Rants & Raves

FIRST ISSUE: GREEN HORNET

FIRST ISSUES: An admirable first issue must, above all else, contain such matter as will compel a reader to buy the second issue. At the same time, while provoking curiosity through mysteriousness, a good first issue must avoid being so mysterious as to be cryptic or incomprehensible. And, thirdly, it should introduce the title’s principals, preferably in a way that makes us care about them. Fourth, a first issue should include a complete “episode” — that is, something should happen, a crisis of some kind, which is resolved by the end of the issue, without, at the same time, detracting from the cliffhanger aspect of the effort that will compel us to buy the next issue.

GREEN HORNET

Green Hornet No. 1 is a markedly successful first issue, which is worth noting because Dynamite, which seems bent on reviving every antique hero of the four-color pulp past, has missed the boat more often than not, IMHO. But Kevin Smith’s revival here is lively and engaging. The issue is divided into two parts — the past and the present. The opening sequence is in the past: Green Hornet and his Asiatic cohort Kato, take on the last two crime families in Century City, an Italian mob and a Japanese mafia, and wipe the floor with them. Then Britt Reid, the Green Hornet without his fedora, retires, and Kato wanders off to raise a family. In the second part, we meet Reid’s son Britt, a playboy slacker, as his girlfriend of four years is moving out because he hasn’t proposed to her yet. She leaves, and he goes to have lunch with his father, the erstwhile Green Hornet, who is now publisher of a newspaper, the Sentinel. Young Britt is a likeable wise-ass (literally: he moons the phalanx of paparazzi who hang around his apartment, hoping to get photos — and they’re successful this day in catching Britt in his shorts, pleading with his girlfriend not to leave, and they also photograph the mooning and sell the photo to Reid Sr.), and because he’s likeable, we wonder what will happen next. So the book accomplishes its primary mission as an inaugural issue. And the past and present constitute two complete episodes, with enough beginning, middle and end apiece to persuade us that Smith knows what he’s doing. And in seeing the characters in completed actions, we know them better than we would otherwise.

Jonathan Lau’s pencils etched by Ivan Nunes’ gleaming colors are crisp and dynamic with a defining sheen. No one is credited as inker, so I assume the coloring, in effect, “inks” the pencils. Breakdowns are by Phil Hester, who is thoroughly accomplished at this sort of thing, but the fast-moving action of the opening battle sequence is not always a model of clarity, a circumstance arising, no doubt, because there’s so much exploding and shattering glass around. And pictures of the Hornet aloft, springing up and jumping down and swinging in on a length of hoist chain, while graceful enough on their own, do not blend into anything like continuous action. They’re poses rather than actions. But that’s a minor matter. Everywhere else, Hester sets up the scenes and executes the actions with panache.

Nunes’ glistening colors and Smith’s dialoguing with snappy patter are the highlights of the issue. The relationship between Green Hornet and Kato comes into sharp focus as they banter back and forth; ditto the relationship between Reid and his wife, who, after threatening to cut him off that night for coming in late (“Any chance you had of getting lucky tonight just went south,” she quips) makes him swear that he won’t tell his son about his crime-fighting exploits because Britt Jr. might decide to follow in his father’s flights: “It was bad enough living through you doing it. I don’t think I’d ever make it through him trying the same stunt,” she says. The verbal exchanges between Britt the Younger and his fleeing would-be fiancee are equally flippant and revealing. Dialogue like this — and pictures like Lau-Nunes’ — will bring me back every time.

FIRST ISSUE: SUPERGOD

FIRST ISSUES: An admirable first issue must, above all else, contain such matter as will compel a reader to buy the second issue. At the same time, while provoking curiosity through mysteriousness, a good first issue must avoid being so mysterious as to be cryptic or incomprehensible. And, thirdly, it should introduce the title’s principals, preferably in a way that makes us care about them. Fourth, a first issue should include a complete “episode” — that is, something should happen, a crisis of some kind, which is resolved by the end of the issue, without, at the same time, detracting from the cliffhanger aspect of the effort that will compel us to buy the next issue.

God in Comics: Part Two

Warren Ellis’ Supergod is a somewhat stronger cup of tea than God Complex. Herein, Ellis plays with religion as a subject of philosophical investigation. The issue opens on an old (but not ancient) man, probably some sort of scientist, sitting in the midst of an immense urban ruin and talking via cellphone to Tommy, to whom the old man is explaining how it all crashed and burned. At the heart of his explanation and Ellis’ concept is the axiom that if God didn’t exist, we’d have to invent Him. “Some say we’re actually hardwired for religion,” the old man says. “We look for something to worship.” And we usually make the gods ourselves. “The whole of religious history is about us trying to build amazing creatures that will save the world—,” the old man continues. And then we turn the page and see a two-page spread of a devastated city, buildings smouldering in ruins, and the old man finishes, “ — so that worked out all right, then.”

