuck circling the skies gobbling up fuel in order to make an emergency landing in the parking lot of some abandoned manufacturing plant in Detroit.

These are hard times. Don’t make me go tit-for-tat. I don’t have that kind of stamina and my one-liners are divided into two.

But hard times deserve hard commentary and slick Swiftian satire, right? And it appears O.M.W.O.T. fits the bill of fare here in this pre-apocalyptic hash house serving, as it does, crude crudités, moist meatballs, and a thick apple pie with a slab of cheddar stuck in it like a caseiculture hammer. There’s a jukebox in the back corner stocked with the entire discography of both Ted Nugent and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Every waitress is named Blanche and they all have an ax to grind about Syrian refugees.

Sweet gibbering gobstopper, it sure does take a thick stomach full of hot bile to macerate what Marra is cooking, doesn’t it? But we breed them big here in America. I mean, it unquestionably takes a capacious, dumb mouth to ingurgitate and bloviate simultaneously. Thank goodness we have a 24 hour news cycle to provide us with role models in that game.

Now I’m hungry. I think I need a ham sandwich.

Mmmmmmmm…...

Finally full of meat, I’m starting to second guess my chuck wagon metaphor. Maybe, instead, O.M.W.O.T is all about big hands? You know, the ones we use to grab our cocks and our guns and our cash at the same time as we throat punch perceived threats, jam thumbs in the eyes of those less fortunate, cover the mouths of those who disagree, and give the finger to the calm voice of reason? The ones that hold flimsy signs scrawled with misspelled hate in front of federal buildings? The ones that violently pull the lever on the voting machine to cast ballots out of blind frustration and against self-interest?

Benjamin Marra creates a book for the reptilian brain that explodes from within and without, whose shock waves push you back into your couch covered in Funyun(™) crumbs and Coors. It throws you out in the cold without your jacket because you have something to say. It complains about how inconvenient it is desperate, voiceless people have blocked your way to the mall with their protests. It whines about how much your city smells like urine in the summer because all those dirty children are living in tents under the overpass.

Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror) is crude and over-the-top. It’s rude and uncomfortable.  It’s thoroughly inappropriate and bat-shit bonkers. And it is of and for our times. Or at least until the Iowa Caucus.

SILVA: So, it’s all politics then or at least political satire and that’s it? One big cock-and-bull-story about America’s (current?) obsession with vengeance and eye-for-eye diplomacy in post-9/11 Dick-Cheney- America? Thanks Obama!

Bullshit.

Marra is better, smarter (and dumber) than you are giving him credit for and so are the publishers of  American independent comics! And yes, Elkin, even a West coast lefty like you with your liberal leanin’s and not so nonchalant references to sandwich fixin’s must be able to see through the superficial scrim of political satire here? Call this Elkin-baiting, but your refusal to engage this comic on any other level than as political satire reads like some mealy-mouthed millennial … yes, millennial ... agog at the senseless violence and gratuitous sex, yet mindful (desperately so) of the instant credibility that having Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror) on their bookshelves brings them while they’re drinking Headys with their fellow douchebag friends, all of whom lack the intestinal fortitude to make a fucking point or decision and stand by it. You’re a gotdamn American Jew, Elkin. Good Christ, you were raised in Texas! And you’re nearly forty-nine, act like it!

Let  me put it in a way a leather-patches-on-the-elbows-intellectual-counterculturalist like you understands: go further. Get on Furthur, tell Neal the ball the jack and thrill us with your acumen of how Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror) functions as, you know, a comic. Critique, my friend, critique.

Sing of Marra’s use of dialogue in this political football you want to punt around. Why does nearly every line describe its corresponding elements in the panel? Example: when O.M.W.O.T shoots the guns out of the hands of an assailant, said assailant says, “What? “You shot the guns out of my hands,” this panel of the disarmed assailant accompanies two “ptang” sound effects, one for each gun, don’t you know. Or when a bedroom door explodes into the room, O.M.W.O.T says, “The door exploded inward,” a big “Boom!” complements the action, natch. Or how about when our hero visits an “internet company” in “the business district, Des Moines,” in the disguise of an investor no less, he ends up having a conference room quickie with the company’s Vice President and says, “I’m just spraying your ass with semen.” The Vice-President responds, “Can you see my body shaking as I orgasm?” There are wavy lines around both the ass shaking and semen spraying to bolster the image in the panel of … well you get the picture. And why is such racy and redundant dialogue sans any exclamation points whatsoever? Why so serious?

So sell your weak tea political insights somewhere else, Elkin, we’re all stocked up here.                       

ELKIN: Everything is about politics, Silva. Even sandwiches.

