Five Comics Worth Reading - September 2011

THE BOYS: BUTCHER, BAKER, CANDLESTICKMAKER
There were points in issue #1 and the first part of issue #2 where I thought this might be the first installment of The Boys/its various spinoffs I might not really get into, not because it wasn’t any good, but because it seemed like it was set up largely to be a war story, and while Garth Ennis writes those well and Darick Robertson can draw anything, war stories just generally aren’t my jam. However, the war portions, while critical, are not the whole thing, and as noted, they’re done quite well so they contribute nicely to the bigger picture. This is really the origin story of Billy Butcher, an intriguing character in the classic Ennis mold who seems to walk the line between being an oddly endearing antihero and a straight up jerk in pretty much every one of his appearances. This story focuses on the roots of why Billy is the way he is, particularly on his relationship with his father and discovery of being able to lose himself in violence, but it doesn’t do so in a “this excuses his actions” way; it’s very shades of grey in presenting the potential motivators for Billy’s personality, but leaving it up to you to decide whether he was shaped against his will by external circumstances or just uses those as a cop out. It’s Ennis doing a great combination of action with psycho-analysis—which makes for the best Boys story—and Robertson returning to full art duties, where I have missed him sorely as he’s one of my all-time favorites. Very much looking forward to the third issue, where Billy’s slated to be “saved” by the love of a wife we know from The Boys he eventually loses.

CAPTAIN AMERICA & BUCKY
It’s kinda crazy to think that a decade ago Bucky was more or less a cipher, a long-forgotten Golden Age sidekick stereotype more useful to stories in death than in life, given the depth Ed Brubaker has managed to give him since he rolled the dice and brought him back in 2004 (Roger Stern, among others, got some great stories in as well). During his comeback tour, Bucky Barnes went from grinning boy mascot to a character possessed of a pronounced dark side born from growing up literally in the midst of war but also a stubborn heroic spirit that propelled him forward through his trials and made him inspirational as well as easy to root for. Now Brubaker and co-writer Marc Andreyko are taking the time to fill in the gaps of Bucky’s formative years, showing where both the tortured soul and grim resolve to carry on came from in this series. The first two issues have been dynamite, presenting a charismatic and boisterous young kid who makes you chuckle only pages before he’s forced to plunge a knife through a man’s throat for the greater good. Though ostensibly headlining the title as well, Captain America fits better as the co-star here, reversing the traditional dynamic, acting as a concerned father figure who warns his charge about the tough times to come as well as the player coach reminding why these things must be done. Chris Samnee’s art is just terrific, his versatility impressive as ever and used to full effect by his collaborators. The juxtaposition of Samnee’s go-lucky depiction of Steve and Bucky goofing off while watching actors portray them in propaganda films against his wrenching actions scenes give both greater weight. Everybody working on this title seems to recognize they’re sitting on a wealth of potential and their determination to make it count shines through.

THE PUNISHER
Frank Castle can be a tough nut to crack when it comes to casting him in an ongoing series. He’s got a great premise, but as has been noted time and again, a vigilante who kills everybody he comes up against can be hard to sustain over lengthy period and not fall into the trap of telling the same story over and over. The best writers can find ways to rise to the challenge and utilize the Punisher’s strengths as a character while writing around the barriers to longevity. Garth Ennis veered far away from the idea of a super hero universe and got nearly a decade out of writing the stories he wanted to tell with Frank as the anchor. Most recently, Rick Remender went 180, dumping Frank in the midst of the Marvel Universe and playing the contrast, then going in a totally unexpectedly delightful direction by turning him into a Frankenstein monster. From the first three issues of his new series, I’m intrigued by Greg Rucka’s approach of using The Punisher as almost a supporting character in his own story, focusing on the world around him and how it’s affected by this gun-toting boogeyman and introducing a strong supporting cast to speak for him (Frank didn’t speak at all through #3). It’s the idea of Batman-as-urban legend taken a step further and utilizes Rucka’s potent skills writing straight crime drama while holding his familiarity with super hero comics in reserve for when it’s needed. Marco Checchetto brings a welcome fresh approach to the book that sets it apart from past Punisher stories, his European style creating an eerie sort of urban ghost story that fits the elusive, larger-than-life nature of the protagonist; he also brings a beauty to the violence that haunts you.