            Ellis’ formula seems to be that in our desire for something to worship, we created gods, and in the latest effort along these lines, we created super-beings that destroyed the world as we know it. The first issue of the title is devoted to the old man’s descriptions of various superheroes, gods, invented by modern science — Krishna, an Indian god, for instance, cloned from artificial intelligence. With the British invention, Morrigan Lugus — “the names of two ancient celtic three-headed dieties” — concocted by Project Lughnasa, “named for the Irish holiday when the god Lugh declared a wake for his dead mother and a feast for the task that killed her” —  Ellis takes his inventive concept into high dark comedy, deploying lingo and syntax for mad, antic purposes. Morrigan Lugus was created in space when three astronauts fused together with “alien mycological mass ... Sometimes it spoke using sound. Sometimes it would communicate by emitting radio signals. On other occasions, it would eject spores, a 4-phosporolated indole full of digital code. And the Lughnasa team’s response to this creature in their midst was instant and profound. They began to worship, and to pray, and to masturbate with an entranced and furious intensity. One poor old man found new strength, such was his devotion, and tore his own todger entirely off — mushrooms began growing on it almost immediately.” Typical Ellis, in other words — fantastic invention coupled to grisly imagination and a wonderfully shocking opening.

            Giving visual reality to Ellis’ concept is Garrie Gastonny’s superb talent as illustrator. As usual with an Ellis artist, the pictures are copiously detailed, but Gastonny knows when to stop laying in feathering linework; his pictures are markedly clear, even those depicting vistas of destruction. The issue offers not one but three complete episodes—each one the history of the invention of a god and its ultimate demise, and the old man is witty enough to hold our attention. Ellis, who may be the Christopher Hitchens of the comics industry, has taken the notion of the superhero to its logical extension—superhero as God.  His premise emerges almost at once. He intends, I think, to show how religion (an invention of mankind, remember) will destroy the world when its gods run amuck. And Jerry Craven—the cliffhanging character the mention of which concludes the first issue—will be the pivotal creation. In the next issue, we learn that Jerry Craven is apparently another of the gods, this one devised to destroy the others. And the consequences of that? Stay ’tooned.

FIRST ISSUE: GIRL COMICS

FIRST ISSUES: An admirable first issue must, above all else, contain such matter as will compel a reader to buy the second issue. At the same time, while provoking curiosity through mysteriousness, a good first issue must avoid being so mysterious as to be cryptic or incomprehensible. And, thirdly, it should introduce the title’s principals, preferably in a way that makes us care about them. Fourth, a first issue should include a complete “episode” — that is, something should happen, a crisis of some kind, which is resolved by the end of the issue, without, at the same time, detracting from the cliffhanger aspect of the effort that will compel us to buy the next issue.

GIRL COMICS

Girl Comics No. 1 is, I assume, part of Marvel’s “Women of Marvel” month in which tribute is to be paid to women characters and women creators. So this 3-issue series features only femininity in an array of short stories, most of which are highly forgettable. It begins with the best part of the issue — a cover by Amanda Conner, who, with her usual visual sense of humor, depicts She-Hulk winning an arm-wrestling match with Iron Man. After that, the content deteriorates. The first so-called story, “Moritat,” is written by G. Willow Wilson with terrible, ugly art by Ming Doyle, who can’t, evidently, draw attractive women. (So is unattractiveness an element of the feminist agenda?) In an untitled piece written by Trina Robbins, Venus returns to earth and gets her old job back at Beauty magazine by means of some vapid feminine wile; art is color swatches without outlines by Stephanie Buscema. The most remarkable instant in the issue takes place in this story: Mercury shows up at Venus’ editor-in-chief bower, and she, reclining on a chaise lounge, says: “Can you make it quick?” If this isn’t a hilarious satirical allusion to the male propensity for shooting and running, I dunno what else it is. In “A Brief Rendezvous” by Valerie d’Orazio, drawn by Nikki Cook, the Punisher poses as female on twitter to lure a guy to his presumed death. Sana Takeda supplies a pin-up of the She-Hulk in which said heroine appears to be smoking at her nether regions. “Shop Doc” by Lucy Knisley showcases her simple lineart in a pointless comedy about Doc Och shopping in a supermarket, using one of his eight arms/hands to get a box of breakfast food off a top shelf. In “Clockwork Nightmare” by Robin Furth and drawn in a quirky fairytale manner by Agnes Garbowska, Franklin and Val Richards show up in miniature as adorable li’l kids to play out an illustrated text version of Hansel and Gretel.