Satire is as satire does, brother, and if it happens to be your sacred cow that is being skewered, you’re the bigger man by doubling down on your order of keeeeebobs. Marra is comic booking here so hamfistedly because that’s the only way to hold on to something so juicy. We live in knee-bent, post-ironic times that demand this type of ridiculously excessive creating in order for you to “get it,” brother.

Get it?

Perhaps your genteel, old-school, pinky-raised, musty, East coast, well-to-do sensibilities prohibit you from rolling in the mud to better understand the swine, Silva, but there’s a world out there that is grokking everything from a place of fear and unease, ganking up the herpetological synapses, and fight-or-flighting all of its reactionary decisions.

Just look at the latest gun sale statistics. I’ll show you the life of the mind.

But you’re right, let’s not limit ourselves to just politics as it will only leave us insatiate. For you, I’ll put on my brown corduroy smoking jacket, pour myself a thick snifter full of a tawny aperitif, and reflexively stroke my goatee (not a euphemism).  You want critique? I’ll give you critique.

Perhaps, and I think this is where you want to go, O.M.W.O.T. is also a comic book about comic books, reveling as it does in hypersexuality, coursing with a banal attitude towards gratuitous violence, and turning on bonkers plot points all while keeping its character development flat and one-dimensional.

You know, for kids!

I’ll admit to having taste when it comes to my comics. I prefer the books I choose to work in the gray areas between clear cut good and evil morality, featuring characters that embrace and examine the dilemmas they face without punching them in the throat. My snobbery even extends to fashion choices. The moment a character decides that the best way to deal with obstacles or predicaments is to put on a cape, I quickly lose interest.

But I get it. I get the appeal of superhero books in the same way I understand why the fairgrounds are packed when the monster trucks come to town, or why a 10 second video of someone getting hit in the balls with a hammer goes viral. Simple is easy and we like to take it easy. There is a clean pleasure in loosening our load and lightening up while we still can. Given the choice between a Twinkie™  and kale, we’ll err on the side of the sweet. But such a steady diet does destroy, so they say. Or, in the case of someone like Dan White for example, it makes us mean and homicidal.  

I’m going to be the bold one in this conversation and say that corporate comic book publishers are the Hostess Snack Cake factories of the entertainment industrial complex, producing sweet treats that are good to eat but which eventually will make you fat, lazy, and stupid. We all know it, yet we keep on buying them in armloads.

(“Bullshit! We do NOT make B pictures here at Capitol.”)

Marra is deliberately playing to the expectation game with O.M.W.O.T. -- there’s a preconceived notion of what comics “are” --  that’s what this dialogue describing “its corresponding image and sound effect” kerfuffle is fluffing. That’s what every twist and turn of his style, layout, and pacing is pinging off of. There is a deliberateness to the dumbness; it’s in service of excacerbating our mastebatory urge to gorge ourselves on that which will soften us.

Sometimes you gotta shine the light in people’s eyes in order to get them to see.

So call O.M.W.O.T. political satire or social satire or even some kind of Wallace Beery wrestling picture, but it’s critique all the way through in both style and substance and every breakdown I make of this book  is only going to have me dancing to that boogaloo and shing-a-ling, pal.

Show me how I’m wrong and I’ll buy you a truckload of Ding Dongs™ and Ho Hos™.

SILVA: Wrong? No. What we are both circling around here, like two alley cats with too much damn education, is familiar ground: risk. The word itself makes some men uncomfortable. Risk. Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror) is not safe for work, it’s not safe for Starbucks™ and it’s certainly not something you want to leave lying around the house for your partner to find unless you consider comics foreplay in which case this fits the bill.

A playful streak runs through Marra’s work like Route 66 cuts across the fable of America. Seriously, this is a cartoonist who did a U.S. Agent story for the teacher-has-left-the-classroom-indie-cartoonists-run -Marvel Comics jam, Strange Tales. Marra’s comics are always a kick. And as is always the case with great art they are as subversive as fuck. The joy -- or dumbness to circle back around to the beginning -- with a comic like this is how the reader chooses to engage with it. Read at one level it’s a bonkers story with gobs and gobs of gratuitous sex and violence. Read another way it turns into a parody of the most vapid 80s action movies and hardcore porn. Or it’s a political/social satire and on and on. And yes, for nerds like me, it’s a statement on how too many comics are grossly overwritten and pay zero respect to the motherfucking point of Comics in the first place.

Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror) is a John 3:16 kind of comic. Marra loves comics and so he sent O.M.W.O.T. Here’s hoping we don’t fuck it up. Seriously, what could happen?

