A Comicbook Orange: Frank Miller Time

Gone Too Soon

Mike Wieringo, the extremely talented artist who had memorable runs on (among others) Flash, Fantastic Four, and Tellos, has died of a sudden heart attack. He was 44.

One prays that his friends and family find themselves surrounded by peace, love, and light (“Ringo” was by all accounts an extremely affable and loving man) even as the dark, inevitable shadows of grief and loss attempt to overwhelm them.

Go West, Young Comic Book Fan...

Like a lot of Americans of my generation I have always had a certain fondness for Westerns. I’m not a aficionado or anything but I have liked some Westerns very much. Both movies…High Noon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Searchers, The Wild Bunch, Unforgiven…and television offerings…Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza, Maverick, Lonesome Dove…but, strangely enough, not so much when it came to comic books.

I never warmed much to the western comic book genre…perhaps because many of them (especially Marvel’s characters like the Rawhide Kid and the Two-Gun Kid) just came off as super-hero stories transposed into the 19^th Century and that held no interest to me.

It’s a bit odd to me then that I’m currently buying and reading (and quite enjoying) 3 western-themed comics. The books in question…DC Comics’ Jonah Hex, Dynamite Comics’ Lone Ranger, and Vertigo Comics’ Loveless…are disparate in tone and theme but each is enormously engaging in its own way.

Jonah Hex is not a character I was ever very interested in…though I did give the strange futuristic Hex series a chance…but his new series is a little gem. Writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti tell taut, flint-hearted morality tales in which their scarred bounty hunter wades through hunting human prey, getting paid, and occasionally meting out brutal justice (as defined by his own personal and decidedly inflexible code of what’s right and what’s wrong.)

Except for a 3-part origin story, we don’t really get into Hex’s head very much…he is very much like Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name” from those classic “spaghetti westerns” from the 60’s…and that’s fine. Aided and abetted by a stellar array of artists (including Jordi Bennett, Luke Ross, and Phil Noto), Gray and Palmiotti are (again with the exception of the origin story) able to tell their gritty, satisfying stories in one issue, which is a delightful change from the so-called decompressed storytelling that too often is the norm at both DC and Marvel these days.

The Lone Ranger is a more straightforward heroic adventure as we follow John Reid, the only survivor of a team of 6 Texas Rangers, in his quest for vengeance, justice, and, most importantly, the building of his friendship and partnership with the enigmatic Tonto, the stern taskmaster who nursed him back to health after he and the other Rangers had been ambushed and he himself had mistakenly left for dead. Unlike Hex, the Ranger makes a decision not to kill, a decision honored…albeit a bit reluctantly…by Tonto, who is very much his partner’s equal in this version of the legendary masked man’s adventures.

Writer Brett Matthews makes the Ranger and Tonto viable for a 21^st Century audience while not compromising the ethos of justice, honor, and righteous vengeance that is the cornerstone of their adventures. He is ably aided with artist Sergio Cariello’s sterling storytelling and art director’s John Cassaday’s evocative covers.

Both Jonah Hex and The Lone Ranger are grand comics indeed…even for someone who thinks they don’t like comic book Westerns.

(I’ll cover the challenging, thought-provoking Loveless in a future entry.)

Those Were the Days, My Friend...

A promo video for Justice League: The New Frontier, an adaptation of Darwyn Cooke's delightful DC: The New Frontier series, a charming and heartfelt paean to DC's immortal Silver Age. The DVD will be out in 2008.

Everybody's Talkin' at Me...

Superman…Wonder Woman…Batman…Green Lantern…The Flash…the Justice League of America boasts a membership featuring “the World’s Greatest Heroes”.

With the firepower that the JLA can muster the comic is, to borrow a movie term, most often a big, widescreen action-adventure blockbuster of a comic. And that makes sense…why else gather a powerful team of heavy hitters who are already formidable on their on except to tackle something so overwhelming that even Superman would need partners to watch his back?

Brad Meltzer’s Justice League of America team is as powerful a lineup as the team has had: Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), Black Canary, Black Lightning, Red Tornado, Red Arrow (it’s literally and figuratively a colorful lineup), Vixen, and Hawkgirl (with Geo-Force hanging around as an apparently unofficial member and the newly-returned Flash (Wally West) having been invited to join the club.) But instead of feeling like a big action blockbuster (to continue to flog the movie metaphor) Meltzer’s run has felt more like a navel-gazing “indie” movie filled with more talking (and talking and talking and talking) and not as much action as one might have expected from the JLA.

It’s an…um…interesting way to go.

The arc has been more about nostalgia (the fact that the team has two clubhouses…a “Hall of Justice” like from the old cartoons and an orbiting satellite like from the team’s 1970’s days) and relationships (everybody is chummy, which is cool, but I’m still having working on accepting the fact that the teammates call each other by their civilian names even when they’re in the field…hearing them call Superman “Clark” and, especially, calling Batman “Bruce” is still kind of jarring.)