“Head Space” by Devin Grayson has the best art in the book by Emma Rios. Herewith, Scott is jealous of Jean’s apparent attention to Wolverine (and he’s right to be jealous). I hope to see more of Rios, best known, according to the bio paragraphs at the end of the book, “for her magazine illustration work and self-published comics in Spain before being introduced to the American market with Hexed from Boom!” Forthcoming from Marvel, Rios’ miniseries Strange and then Firestar. The only other good parts of this issue are the prose appreciations of Flo Steinberg, longtime factotum at Marvel HQ, and Marie Severin, a graduate of famed EC Comics (that she enhanced with psychologically-cued colors) and, subsequently, artist and cartoonist. As a tribute to women characters and artists, the book is marginal at best, insulting at worst. A good idea, but badly executed. (“Thoroughly executed” might be more apt.)

FIRST ISSUE: NEW ULTIMATES

FIRST ISSUES: An admirable first issue must, above all else, contain such matter as will compel a reader to buy the second issue. At the same time, while provoking curiosity through mysteriousness, a good first issue must avoid being so mysterious as to be cryptic or incomprehensible. And, thirdly, it should introduce the title’s principals, preferably in a way that makes us care about them. Fourth, a first issue should include a complete “episode” — that is, something should happen, a crisis of some kind, which is resolved by the end of the issue, without, at the same time, detracting from the cliffhanger aspect of the effort that will compel us to buy the next issue.

NEW ULTIMATES

Marvel’s New Ultimates has undoubtedly the most spectacular roll-out ever in comics — a six-page fold-out cover featuring a massive agglutination of monstrous gorilla-like demons attacking a mere handful of heroes (Thor, Captain America, Ka-zar, Shanna, and a couple of others, nearly submerged in the morass). Six-page fold-out!! Beautifully rendered by Frank Cho at his favorite subject — gorilla-like creatures. Cho also draws the rest of the book, displaying his usual adroitness at pacing and managing the resources of the medium for dramatic effect. And that’s the best thing in the first issue. The story, by Jeph Loeb, is a mish-mash that will appeal only to the most deeply-dyed of the marching Marvel minions, all devoted to keeping track of continuity threads that most of us have long ago given up trying to untangle. Herein, too many names of characters not on the scene (but who we are supposed to know in every nook of their personal histories), too much backstory; can’t tell who the good guys are let alone the bad guys unless you’re steeped in Marvel continuity. Tony Stark has brain cancer? He was/is romantically involved with Black Widow, who lives up to her name in “every way.” What ways? She’s not black. Is she a widow? Or are we talking about eating husbands here. Who is “Danvers”? The blonde. Then we have Ka-zar and Shanna strolling in the park. Loki arrives on an incoming cold front, and Tony and Danvers take time off for a roll in the hay. So what of Stark’s commitment to the Black Widow? Confusing enough? An object lesson in how comic books can lose audience: how does a newcomer get into this? You can’t grow the industry without attracting new readers. And even an oldcomer, namely yrs trly — I’ve been away from the Marvel Universe for some time now; it’s a religious thing—has trouble sorting it out. This issue, however, is worth keeping for the six-page fold-out. And Frank Cho.

FIRST ISSUE: SHUDDERTOWN

FIRST ISSUES: An admirable first issue must, above all else, contain such matter as will compel a reader to buy the second issue. At the same time, while provoking curiosity through mysteriousness, a good first issue must avoid being so mysterious as to be cryptic or incomprehensible. And, thirdly, it should introduce the title’s principals, preferably in a way that makes us care about them. Fourth, a first issue should include a complete “episode” — that is, something should happen, a crisis of some kind, which is resolved by the end of the issue, without, at the same time, detracting from the cliffhanger aspect of the effort that will compel us to buy the next issue.

SHUDDERTOWN

Detective lieutenant Isaac Hernandez (or maybe Harrison — he’s called both, probably a case of bad proof-reading) has a problem: he has four open cases, all murders, each apparently, according to DNA, committed by the victim himself, who has been reported dead some time before. “Four dead perps, all before the fact,” as Hernandez/Harrison cryptically says. A nice puzzle. Provocative. But there’s not much else here. Just puzzles and provocation. That’s about all we know for sure. The rest of the first issue of Shuddertown is pure mysticism. Hernandez/Harrison drives off and crashes his car because he wasn’t looking where he was going: he was, instead, trying to pick up the pills he spilled on the front seat. The next day, having slept off his intoxication, he canvases the neighborhood in which the latest murder was committed. He meets a smart-alecky boy. To no purpose. Then he is apparently attacked by a hooded thug, who knocks him unconscious and leaves him supine in the alley. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on or, even, who is being knocked unconscious because Adam Geen drenches his drawings in shadow, covering up all informing detail. This issue satisfies almost none of the criteria for a good first issue. The hero is not likeable, even if we knew him well enough to know anything about him except that he drinks and takes pills. Everything else is mystery. Who are the dead guys, really? Who knocks Hernandez/Harrison out in the alley? And the frustration at leaving all these loose ends to be tied up in some future issue is all the greater because this issue contains no completed episode: nothing with a beginning, middle and end that would reveal either the competence of the writer, Nick Spencer, or the personality of the protagonist. And Geen’s art is terrible: all obscurity. Where there is color, it is splashed across the page without regard for what it is coloring. 