***

Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T (One Man War On Terror) is available from Fantagraphics. For all other dumb Marra stuff visit www.benjaminmarra.com.

Daniel Elkin is Your Chicken Enemy. And there's always @DanielElkin for more dumb ideas about sandwiches, leftwing political drivel and comics.    

 

 

Vital, Vicious and Visceral: Starve #1 (a review)

W: Brian Wood A: Danijel Žeželj C: Dave Stewart

How do you like your dog?

For those familiar with (or hungry for) Brian Wood’s agitprop storytelling there is much to feast upon in Starve: a near-apocalyptic NYC, the populist rhetoric of ‘Us vs. Them,’ the cultural bankruptcy of celebrity, gross consumerism and, a near-fetishistic environmentalism—call it, Wood du jour. Yes, in much of its ‘stuff’ Starve dovetails Wood’s oeuvre from as far back as Channel Zero, Supermarket and DMZ to more recent work like Mara and The Massive.

Nearly two decades into Wood’s career as a comic book creator, when his peers have either split or are content to act as slaves to their own machinery, Starve proves Wood remains, yes, hungry. Each of those Wood-isms (see above) receives a check in its respective box and yet there is also a further brashness, an attitude, an urgency—Starve snarls, a vital, vicious and visceral beast.

The main ingredient here is Gavin Cruikshank, a (former) celebrity chef—number one with a bullet on 2015’s list for best new characters—who is estranged from his wife, Greer, and his daughter, Angie. For the last three years Cruikshank has been on a drunk of debauchery and local cuisine. A compelling and complex character, Cruikshank is world weary and cheeky with a pinch of pretentiousness that's more charming than obnoxious.  

Wood’s one misstep is to mention Cruikshank is gay or as he calls himself, “a queer dad.” His ex-wife says she was “twenty-two when we were married and when you came out of the closet? I was forty.” Wood never goes further with how or if Cruikshank’s sexuality [1] either informed his choice to go on his self-imposed exile or to return. Cruikshank contains multitudes, for sure, but why introduce his sexuality and then do nothing to develop it? Here's hoping Wood goes further with this aspect of Cruikshank's character.

The rest of the ingredients are these: world markets are crashing and global warming (isn’t it ‘climate change’ now?) has caused Jamaica Bay to rise twelve inches and swamp Queens and JFK. Fortunately, broadcast television has fared much better in the encroaching biblical reckoning. The number one show is ‘Starve.’ Created by Cruikshank as an Anthony Bourdain-like ‘No Reservations.’ In his absence, however, his creation has put on weight to become a cutthroat reality TV cooking competition. During Cruikshank’s truancy, Greer has had him declared dead and has taken full control of all the show’s assets and fiduciary concerns i.e. Angie. In order to (maybe) recoup some of his filthy lucre, Cruikshank must compete in (and win) an eight episode season of Starve.

This is Wood drawing from a deeper well. Starve is more than its bespoke urban rot and populist politics. Wood collaborates with artist Danijel Žeželj and colorist Dave Stewart, all three are listed as co-owners on the title. To nitpick Stewart’s approach to color on Starve sounds hypocritical like arguing hitting with Ted Williams or tugging on Superman’s cape, caveat dumbass. It’s all well and good to draw from the Crayola box of Armageddon shades and tones, but perhaps there’s more to this world than sepia and ocher, gunmetal and sage. Is it too much to ask any artist, let alone an undisputed authority like Stewart, to imagine (rethink) a pre-apocalypse and therefore break from the accepted language of the genre? Perhaps. Stewart knows blood and so when it’s time for this cooking competition to get on to the real ‘meat work,’ Stewart will surely bring his trademark bloody and sinuous reds.

Few illustrators or cartoonists equal Žeželj for style, emotion or amount of ink per page. His art occupies some liminal space between woodcuts and stenciled graffiti as if Albrecht Dürer and Banksy had a baby. In those viscous lines Žeželj wrings out exhaustion, ennui and joy in equal measure in the faces and frames of his characters with an unmatched poignancy. As he does in stories set in derelict urban settings -- Luna Park comes to mind -- Žeželj’s printmaker’s precision for background details in Starve creates images so suffuse with girders, illegal wiring and bodies, bodies, bodies it feels the opposite of industrial, organic and not manufactured. So fastidious is Žeželj’s line even tiny minutiae like tattoos and logos pop in all that ink. And when it comes to tousled hair, Žeželj’s tangles are matched only by other Wood collaborators like Becky Cloonan and Ryan Kelly.