STORMWATCH
On Captain Britain and MI: 13, Paul Cornell demonstrated tremendous skill when it came to taking the fringe elements of a shared universe and using them to world build a fascinating place just off to the side of the main action where characters not always given the chance to shine got spotlight and characterization while also being able to provide a compelling side commentary to a larger narrative. In this regard, Stormwatch is the perfect comic for Cornell, as he gets to integrate cherry-picked elements of Wildstorm’s remains into the new DC status quo, pull in players like Martian Manhunter to act as a bridge, and then move the camera around as he creates a framework exploration of the emerging landscape. In the first issue, we get introduced to the latest incarnation of Stormwatch, mostly helmed by Authority alums such as Jack Hawksmoor and The Engineer, but also joined by the aforementioned J’onn J’onzz as well as new Cornell creations (I believe) like Projectionist and Harry Tanner. All of these characters plus would-be recruit Apollo and late-coming Midnighter gets a nice moment to show off their powers, something that perhaps seems trivial but is crucial in first issues, especially one like this where a good deal of the audience may be unfamiliar with these folks. The positioning of Stormwatch as an alternative to the Justice League and the threads laid down here in regards to there being a bigger picture guys like Superman might not be privy to made me glad I picked this up and eager to see more. Cornell made the most out of the real estate he had to work with, really packing this debut; he seems to have found a nice sweet spot creatively.

ULTIMATE COMICS ULTIMATES
There are probably few assignments in comics more simultaneously daunting right now than The Ultimates. It’s not like being asked to write an icon like Superman or Spider-Man where there have been decades of history and plenty of subpar runs and it’s not like creating your own stuff from scratch where you create the expectations; despite being around nearly a decade now, Ultimates is still mostly remembered for a handful of comics that set the tone for the last 10 years of comics and a lot of the stuff you’re seeing in the blockbuster movies hitting the screen each summer. What I like about Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic’s first issue of their Ultimates book is that it pays homage to the original stuff but strikes a different tone to let you know that the story has progressed and everything that’s taken place since the end of Ultimates 2 counted and weighs on this cast. The best example I can think of is how Nick Fury still possesses the scowl and swagger Mark Millar initially instilled in him, seeming up to literally any challenge, but as the problems mount, he blinks ever so slightly, until by the issue’s close he’s almost paralyzed by indecision; this is still the guy who took down an alien invasion, but he also saw a teenage hero die on his watch, and he has been affected. Likewise, Iron Man is still the puffed up spin on his traditional template, but he too shows human moments of weakness, like when he insists his new butler answer to Jarvis even though it’s not his name. The Ultimates has always been a popcorn flick with balls-to-the-wall action and huge heroes who have a quip in response to any sign of danger; Hickman’s Ultimates are those same people with the weight of the world and tremendous personal loss on their shoulders and I’m really taken in by getting this three-dimensional examination of where they’re at now. And Esad Ribic’s art is just gorgeous; it always is, but the care he takes here with not just the tech or the fighting but just Thor’s glaring face is remarkably beautiful. Simply put: Nobody today does it like Ribic and Dean White. Heck, I love the way Clayton Cowles letters the word balloons and how the story title is laid out. This is a very good comic. Will it pave the way for the next decade? I’m looking forward to finding out.

Our Comics Decade: 2000

Ben
I’ve given the cliff notes version here before, but after my high school graduation from Newton South in the spring of 2000, I migrated about two hours south to matriculate at Connecticut College. Conn used to be an all-girls school up until about the 70’s and thus it comes as no surprise that the only two people I knew from high school going in were girls—both very cool individuals, but neither a person I saw watching wrestling with me on Monday nights. Factor in that the girl I was dating at the time was going to school at Trinity—only about 45 minutes away, but neither of us had a car—and I found myself in the familiar situation of being psyched for college, but quickly going from the “I have so many friends!” rush that senior year at high school brings to the “I have nobody to eat dinner with” low that accompanies your freshman year at college.

Fortunately, I did have my interest in various extracurricular activities to fall back on when it came to meeting friends. While there was no wrestling team at Conn (and frankly my surgically reconstructed shoulder and torn up ankles were grateful for that), I did continue my interest in theater, and as a result met an outgoing giant (seriously, he’s like 6’5”) named Jordan Geary who would become my best friend in college and introduce me to most of the other folks I’d grow to consider my family away from home.

An interesting tidbit myself, Jordan and our friend Chris Everson discovered during one late night chat was that we’d all been hardcore comic book geeks in our younger years, but had each lapsed during high school in favor of not being shunned by the social majority (which still only like half worked). We found we shared a mutual love of the X-Men and immediately took to looking up clips of the old cartoon online and deciding which team members us and each of our crew most closely matched for nickname purposes (I was Iceman, Jordan was Cyclops, Chris was Wolverine, and we literally came up with dozens more for pretty much everybody we even casually interacted with).