But too often during Meltzer’s run, the team seems to spend a great deal of its time standing around talking (and talking and talking)…the crossover with Justice Society of America and the Legion of Super-Heroes just added more guys to spend a lot of time standing around talking (and talking and talking).

The most current (as of this writing) issue, #11, is a prime example of this. The claustrophobic story features just two members of the team, Red Arrow (an awkward name I think…he had a perfectly workable codename in Arsenal and I’m not sure that changing it to honor “the family business” was necessary) and Vixen (who is the subject of a plot curve ball that Meltzer won’t be around to resolve), trapped under a collapsed building trying to get out. That’s the whole story. Is it a suspenseful character study? Yep. Is there a lot of talking? Oh yeah. Does it work? Yes it does…but it’s not a Justice League story, it’s a Red Arrow story (Roy is shown as the focused strong one, Vixen, who’s been doing the super-hero thing for a while, is presented as panicked, insecure woman who needs to be bolstered up by her partner’s resolve.) Nothing wrong with that, I guess…but as the whole run has been on this same “small screen” vibe it doesn’t have the same impact it would have had if it has been a change of pace from some more expansive JLA adventure.

And leaving after setting up...but not resolving...mysteries and subplots is, to my mind, uncool...but there you are.

Meltzer’s run…bolstered by some sweet artwork art from Ed Benes and, in #11, Gene Ha…has been kinda okay (not great by any means, to be sure, but kinda okay) but I do hope that incoming JLA write Dwayne McDuffie will take the foundation that’s been laid down and craft some adventures worthy of a team with the scope and power of the Justice League of America.

Once Upon a Time...

Once upon a time…which, as all children and people of good heart well know, is when all tales of note begin….there was a war in the lands where fables and fairy tales are true and not just the fanciful imaginings of scribes like the Brothers Grimm. The forces of malevolence prevailed and those who fought on the side of righteousness fled their homelands for life in the mundane world…for life in our world. Using guile and magic and steadfast cunning, the exiles created a community…Fabletown…hidden in plain view…amongst the mortals and thrived while dreaming of the day when they could return to the land of fables and fairytales and overthrow the Adversary (as the ruler of the malevolent armies was known; the Adversary is, surprisingly enough, actually Gepetto, the puppet maker who crafted Pinocchio) and take back the magical lands that are rightfully theirs.

This then is the back story of Fables, the unflaggingly clever, charming, rollicking, and intriguing Vertigo Comics series created and written by Bill Willingham. The conceit of having legendary characters such as Snow White, Little Boy Blue, Prince Charming, Little Red Riding Hood, Old King Cole, and the Big Bad Wolf interacting in an exile community on Earth could have quickly become gimmicky and cloying in the wrong hands but Willingham deftly avoids every false note and tiresome cliché in his sprawling tales of love, life, adventure, intrigue, politics, and intrigue.

With those Fables who can pass for human living in the city and those who cannot (the Three Little Pigs or the Giants, for example) living, sometimes quite reluctantly, on a secluded farm, the avenues for drama are seemingly endless. And with the breadth of mythology and fable to draw from, the cast of characters are likewise bountiful beyond measure.

Many characters take their turn on the stage but at the heart of the series are the fierce Big Bad Wolf, the son of the majestic and haughty North Wind, who can take human form as Bigby Wolf, the erstwhile Sheriff of Fabletown, and his new bride, Fabletown’s former Deputy Mayor, Snow White. Their prickly…and then passionately romantic…relationship is the emotional foundation of the series. Even having given up their positions in Fabletown for a place out on the farmlands with their children, Snow and Bigby remain important players in the Fables saga.

With the Fables title too small to hold his rampaging ego, one character, the amoral but still charming rogue Jack (almost every Jack in fairytales is and was him) struck out in his own title, Jack of Fables (co-written by Willingham and Matthew Sturges), chronicling his own misadventures (both in the current mundane world as well as his many fantastical experiences in the days before the Fable homelands were conquered the Adversary.)

The Fables experience also flowed through the gorgeous pages of 1,001 Nights of Snowfall, a delightful graphic album featuring Snow White in the role of Scheherazade, the clever woman who survived her murderous husband’s wrath by telling him fascinating tales for 1,001 nights in The Arabian Nights. Charles Vess, Brian Bolland, Jill Thompson, John Bolland, and John Bolton are among the artists who illustrated various chapters in the volume.

Fables (and its spin-offs) are full of love, light, laughter, adventure, and magic. Lots and lots of magic. It’s a wondrous thing indeed.

Death is Only the Beginning...

This is the trailer for the direct-to-DVD animated movie, Superman/Doomsday, an adaptation of the Death of Superman arc. The DVD is due out on September 18th. It's included here because I think it's kind of cool.