Žeželj is not a nine panel kind of artist. Almost all of the pages in Starve are composed so panels act as satellites around a central image. Žeželj often layers panels to create a kind of consistent present rather than the sense events take place moment to moment or frame to frame like in a movie. Not only is this technique ‘pure comics’ it acts like the needle of a compass pointing the way through the chaos to tell the story where everything happens all at once. With apologies to Wood and to letterer Steve Wands, Starve doesn’t need narration or dialogue, everything the reader needs to know comes across in Žeželj’s art and that is something too many readers are starved for.

As to the dog in this first issue … it’s going to be a bridge too far for many readers. It’s dark, unsettling and daring … which is the point. Exploitation works to shock, to demand the audience pay attention, the meaning is self-evident and not to be dismissed as purposelessness. The point is to be insulting without insult and to challenge conventions. There is an (over) abundance of testosterone in Starve—which would fit with male-centric reality TV cooking competitions. It’s perhaps an overreach, but Starve (almost) feels like what David Mamet would do in a similar situation and the dog is symbolic of delivering on this chest-thumping male bravado.

The machismo on display fits with Cruikshank’s character -- the wildest of the wild bunch, the cagiest of vets in for one more job, one more score, the old dog brought back to show the young pups what for -- and it fits for Wood as well. Starve is a statement about men, fatherhood and most importantly, redemption. Cruikshank is looking for redemption and not to put too fine a point on it, so is Brian Wood.

On the final page of Starve #1, Cruikshank narrates, Wood writes, “But I won’t play the game they want me to play. This is my fucking show. I’m going to do my eight episodes and burn this whole place to the ground. Watch.” These words nest within full page image of Cruikshank from the chest up. Žeželj draws a skein of raw meat as it curls out from below Cruikshank’s top teeth and bottom lip like a serpent’s forked tongue. Blood drips from the meat onto his chef’s whites, he looks vampiric … he looks awesome. Wood’s words are a promise, tenacious and immediate, Gavin Cruikshank like Brian Wood means to reclaim his vigor and prove his worth. Watch.

---

[1] In a later issue, Angie mentions her father’s workaholic nature which may explain why he lacks a partner or the time for to pursue a sexual or romantic relationship.

The Tick #1

This review originally ran as the 'Dig the Long Box,' a column on the now defunct RCB.net 

New England Comics (NEC) in Brockton, Massachusetts was where I went after weeks of mowing lawns or stacking wood. Today, I think of it as a kind of nostalgic 'doper's dream,' the LCS as cathedral; phalanxes of long boxes lined up like a secretarial pool in a 1930's screwball comedy, comics covering the walls in clear Mylar sleeves that intensify gaudy covers, and (in my mind) acres of space  to wander (wonder?). NEC was where I was first struck by the lightning bolt of The Dark Knight Returns, learned what the word 'covet' really meant after seeing The Incredible Hulk #181, where I first encountered the earth-pig (Cerebus), made the acquaintance of Daredevil and when I first saw The Tick.

The Turtles hit at the apogee of my adolescent comic book collecting. My world was black and white and everything was anthropomorphic, skilled in some Martial art and a parody of a parody of a parody. No, I do not own copies of Geriatric Gangrene Jujitsu Gerbils or Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters, yes, I did buy a lot of issues of Boris the Bear, one issue of something called Buce N Gar, and I even own a couple of the worthless issues of Albedo Anthropomorphics. Oh, sure, I did my required reading for Marvel and DC, but if it was black and white and put out by some fly-by-night independent publisher nobody had ever heard of, before (or since), I had to have it.

Original 'The Tick' strip

Creator-owned wasn't (really) a thing back then. In the mid-1980's, the black and white independent revolution in comics was just getting started. It was still more-or-less of a camp and not the Wild West boom town it would become. Eastman and Laird had staked their claim and the sharpers and innocents alike were quick to fill the speculators demand which meant both promise and a lot of lousy comics. When NEC published their own comic book, The Tick, from a strip that had run in their newsletter, it was a definite must have. Like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (New Hampshire, sadly) the Tick was local, the creation of a fellow member of the Commonwealth, Ben Edlund, so, I bought it.

Sidebar: Like so many other comics from that time in my life, I own this #1 and that's it. I didn't know The Tick lives on until, my friend (and inveterate hoarder), Aaron Meyers, vehemently chastised me in a tweet. [Shortly after this review posted I sent my The Tick #1 to Mr. Meyers and the home he runs for comics, it's a safe space where I know The Tick #1 will be well cared for and happy] Apparently, there's money in these creator-owned comics, well, the 'good 'uns,' anyway, sucks to be you, Fish Police. I never saw the live-action The Tick TV show with 'the face painter.' I knew there was a cartoon (1994), I guess (?), but by then, as James Robinson says in Starman, 'I'd moved on to wine and women.' NEC continues to publish The Tick on occasion, so, good on them and good on Edlund. The various, sundry and (I hope) profitable permutations of Edlund's creation are all beyond my ken, so, let's stick to 1988 when all there was was a black and white comic book about a wannabe superhero who wore a View-Master around his neck.     