 Here’s the first page. Notice the girl at the bottom right.Is she showering in shades of pink and sepia? Artsy enough to look nifty on a gallery wall, but it isn’t serving the narrative purpose of visual storytelling in which clarity is more important than mood. And who is the woman? She never appears again. Don’t bother with this one.

FIRST ISSUE: GOD COMPLEX

FIRST ISSUES: An admirable first issue must, above all else, contain such matter as will compel a reader to buy the second issue. At the same time, while provoking curiosity through mysteriousness, a good first issue must avoid being so mysterious as to be cryptic or incomprehensible. And, thirdly, it should introduce the title’s principals, preferably in a way that makes us care about them. Fourth, a first issue should include a complete “episode” — that is, something should happen, a crisis of some kind, which is resolved by the end of the issue, without, at the same time, detracting from the cliffhanger aspect of the effort that will compel us to buy the next issue.

God in Comics: Part One

Ever since the arrival of the conceit that superheroes live in a real world in which their superpowers cause as many problems as benefits — since Frank Miller’s Dark Knight and Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Mark Waid’s various takes on the proposition — the idea of superhero as god has been lurking in the shadows.

In God Complex, Michael Avon Oeming and Daniel Berman with John Broglia on pictures test the idea with the novel notion that the old Greek gods, being immortal, are still around, but these days, they are board members in a modern Olympian undertaking, the Kronos Corporation, that started the industrial revolution in the 19^th century. The old gods are now the gods of modern industry. One of their number, Apollo — going by the name of “Paul” — resigns to because he wants to be a mortal. He wanders off into the world of ordinary humans and becomes a dishwasher in a Greek diner, where he yearns for Sophia, the toothsome daughter of the diner’s owner, old George. But when a local cabal of hoods shows up to extort protection money from the old guy, Paul gets massively irritated and throws them all out—bodily, head over tukus—revealing that he is no everyday mortal. His impulsive albeit commendable action produces two reactions, both aimed at removing him: the local mob wants to rub him out because he starts interferring with their business, and the Kronos board wants him back. So Paul is now a target, threatened from two directions at once. As a first issue, this one offers all the requisite ingredients — the incident in the diner with Paul throwing the bad guys out on the street supplying the completed episode, the threats pumping up cliffhanger suspense, and Paul’s behavior (and his infatuation with Sophia) making him a likeable hero. Broglia’s drawings are in the simplicity manner of Powers with a little more detailing — wholly adequate and pleasant to watch. A novelty in the issue is supplied by Broglia’s treatment of page layout: facing pages are deployed as a single double-wide page with panels running across the gutter. The maneuver endows individual panels with more room for depicting explosive action as we can see here on the pages showing Paul throwing the thugs out of the diner. And the device works for less rambunctious sequences, too. The problem, easily overcome but mildly annoying for an artist, is that key visual elements must be kept out of the gutter: you don’t want to put a character’s face in the middle of a panel that’s going to span the gutter. Over-all, a good first issue.

FIRST ISSUE: AMERICAN VAMPIRE

FIRST ISSUES: An admirable first issue must, above all else, contain such matter as will compel a reader to buy the second issue. At the same time, while provoking curiosity through mysteriousness, a good first issue must avoid being so mysterious as to be cryptic or incomprehensible. And, thirdly, it should introduce the title’s principals, preferably in a way that makes us care about them. Fourth, a first issue should include a complete “episode” — that is, something should happen, a crisis of some kind, which is resolved by the end of the issue, without, at the same time, detracting from the cliffhanger aspect of the effort that will compel us to buy the next issue.

 

American Vampire

In the first comic book he has written, Stephen King takes up the vampire genre but gives it what he calls a typically American aura. American Vampire is about a Wild West outlaw who’s a sociopath even before he gets turned into a vampire. Shannon Donnelly at the DailyBeast.com is convinced, talking to King, that Twilight fans won’t go for this one. Said King: "There's been a whole spate of vampire stories where the vampires are kind of like boy toys, and they're kind of beautiful, and you want to kind of pet them and take them home with you. I think that the Twilight books, while they do have some crossover, sexually, boys and girls, for a lot of girls, this is an extremely romantic and highly-charged concept that has a sexual element but it doesn't seem as dangerous," King continued. "I go back to that thing about how vampires are terrifically sexy from the neck up and dead from the waist down, because the original vampire thing, the whole element of that was oral, you know? It was basically giving girls hickeys in the middle of the night."