Seeing as we had a big awesome freaking comic store a five minute drive away (and Jordan had a car), regular trips to Sarge’s became a foregone conclusion. When I first entered the store and gradually got past the overwhelming feeling of being a obsessive nerd away from his element for nearly five years, I made a beeline to the section housing the X-Men titles, eager to learn what I had missed since dropping out of the scene in 1996 with the end of the Onslaught saga.

The first title I vividly remember purchasing in my second life as a comic book fan was Uncanny X-Men #390, written by Scott Lobdell with art by Salvador Larroca and featuring no less an event than the death of Colossus. It was a deceptively welcoming comic to come back to, as Colossus was an old favorite, Lobdell was the same writer I remembered from my youth, and Larroca’s style was tight and colorful ala Jim Lee or Andy Kubert. Even the main thrust of the issue’s plot involved curing the Legacy Virus, a plot device I had seen the birth of at the conclusion of my beloved X-Cutioner’s Song.

In an interesting parallel to being away at school for the first time, that first issue of Uncanny X-Men was like coming home and finding your room exactly as you had left it (it was also a darn fine issue, as Lobdell always did know how to wring the pathos from a heroic sacrifice and write the “X-Men as a family” stuff decently rather than them just being a military-style strike force).

However, to follow the same analogy, in the subsequent visits I paid back “home” over the next several months, the more and more the furniture seemed to get moved around, and not particularly to my liking.

Grant Morrison and his New X-Men revamp were well in the hype stages even as I was trying to piece together what had become of the Blue and Gold teams. Picking up Wizard (another ritual I was glad to return to) and seeing Frank Quitely’s proposed visual re-imaginings of Beast (he’s a cat?!), Wolverine (no mask?!) and Emma Frost (…huh?!) certainly did not deliver the nostalgic comfort food of bright costumes, big action and ill-defined energy powers I was looking for. Indeed, I found those first few issues of New X-Men so distasteful to my old school 90’s palate that I was about ready to throw in the towel and get back out of comics no sooner than I’d returned. Fortunately for me (and all of you who enjoy this blog, I guess), that aforementioned at-the-time girlfriend got me a subscription for Christmas that year, meaning Grant and I were stuck with one another at least for a bit.

Bringing my little comparison to what will hopefully be a poignant or at least sensible close, I gradually learned to appreciate—or at least tolerate—Morrison’s different approach to the X-Men and also to sample new comics I would never have thought to try as a kid, which of course paid off big-time in the long run for me. I would have to take the same approach to college itself, learning not to focus all the time on how it wasn’t high school and instead come to find all the neat new stuff that I had to look forward to.

Today I can go back and actually enjoy New X-Men because I’ve got such a broader view of what comics can be and how they evolve. Similarly (I think?), I ended up becoming closer with most of the friends I made in college than I ever did with my old pals from high school.

At the time, comics ranged from a fun hobby for me to a survival aspect I utilized to feel safe in a new place; I had no idea that my decision to start reading X-Men again in 2000 would end up being one of the biggest turning points in my life.

Rickey
In 2000, I was a senior in high school and allowed myself $20 a week maximum to spend on comics. It's weird thinking back to a time when I didn't buy trade paperbacks online (if at all) - and how I got my hands on comics in general. Like a squirrel burying acorns in a rain storm, I'd hold on tightly to any books I bought, even if I eventually thought they sucked. By the time I dismantled my collection so my parents could sell their house in 2008, I had the equivalent of 12 long boxes and maybe 30 collected editions and original graphic novels back in the room I grew up in. That's why it's all the more impressive that I bought Warren Ellis's four Stormwatch trades in 2000.

I'd just finished reading Sandman through collected editions and that mission had taken almost 2 years and (what was at the time to me) lots of money. But my comic shop was cool about ordering stuff for me in advance and letting me pay for it as I picked up each new collection. That's why it was no hard task to talk myself into trying Stormwatch. At the time, I didn't know Warren Ellis's work at all and just knew that I read in Wizard that the title was fun and weird. Unlike most people my age, I'd never really gotten into Image at any point in my life, so I didn't know dick about Stormwatch or the WildStorm universe. I was a blank slate.

But over the course of January through December that year, as I wrestled with what college to go to, graduated high school, said goodbye to almost all my friends, moved myself into my dorm and started college living with a cockhead jock-turd of a roommate, the high-octane action-adventure sci-fi superhero bonanza of Stormwatch rocketed my notions of what could be done with spandex heroes into subspace eternity. In the first fucking issue, Ellis fires half the team and introduces new characters who went on to become cornerstones of the WildStorm universe. People got their jaws punched off, the leader wound up being the bad guy, several of the characters DIED in battle, they traveled to an alternate reality and introduced the Bleed (an updated version of the Multiverse), and, in the final volume of the regular series, a Superman-level hero returns to active duty after a self-imposed exile to round up a crew of partners to tell the world they better behave or the super heroes are gonna MAKE you behave. I'd never seen anything like this!