The Tick #1 feels different from all those other black and white critter books of the 1980's, see, it's (a bit) oversized. If a cheap, easy (and somewhat subtle) joke like that bends back your antenna, The Tick is your jam and Bob's your uncle -- the unnecessary reference to British slang here is not important to understanding The Tick; however, it does add to the absurdist nature of this comic. The Tick triumphs as comic and concept because Edlund understands parody and comedy are at their funniest when the characters take themselves seriously, the seriouser-er, the funnier-er. So acute (and so serious) is Tick, his story begins in a mental institution. Yes, superheroes stand-in as our modern myths, blah-blah-blah, and yet, Nano-suit or not, a guy in a cape would not fly outside a green screen or the pages of a comic book; and that, of course, is part of the fun. The Tick is in itself a parody of a parody (TMNT and its clones), but Edlund knows being self-referential is only (really) funny when one is self-aware as well.   

Other than from the force of his own internal monologue, issue #1 offers no explanation of how the Tick goes from being a padded room, where he feels restrained and bored, and a page turn later is leaping from rooftop to rooftop. As the saying goes, 'nuff said. Tick and The Tick moves fast. By page three, Tick admits he once thought his destiny was to ''become emperor of Greenland'' and then to ''build a Polynesian longship in my garage,'' and now he decides destiny has tapped him to be ''this city's superhero.'' And so it goes.

When The Tick takes its bow, Edlund is in college, not even old enough to drink (legally), but he was already seriously soused on comics. The opening panels of issue #1 show an artist who has heroic poses down pat and a writer with every heroic trope under his fingernails. It is safe to say, Edlund read a lot of Daredevil and paid close attention to ol' hornhead's penchant for bouncing off of conveniently-placed flagpoles. Edlund runs a flagpole gag a full seven pages, the sound, ''wub wub wub'' acts as ambient noise while a cigar-chomping vagrant takes the Tick down a peg or ten.

The deepest cut happens when the man asks the Tick: ''Didn't you escape from an insane asylum a coupla weeks back?'' The Tick thinks: ''My mind reels and spins at the speed of light as I search for the perfect response … the perfect alibi for the past two weeks.'' After an ''ah,'' ''eh'' and a few other mono-syllabic noises, the Tick answers: ''No,'' another clue Edlund gets it. Comic books are time-less. There's no clock and no calendar when it comes to sequential art, so try to keep up. 

The Tick is nigh-invulnerable which means he is not invulnerable. So should he fall off a roof and then through a concrete sidewalk or get hit by an on-coming subway train, he'll survive, but he's going to feel it. Like Quixote, the greatest danger to the Tick is the Tick as he shows when he is easily defeated by a common drinking straw and his own ego. Tick sidekick, Arthur, is nigh-noticeable in this issue. He doesn't interact with the titular Tick, but he can be seen flying around in the background while Tick dispatches with some nigh-Frank-Miller-looking-ninjas.  Arthur's nigh-appearance means Edlund has plans for Tick, more adventures and more chances to hole up at Hopper's after a long night of fighting crime or almost.

Ticks are common where I grew up in Massachusetts. They live in wood piles and hide in tall grass. I like to think Edlund knew about the nigh-invulnerableness of ticks when he came up with the character and I marvel at fervid and fecund imagination that filled in the rest of the details. The Tick is no superhero and he is certainly not a roach. What Tick is is a good idea for superhero. He's makes comics comic -- an anodyne to the super serious superheroes, a hero for every and all ages. Not the superhero you need, but the superhero you want.      

Rocket Raccon mini-series (1985)

This review originally ran as the premire 'Dig the Long Box' column on the now defunct RCB.net 

Bill Mantlo was the Brian Michael Bendis of his time. Check that, Mantlo was Bendis and Jonathan Hickman … combined. Come to think of it, Mantlo might have been the Wolverine of 1980's comic book writers, seriously. At the height of his career, Mantlo was writing as many as eight Marvel titles a month.

 

Best remembered as the writer of The Micronauts and Rom Spaceknight, Mantlo introduces over fifty characters to the Marvel universe during his twelve year career. His creations range from the infamous, Shamrock and Hypno-Hustler, to fan favorites Cloak and Dagger, Lady Deathstrike and Rocket Raccoon.
 