King is writing American Vampire with Scott Snyder, who intrigued King with a proposal for the story that he sent the famed author of weirdness. The first issue presents two narratives: the opening episode, by Snyder, is about Pearl Jones, a young actress trying to get into movies in the 1920s; the second story goes back to 1880, where we meet Sweet, a vicious outlaw who gets bitten by a vampire in the course of his escape from custody. To some extent the second story gives the first a context (if not, exactly, an explanation): Pearl and her roomie, Hattie, have a nextdoor neighbor who looks like (and most assuredly is) Skinner Sweet, still alive (well, mobile) and still young, like any good vampire. It’s Sweet who holds the two pieces together and makes them whole. The girls are intrigued by him; and he, by them. Their exchange with him gives the first story its complete episode. Then an actor on the movie set invites Pearl to meet a movie mogul one evening, and she encounters a flight of vampires there; Snyder leaves her screaming (and us, of course, hoping to find out what happens next time). The Skinner Sweet episode, completed by his escape, ends with one of his former captors beating him to death; but when the brute turns away, we see Sweet’s eyes glowing and we know he’ll be around for a long time yet.

And it is the notion of time that attracted King to the project. "One of the things that happens when you write something like this is the themes start to suggest themselves,” he told Donnelly. “No matter what format you're working in, whether it's short stories, novels, or comics, you oughta be writing about something or you're wasting your time. And it seemed to me that this was about time, and how we get older. I loved the whole concept of the vampire — the most attractive thing about it is that you never age."

Although this is King’s first try at writing comics (the earlier King-inspired Dark Tower books from Marvel adapted the novels to the comics form, but King didn’t write anything), he’s always been a funnybook fan, he said. He grew up reading them, reports Donnelly, including the classic EC Comics — like Tales from the Crypt and Tales from the Vault — that inspired his own 1982 film “Creepshow.” Said King with a laugh: "They twisted me entirely. And I loved Superman, Captain Marvel, all those guys. I even liked Casper the Friendly Ghost! I probably should be ashamed to admit it, but I did."

DISNEY BY HAND

Ironically, the man who saved Disney Studio’s traditional, hand-drawn animation from oblivion is John Lasseter, reports Bruce Kirkland at the Toronto Sun. "Even though John is the king of digital animation at Pixar," Disney animation director Ron Clements told Kirkland, "he loves hand-drawn animation. He very passionately loves hand-drawn animation!" Adds Kirkland: “Lasseter once told me he cherished the beauty, grace and storytelling possibilities of hand-drawn animation, even though he pioneered digital animation at Pixar. Once he took over the animation departments at both Pixar and Disney, Lasseter put his plan of revival into action. Disney had phased out hand-drawn movies after 2004. Lasseter brought it back with ‘The Princess and the Frog.’” Alas, the Princess and her amphibian beau didn’t do quite as well at the box office as it’d been hoped, but hand-wrought animation is still alive and well at the Mouse House.

FIRST ISSUE: INCORRUPTIBLE

FIRST ISSUES: An admirable first issue must, above all else, contain such matter as will compel a reader to buy the second issue. At the same time, while provoking curiosity through mysteriousness, a good first issue must avoid being so mysterious as to be cryptic or incomprehensible. And, thirdly, it should introduce the title’s principals, preferably in a way that makes us care about them. Fourth, a first issue should include a complete “episode”—that is, something should happen, a crisis of some kind, which is resolved by the end of the issue, without, at the same time, detracting from the cliffhanger aspect of the effort that will compel us to buy the next issue.

Incorruptible

Mark Waid continues his explorations of the real world implications of superheroics with Incorruptible wherein we meet Max Damage, a guy who catches bullets in his teeth and then spits them out at his foes. Damage is a crook who has decided to go straight in a world where other superheroic types have either been killed or have given up do-gooding. The book ends promising a confrontation between Damage and the Plutonian, “the world’s most powerful man” who has “gone berserk.” Damage’s good opinion of himself towers over the whole issue. When asked by his erstwhile paramour if he’s “found Jesus,” he says: “Close —  I saw the face of God.” Nice premise, and all the usual criteria are satisfied, but Jean Diaz’s storytelling is often lame. He feathers in places where it’s not needed, and he can’t draw women’s mouths. But his most serious shortcoming is revealed during action sequences where we can’t tell what’s happening much of the time. Adroit action sequences show a species of continuous activity: you know where a character has been standing just before smiting the bad guy. Diaz gives us just poses, suspended in mid-air, not action.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In these times of financial trials for newspapers, it’s a comfort to find one that’s doing well. When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp bought the Wall Street Journal in 2007, journalists everywhere wrung their hands in agony, predicting that the highly respected WSJ would be turned into one of Murdoch’s Page Three Girl tabloids. But that hasn’t happened, according to Editor & Publisher (April 2010). Not only is the paper still a distinguished journalistic enterprise, it’s thriving. Its circulation has increased to more than 2 million subscribers, making it the largest daily in the U.S.; and advertising revenue is up 23% from a comparable period a year ago. WSJ is hiring, too — adding about three dozen journalists at a time when the rest of the industry has shed 27% of its newsroom positions. And its website is equally robust. The Journal charges readers for all content, regardless of point of access; and its website revenue is about $200 million in subscriptions, representing 15-20% of total revenue, and traffic is up 25% to about 22 million users. But no comics. No editorial cartoons either.