And the continuity! Ideas, themes and concepts debut throughout the run that later played into the Authority and Planetary, two books also written by Ellis and that I also bought in trade. And not just red sky continuity, I'm talking about stuff like the Superman-level hero I mentioned cameo-ing as a conversation piece in Planetary or how the mechanical blood of a bad guy in one arc was used to create the Engineer in the Authority. Or how a Green Lantern-esque character is hunted down and murdered in Planetary, but his lantern later shows up as a weapon wielded by a member of the covert operation that gave birth to Apollo and Midnighter in Stormwatch. I'm a sucker for tiny continuity nods that don't call attention to themselves and are directed at those paying attention - and this book is filled with them.

The tongue-in-cheek style of Ellis's later work hasn't really appealed to me, but this earnest superhero epic not only naturally built my love for the WildStorm universe, it showed me that superhero tales could be more than cookie-cutter stories at a time when my mind was looking for expansion in all the forms of art I was most interested in. And by expanding what was done with superheroes on a personal and wide-screen level, I credit Ellis alongside guys like Bendis for introducing the kind of radical ideas in the early 2000s that helped revive the aging mainstream scene by trying new things and for paving the way for that genre's fandom to change their visual prescriptions from following JUST artists to finally faithfully following writers.

Kiel
I'm not usually one to attribute any extra significance to supposed "milestone" occasions in time from the simple changing of years or the turning of significant birthdays to the conclusion of decades. Still, even I can't ignore that a lot changed in my life in 2000. I graduated from high school that spring, which comes with enough drama, awkwardness, excitement, fear, stress and joy without being a comic nerd even coming into it. Luckily though, my personal life and my comics life collided in a pretty significant way back then.

Towards the end of my senior year, I started dating this girl named Laura Gutierrez. She was a year behind me in school and a friend of a friend, but for some reason I never really met her until sometime around that winter. I always thought that a little STRANGE as she was someone who was extremely smart and unpretentious in a way few people (certainly not this guy) are at that age. We hit it off pretty quickly and were fast on our way to the kind of brief, crazy, doomed relationship that you can only have when you're a teenager.

When school ended that year, Laura was set to fly to Finland for the summer on some kind of foreign exchange student program, and by the time she returned I'd be away to East Lansing for college. Faced with the choice of whether or not to date knowing full well that we weren't going to try and make anything out of it once she left, we totally went for it. It was one of those go to a lot of parties but ignore your friends, get caught making out in your parents basement, go park on a dead end street and lay next to each other on uncomfortable reclining car chairs talking about everything and nothing in intense marathon sessions for hours on end kind of things.

And at some point in this long string of dramatically impassioned yet timed to expire conversations, we talked for a while about comics and my impractical plan to try to work in them some day. And at one point Laura looks at me and says, "I have something you should read. It's kind of like a comic. At least I think it is."

Then she gave me her copy of Craig Thompson's Good-Bye, Chunky Rice.

At that stage in my comics-reading life, I'd been reading comics outside the superhero mainstream for a while, but most of them still fell into that "published as a monthly serial with some vague adventure ties" category like Bone and Skeleton Key or at least something with a certain level of reality to it like Palooka-Ville. To be that age at that moment and have my girlfriend drop Thompson's lavishly rendered, formally playful graphic novel on my head was a mind-blower (and to the professed comics expert in me more than a little embarrassing).

More importantly, the story hit me in a way that I'll honestly admit I couldn't even comprehend at the time. More than any other comic I've ever read, Chunky Rice draws out the sad, strange, sweet set of emotions and experiences that accompany letting someone fall out of your life. From the titular character's painful choice to leave his best friend Dandele through the tragic fable of Solomon and Stomper to all the bizarrely forlorn characters Chunky meets on Captain Chuck's boat, every thread Thompson spins in the story echo that feeling of loss and in their own way the bittersweet joy that comes with accepting the fact that though the ones you love may be out of your life, they're still with you in other ways.

It took me a long time to process everything that book made me feel, partly because at the time I was so far up my own ass I wasn't confronting the very obvious parallels to my own situation and relationships (hooray for being 18!) and partly because when you're still so close to letting so much go to try something bigger, it feels like you'll never get beyond the worst feelings to appreciate the best ones.

All in all, knowing that girl and having that story with me in 2000 helped me through the next ten years in ways that I'm still insanely grateful for and hope to never let go of completely.