Mantlo learns the art (and artistry) of comic books literally at the feet of the master -- Jack Kirby was his neighbor. As a teenager Mantlo would spend his afternoons hanging out with Kirby (!) talking about superheroes and storytelling. Mantlo made his Marvel, starting as a writer and a colourist in 1974. By April of 1975 he was writing full-time. In his tenure he would write almost every Marvel character before leaving comics for good to become a public defender in New York City. As Tragic as his departure from Marvel was for comic book fans, the real tragedy occurred in 1992 when Mantlo was hit by a car while rollerblading. The driver fled the scene and was never identified. Mantlo has never fully recovered from his injuries and now requires round-the-clock care.

 

Artist Keith Giffen and Mantlo debut Rocket Raccoon in the pages of Marvel Preview #7 (1976). At that time, Rocket was known as Rocky -- you can decide for yourself if this is a joke, a blatant rip-off of a Beatles song, a loving homage or all three. The Incredible Hulk #271 (1982), written by Mantlo with art by Sal Buscema, is where Rocket Raccoon earns his stripes as protector of the Keystone quadrant on the planet Halfworld. A four issue limited series, Rocket Raccoon, is published in 1985; Mantlo handles the writing with Mike Mignola on pencils, Al Gordon inks, the colors are by Christie Scheele and the letters are done by Ken Bruzenak.

At this point in his career, Mignola was known (primarily) as a cover artist and an inker at Marvel. Before Rocket Raccoon, Mignola draws the interior (and exterior) art on two other Mantlo-penned series, The Incredible Hulk and Alpha Flight. One could call his work on Rocket Raccoon proto-Mignola. The artist's distinct style -- ''a mix of German expressionism and Jack Kirby,'' according to Alan Moore -- was still in its Cretaceous-phase. The sun on the cover of issue #1 looks like it could set over the headquarters of the B.P.R.D., but not quite yet -- take look at Mignola's cover to the recently released Rocket Raccon and Groot Ultimate Collection to see the artist's current interpretation of the character. 

Rocket Raccoon had only appeared twice in a Marvel publication and his last appearance had been in a stand-alone Hulk story three years prior to the release of Rocket Raccoon. How does a D-list character, at best, manage a four issue limited series? What, was Professor Phobos on sabbatical?  Never underestimate the power of a quick buck.  By May of 1985, the world of comic books was in a full-blown revolution; The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had arrived a year earlier. The not yet christened 'heroes in a half-shell' were already changing comic book publishing and before long the names Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo and Raphael would be more than merely renowned Renaissance masters. So, the time was right to dust off a talking bipedal raccoon who dresses like a fencer, smokes a pipe and fires laser pistols. Never let it be said Marvel's long-time editor in chief, Jim Shooter, didn't know how to seize an opportunity and ring the cash register.   

I. Is this some kind of joke?

The opening page of issue #1 is a pure delight stuffed with wit, goofs and gags. The image of a craftsmen working on deadline late into the night must have felt very familiar to the young Mignola. In narrative boxes made to look like scraps torn from some arcane text (more on that score in a moment), the reader is told the necessary particulars. Front and a bit off-center sits the Chief Toysmith. He is propped up on a pillow, his many efforts encircle him. Mignola fills the foreground with various toys, dolls and sundry implements of an artisan's labors. Humpty-dumpty crowds into the far right-hand corner adjacent to a real Easter egg, Rocket Raccoon himself, a banner sporting the words ''New! Improve-''acts as an arrow to draw the reader's attention to the titular raccoon. Rocket's first-mate, Wal Rus, is at Rocket's flank on the opposite side of the title card, the Rack 'n Ruin (Rocket'a ship) is tucked in behind Wal Rus. Another great inside joke shows Gumby as he poke(y)s out from behind the Rack 'n Ruin.

Along with Gordon's inks and Scheele's colors, Mignola's composition creates great depth by placing a battery of Kirby-like lights behind and above the toysmith. In the lower right-hand side of the page a silhouetted figure looms in a lighted entryway. Scheele uses the straw yellow of the light bulbs to reflect the color outside the opening; the toysmith, hunched over his workbench, echoes the doorway's arch. Gordon's inks on the back wall help draw the reader's attention to the approaching menace, going so far as to offset the hatching on a hanging clipboard. Only the empty eyes of the English bobby bear witness to the toysmith's approaching doom. Rocket Raccoon (and his world) may have started as larks; however, in the hands of skilled creators even jokes can make for serious comics. Then again …

II. ''... a strange and not always rational galaxy''

'Madcap' is perhaps the best word to describe the world of Rocket Raccoon although 'convoluted' could contend for the title as well. Ostensibly, this series is built around a trade war -- two words that give every fanboy a case of the howling fantods -- between two toymakers: Lord Dyvyne of the Spacewheel and Judson Jakes of Mayhem Mekaniks, the former, a lizard and the latter a mole. Jakes and Dyvyne provide entertainment, in the form of toys, for the mentally-handicapped human inhabitants (referred to as ''loonies'') of Halfworld. The 'loonies' are cared for by genetically enhanced animals like Rocket and Wal Rus. Yep.