CLAY BENNETT WINS NEW AWARD

Clay Bennett, editorial cartoonist at the Chattanooga Times Free Press — who has won just about every award in season for editooning — has just received the first annual Phillipp “Fips” Rupprecht Prize for Collectivist Hate Cartoon Excellence. The so-called “prize” is the invention of a blogger named (we think) Mike Vanderboegh, a gunslinger who operates a teabagger site, sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com. In selecting a name for his “award,” Vanderboegh has displayed admirable ingenuity: Phillipp Rupprecht, pen-name “Fips,” was a German cartoonist notorious during the Nazi era for his anti-Semitic cartoons fomenting hatred for Jews. Bennett won the dubious Sipsey Street distinction for the cartoon below.

Vanderboegh’s strenuous implication is that Bennett is inciting hatred for the Teabaggers in the same way Fips did for Jews. A stretch, you might think, but when you consider Bennett’s other recent cartoons, you might agree: Bennett wants his readers to disapprove of the idiots he pillories in his cartoons. Or, if he is not urging scorn, he’s at least hoping for derisive laughter. And his use of visual metaphor is both ingenious and uncompromising; his cartoons are easily among the best in any month’s crop.

In giving a prize to Bennett, Vanderboegh betrays his penchant and that of his minions for indulging in extreme behavior: just as they interpret any action by a governmental body as “taking their country away” from them, so do they see any attack on any idea they favor as an act of hatred. Civil discourse with such personages is not just impossible, it borders on dangerous: most of this ilk are avid gun fanciers and tend these days, as an presumably symbolic act, to wear sidearms when they go to political rallies, saying they are merely exercising their Second Amendment rights.

Symbolic maybe; intimidating, definitely. Few among us would openly disagree on a political issue with an armed individual bristling with hostility who tends to shout rather than reason. A loud and threatening citizen undermines the very principles upon which democracies are founded, principles he claims to want to uphold.

HUMOR TIMES AND COMICS REVUE

Humor Times, a monthly tabloid that publishes mostly insightful and deliciously acerbic editorial cartoons but also a couple of humor/political columns (Will Durst, Jim Hightower), celebrated its 19^th anniversary with its April issue — “with more pages and extra color.” Subscriptions, well worth the price, are $18.95 for twelve issues: P.O. Box 162429, Sacramento, CA 95816.

Comics Revue, Rick Norwood’s durable monthly magazine that reprints classic comic strips, now up to No. 288, underwent a spectacular format change a few months ago: no longer saddle-stitched, it is now square-spined, and Sunday strips are in color. The usual line-up is: Tarzan (Bob Lubbers and Dick van Buren) plus Russ Manning’s, Flash Gordon (Harry Harrison and Dan Barry) and Mac Raboy’s, Buz Sawyer, Phantom (Lee Falk and Wilson McCoy and, later, Ray Moore’s art), Secret Agent Corrigan, Rick O’Shay, Alley Oop, Mandrake the Magician (Falk and Phil Davis), Little Orphan Annie, Gasoline Alley (Dick Moores), Steve Canyon, Krazy Kat (dailies from the 1930s), Modesty Blaise, Casey Ruggles, and Sir Bagby. Each issue is a “double-issue” these days, and Norwood runs a complete story for a couple of the serial strips in every issue. Subscriptions are a mere $59/year from Manuscript Press, P.O. Box 336, Mountain Home, TN 37684.