For all intents and purposes, Rocket Raccoon is a four issue, eighty page, origin story. The trade war gives Mantlo reason to stage near death escapes, bar fights, and rides through underground caverns on giant worms (David Lynch's Dune had come out the year before). That's all foreground, the background is where this otherwise average 80's comic book gets bizarre.

A long time ago, a group of psychiatrists colonize a planet in order to care for people ''whose mental disorders had caused them to be cast out from our world and the companionship of our race.'' While the psychiatrists are ''expanding [their] knowledge of the functioning -- and disfunctioning -- of the human mind,'' their patients are cared for by robots; also in attendance are a diverse set of animals for the purposes of ''entertainment and companionship.'' When the psychiatrists funding gets cut (!), they are called back to their home world (not Earth). These well-meaning do-gooders decide to leave their patients behind (!!) in the care of the robots and in the company of the animals (!!!). And before these benevolent overlords skedaddle, they construct ''a space-encircling Galacian Wall that … would shield them [their patients] from the same society that loathed them'' which makes the planet kind of a prison or an asylum, albeit one filled with compassionate robots and benign woodland creatures.

These giant gobs of exposition and explanation are contained within the 'Halfworld Bible,' which neither the animals nor the ''loonies'' can read until Uncle Pyko, the chief toysmith of Judson Jakes, deciphers it and learns its secrets. Which happens while the trade war rages on between Jakes and Dyvyne, natch. What the Halfworld Bible doesn't explain is how Rocket, Uncle Pyko, Wal Rus and the rest gain sentience, not to mention their genetically-enhanced geegaws.

Uncle Pyko manages to noodle through this mystery and comes to the conclusion: the robots (must have) exceeded their programming -- the cause of which, Pyko figures, could have been from radiation from a nearby nova -- and ''developed and artificial intelligence.'' Before too long these logical machines tire of tending to their illogical charges and begin to dabble in genetics and enhanced intelligence -- instead of continuing the psychiatrists work and finding a 'cure,' but I digress.

You don't need to be an 'Uncle Pyko' to figure out how the animals learn to talk, walk and develop skills like marksmanship. With the animals now in charge, these industrious automatons retreat to their own side of the planet (hence the name, Halfworld) where they make the toys per the animal's design and work on how to deactivate the Galacian Wall so they leave Halfworld in a spaceship they've been building along with the toys, etc..

 

When Uncle Pyko finishes his dissertation, Rocket screams out: ''B-but … that means that I've spent my whole life searching for sanity in a universe established to house the insane!'' Rocket's reaction is a very human emotion, the reader can relate to trying to make sense in a world where randomness and irrationality sometimes seem de rigueur.

 

As I like to say here: so what? Mantlo needs to construct a backstory and explain (I suppose) how and why Rocket became the protector of this literal fool's paradise. It serves as a character moment to establish Rocket has integrity. If this one-note character is going to avoid becoming a demisemiquaver, not only does he need a reason to (ahem) blast off without abandoning the planet and the people he has sworn to protect, but he's got to do it with style and grace, otherwise, he becomes a punch line. Credit Mantlo for not having Rocket half-ass either of his obligations; Rocket Raccoon, it could be said, gives it his whole-ass.

For all its silliness and complexity for complexity's sake, Mantlo's world-building trips up on itself when the reader begins to consider how long it took between the time the psychiatrists left Halfworld to when the robots were able to genetically-engineer the animals to care for the 'loonies.' Continuity wonks will no doubt cry foul as well that it is not made clear how many generations Rocket and his pals are removed from the animals that first landed on the planet. Same goes for the 'loonies,' who several generations removed from even the sons and daughters of the original patients brought to Halfworld by the psychiatrists. Uncle Pyko speculates there were ''generations of loonies who, if not congenitally insane as their ancestors had been were born into it.'' And let's not get into the fact that this entire society is built on the making and selling of toys to a captive population. It feels less like a critique of our society and more like a dare from one of Mantlo's colleagues, some kind of Marvel Bullpen one-ups-manship -- 'yeah, but I bet Shooter won't let you get away with this!" 

 

In the last issue, the reader learns what passes for currency on Halfworld which is too grand to spoil and makes sense in a nonsensical Lewis Carroll meets Roald Dahl kind of way. Maybe Mantlo should be given some credit for going to a place where few comic books -- then (1985) and maybe even now -- would dare to go? Today's reader will chafe at the word ''loonie'' being thrown around so liberally (I did) not due to political correctness, but plain decency; and it should have bothered Shooter and series editor Carl Potts as well. There's a silver lining (of sorts) because for all its overdone intricacies the narrative of Rocket Raccoon, like a fairy tale, works out in the end. Rocket feeds the Halfworld bible to the Head Robot -- which is exactly what its name implies, a robot head with teeth -- for analysis (pun intended) and it produces a cure, the ''wonder toy,'' so all's well that ends well. The fact Mantlo would offer a cure for mental illness is wish fulfillment of the highest order and something one can (sadly) only get in a comic book.

 

''… under the cover of laser smoke''

 

As awkward, cringe-inducing and at times too hackneyed for its own good, Mantlo's scripting and plotting possess an esprit de corps that puts it alongside 1980's cartoons like Transformers, G.I. Joe and Thundercats. Mantlo knows (Kirby-like) when to move a story along and how to retain the reader's interest. Unlike too much of today's mainstream Marvel fare, talking heads don't dominate issues of Rocket Raccoon in order to delay gratification so that issue four plays out as one big showdown. Mantlo consistently writes to Mignola's strength to draw action; and each creator allows Rocket Raccoon do what Rocket Raccoon does best: fly around on his rocket-skates and fire laser pistols.

Because Rocket Raccoon takes place in space and because it came out after Star Wars there is an inevitable cantina/bar sequence in which Rocket and company get to blast away. Mignola shows his sequential art chops when Rocket's girlfriend, Lylla, is taken hostage (for like the fifth or sixth time in the series) by the chaotic neutral Blackjack O'Hare (he's a rabbit, in case you were wondering). In the first panel Mignola has O'Hare's left arm swing around Lila while his right arm holds a knife to her throat. Again, using opposite sides of the panel (as he did on the first page) Mignola uses similar visual elements to frame the action. In this case, the movement, the swish, of O'Hare's arm mirrors Lylla's tail as it swings up from the bottom of the panel and pulls the reader's eye to the knife at her throat. In the following panel Lylla elbows O'Hare in the face in the same exact spot where the reader's attention is focused. Lylla's elbow moves O'Hare up and to the left-hand side of the second panel which sets up the third panel showing how O'Hare gets a good 'Kapow' for his troubles. In this final panel Mignola shows the sweep of Lylla's arm which completes the 360° arc which was started in the first panel with O'Hare's arm. Mignola's hard-edged, horn-headed hero may be eight years away, but boy, Rocket Raccoon shows Mignola to already be a damn fine draftsmen and a hell of an artist.

When Lylla flips O'Hare over she calls him, ''you horrid hare!''. This is all but one example of the alliterative nature of Mantlo's script, no joke; there is alliteration at almost every turn of the page. It also appears as if Mantlo and Mignola were paid by the pun. The title to each issue is a play on words that reflects the issue's themes and plot. For example, issue #2, ''The Masque of the Red Breath'' takes place at a masked ball held annually by the 'loonies.' The big bad in the issue is an amorphous ''crimson cloud,'' the aforementioned Red Breath, which absorbs everything and everyone it touches -- no worries though, order gets restored when a quintet of Killer Clowns riding vacuu-sleds suck up the cloud and allow Rocket to escape. It's this kind of cartoon violence that gives Rocket Raccoon that Saturday morning or after-school cartoon feel, nobody really gets hurt, except maybe a few clowns, but there are always plenty of them to go around.

 

'' And the stars do beckon''

Rocket Raccoon makes for a gantry, a launching pad for fiction's best (and only) question: 'what's next?' Mantlo and Mignola's creation remains sturdy because its playfulness never takes itself too seriously, only seriously enough. Rocket's complicated and at times torturous backstory makes him more than a cartoon, more than a novelty (song), and more than a knock-off to turn a quick buck. In The Micronauts and Rom Spaceknight, Mantlo took the disposable and gave it a spark, a life -- like Geppetto, Mantlo made a toy real, made it live.

Guardians of the Galaxy is going to introduce mainstream pop culture to Rocket Raccoon; and for comic book readers, those of us who are already in on the joke, Rocket Raccoon is going to be a monster. How 'loony' is it going to be when today's twelve-year-olds (or younger) will be sporting Rocket Raccoon t-shirts and buying Rocket Raccoon toys … insanity, absolute insanity. As Mantlo proves, insanity makes for a 'rocky' start; however, if creators toy with it, tweak it, the sky (and the stars) are the limit.