NEW IMPROVED PRINCE VALIANT

The new Fantagraphics reprinting of Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant got a short but illustrated write-up in last October’s Vanity Fair: Cullen Murphy, who often writes for the magazine and who wrote Prince Val for 25 years while his father, John Cullen Murphy, drew it, applauds the improved reproduction in the new volumes. Said he: “A witch named Horrit once prophesied that Val would never know contentment, but fans of the strip will find it here.” Fantagraphics has done Foster before. Between 1984 and 2004, it published over 40 volumes reprinting all Foster’s famed Sunday pages. So why do it again? Because, Kim Thompson explains in an afterword in the first of the new volumes, since the first run, advances in digital color technology permit more faithful reproduction and — most importantly — they have access to “a nearly full set of pristine color engraver’s proof sheets of almost the entire Prince Valiant run, carefully preserved by Foster and donated to Syracuse University,” which provided scans for Fantagraphics’ use. Previous editions of Prince Valiant — the Nostalgia Press effort in the 1960s and Fantagraphics’ — recolored the pages, but the color didn’t duplicate the appearance of the original publication of the strip, and the linework was often blotchy. I have the earlier Fantagraphics books, and in comparing them to the current enterprise, it’s clear that the earlier reproduction was inferior. But the present effort is wonderfully faithful to the originals: not only is the color itself much much better, but the linear detail is stunning. The current volumes reprint twice as many pages (124) per book as the previous undertaking, and the pages at 10x14 inches are slightly larger than the predecessor’s. But it’s the fabulously high quality of the reproduction that makes these volumes a bargain at $29.99 each; Volume 2 is due soon.

SPIDER-MAN 4: FAN RESPONSES

Some fan responses to the news that neither Tobey Maguire nor director Sam Raimi will be involved in “Spider-Man 4": “This is absolute classic spin,” said Dave Blanchard. “They must teach this in PR 101 classes now — spend the maximum number of words saying absolutely nothing. That line about going back to Peter's roots [as a high school student, which would permit a new, younger actor to take the Maguire role] cracks me up. How many years did Parker actually age throughout the three movies — two? three? Why don't they just come right out and say, 'We couldn't afford Raimi and Maguire any more, so we're going to try to make this movie on the cheap.'" To which Brent Frankenhoff at the Comics Buyer’s Guide reposited: “While costs may be a factor, Dave, I think it's more a matter of Raimi's vision clashing with that of the producers, and the two groups choosing to part ways rather than continue down that path.” And Dave said: “I think the producers' vision was: ‘We want to do this movie on the cheap.’ Hence, the ‘creative differences’ spin.”

POW!

Ronald Grover at cio-today.com visited Stan Lee at the four-room suite that is headquarters and laboratory for Lee’s POW!, short for Purveyors of Wonder, soon after Disney, attracted by Lee’s “legendary creativity,” paid $2.5 million for a 10 percent stake in the company. Reported Grover: “Disney has several deals with Lee, including a ‘first look’ arrangement to turn his ideas into movies.” POW! has only six employees, says Lee’s partner, Gill Champion, 69, including a chief financial officer and lawyer to handle agreements to license the characters Lee creates. “Lee is the sole creative force; the remaining two employees are assistants.” Said Lee: "I've got people calling me all the time with ideas, some of them good, some of them not.”

Soon after opening the doors in 2003, “Lee signed a deal with Playboy to create an animated tv series called ‘Hef's Superbunnies’ that is still in development.

He also created a series of DVDs based on Ringo Starr, whose character the company describes as ‘an evil-biting, earth-saving [though reluctant] superhero with a great sense of rhythm.’”

Grover thinks of Lee as a kid on a candy store, “taking a bite of everything that looks good.” But POW!s biggest opportunity is with Disney, “where Lee suddenly finds himself in the midst of what looks like an animation Hall of Fame. Already the home to Mickey, Minnie, and others, Disney is collecting cartoon brands the way a kid collects old Spider-Man comics. In the last five years, Disney bought Pixar and Marvel, as well as a piece of POW! ... Lee and Champion aren't saying exactly what the deal with Disney means, other than that they are hard at work on several projects for the fabled animation factory. Lee says he's already met with John Lasseter, the former Pixar head who now lords over Disney's animation activities. Is there a Stan Lee-Pixar film down the road? A new Marvel character that Lee might help Disney exploit? ‘We're thinking,’ says Lee.

“Right now, Lee is consulting with writers and producers on three Disney films, including one called Tigress about a female crime-fighter with, what else, cat-like quickness. That character could just as easily describe Lee, a man who has projects popping up as often as bad guys in a superhero's path.”

TRACY'S JAW IN BRONZE

At 1 p.m. on April 11, a nine-foot, one-ton bronze likeness of Chester Gould’s iconic Dick Tracy was unveiled on the Riverwalk at Naperville, Illinois. The idea for the sculpture was conceived by Naperville  Century Walk Corporation president W. Brand Bobosky and cartoonist Dick Locher, who drew the strip for more than 30 years and is its current writer. Locher, a 40-year resident ofNaperville, served as Gould’s assistant for several years, and when he sculpted a Tracy maquette and showed it to Bobosky, the latter thought it would make a beautiful life-size statue, joining the more than 30 public art pieces theNaperville organization has installed in the last 15 years.

Locher’s concept was then turned over to Wisconsin sculptor Don Reed who transformed the maquette into the larger-than-life sculpture. Reed was intrigued with the challenge of capturing the structure of Tracy's angular face, the flow of his hallmark trench coat and the sense of energy and motion Locher conveys of the detective in the strip. Reed, quoted in a press release from Tribune Media Services, the syndicate that distributes Dick Tracy, said that “thinking of the character as fully round, while creating strong lines and paying close attention to detail were essential to accurately depicting Tracy's likeness.

Tracy in three dimensions, complete with the swirling yellow trench coat, is eye-catching for more than its larger-than-life dimensions, wrote Hillary Gavan in the Beloit Daily News, Reed’s hometown newspaper. “In line with Tracy's vintage comic strip origins, the bronze likeness of the 20th century crimestopper is rendered in full color through the use of a chemical technique called ‘patining’ that dates to Renaissance times.” She goes on, quoting Reed: "To me, Dick Tracy was the ultimate crimestopper who stood up for the public — someone who had a strong sense of values and who projected safety and security," Reed said. "My goal has been to bring that personality to life and convey a positive impression to viewers." A sculptor for more than 30 years, Reed is also a third-generation foundryman who combines state-of-the-art technology with Old World techniques. The accompanying photographs were taken in Reed’s studio before the sculpture was moved to Naperville.

JULES FEIFFER AND NORTON JUSTER

I’ve just started reading Jules Feiffer’s memoir, Backing into Forward (440 6x9-inch pages, mostly text with a few of his cartoons, b/w; hardcover, $30), and he has me from the start.  “Comics,” he writes, “ — I ate them, I breathed them. I thought about them day and night. I learned to read only so that I could read comics. Nothing else was worth the effort. ... I was small and powerless, so inadequate that I couldn’t bat, throw, or catch a ball (a disaster in real life, but in comics a self-imposed limitation that hid my superpowers from evildoers).” Reading comics and “listening to radio serials and favored comedians — ‘Jack Armstrong,’ ‘I Love a Mystery,’ ‘Fibber McGee and Molly,’ Charlie McCarthy, Jack Benny, Burns and Allen” was what Feiffer did with his childhood. Reading this, I realize he’s writing about me. And I can’t wait to see how I turn out.

Meanwhile, after half-a-century, Feiffer is back with his one-time collaborator, Norton Juster: the two are working on a new book, The Odious Ogre, for Michael di Capua Books at Scholastic. Their previous effort together was The Phantom Tollbooth, which came out in 1961; since then it has sold 3.3 million copies.

Feiffer and Juster met while taking out the garbage: they lived in the same apartment building — Juster in the basement; Feiffer on the third floor. When the landlady ended their leases so she could renovate, the two took up residence in a nearby “seedy duplex.” Juster paced the floor as he conjured up a story. On the floor below, Feiffer could hear him walking around: annoyed by the noise, he came up to see what Juster was writing. Said Juster: “Then he drew sketches to go with the story. They were unbelievably good.”

Juster wrote two more books, reported Sue Corbett at Publishers Weekly, but, trained as an architect, he devoted most of his energy to designing buildings for the next thirty years. Feiffer also turned away from children’s books for most of his career: “I started the weekly comic strip [in the Village Voice], trying to overthrow the government,” he quipped. But he also wrote novels, plays, and, particularly in the last few years, children’s books again.

Di Capua longed to bring the duo together again, but he thought Juster’s most recent books were too “sweet” for Feiffer’s scratchy artwork and urbane sensibility. “But this story about the ogre is extremely witty and has a certain black humor to it,” di Capua said. The ogre, for instance, has an impressive vocabulary, “due mainly to having inadvertently swallowed a large dictionary while consuming the head librarian in one of the nearby towns. I knew dead certain Jules was going to want to illustrate it,” di Capua said.

He was right. Now nearly finished with the artwork, Corbett continued, Feiffer reports he’s had a blast. “The one thing I will say is that, in relation to the other characters, he is possibly the biggest ogre in captivity,” Feiffer said. “He was great fun to draw, though—more fun for me than for the ogre.”

Di Capua finds an echo of Feiffer’s Village Voice comic strip in The Ogre:  though the ogre is “extraordinarily large, exceedingly ugly, unusually angry, constantly hungry, and absolutely merciless,” the girl he encounters, working in her cottage garden, is unfazed by his brutishness. “She’s another manifestation of Jules’s dancer,” di Capua said. Only, somehow, she’s better. “Not that I’m knocking his earlier work,” he added, “but there’s a certain freedom that’s noticeably on a higher level. You can tell he’s having a great time.”

Right again, Feiffer said, who did the illustrations in pen and ink brush with colored markers, gouache “and anything else I could think of. It’s my new way of working, which I love.” In fact, he and Juster are already planning their next joint maneuver, he says: “The Phantom Ogre, or maybe The Odious Tollbooth — coming in 2060.”