Savage Dragon Archives vol. 1

In the last couple days I read through Savage Dragon Archives volume 1, which is published in the same basic format as the Marvel Essentials: black and white, cheap-ass paper, and a little lower quality printing. Granted, Savage Dragon was a little nicer than the Essential volumes. I shit you not, take a thumb and rub it on an inky panel of an Essential volume. That shit'll smear worse than a brand new sneaker on a blind guy walking into a dog park. But it had the same problems, maybe even more so by my accounting.

So for those who don't know, Savage Dragons is a guy who wakes up in Chicago with no idea who he is, who he was, or why he is a dragon man with immeasurable strength. He's not the only abnormality in the world, and the police force is losing the battle to the "freaks" that have started showing up. Through a chain of events, Dragon is convinced to become Officer Dragon and start fighting every man with a claw for a head or a leg for a head that comes along.

I think the thing that really appeals to me about the story, and about the way its told, is that they don't spend a lot of time fucking around with the details. Instead, this is a comic created in a world that is aware of comics. It feels almost like the writer/artist, Erik Larsen, is saying, "Look, you've got Wolverine, Nick Fury, tough guy with mysterious past. Got it? Good, let's go." The whole thing is very antithetical to John Byrne's Next Men, which felt like eight issues of origin. I'm sure that's some people's cup of tea, but some people also put cream in their tea which is gross and wrong. Don't make milk hot, people. Don't do it. You'll hate yourself later for it, I guarantee.

Another noticeable...feature of Savage Dragon is that a number of the characters wear outfits that are pretty damn revealing. The standard female crime-fighting togs of the time appear to be something along the lines of a woman's one-piece bathing suit, low cut in the front, thong in the back.

This is by no means a big shocker in comics. I'm sure we can all agree on that. And the classic excuse offered by one character, something along the lines of the outfit serving as a distraction and an advantage, isn't terribly new either. What is different is that we actually see a pretty good number of men in suggestive poses and outfits as well. Not as many as the women, but the ratio is closer than you'll get from a Power Girl/Superman team-up wherein Superman is fully -clothed and Power Girl has for some reason decided to show all of her legs, plus cut a hole for her breasts to pop out of. All these years crime-fighting and not one titty pops out? I've seen it happen on a goddamn water slide, and that can't be nearly as bad as being shot with some kind of ray. To digress even further, I heard that Victoria's Secret only goes up to a certain size. I don't remember which exactly because I have absolutely no earthly reason to, but I do remember it being fairly small. This seems wrong to me as someone who is staring down the barrel of FFF's probably needs some real care and love put into bra-making. So fuck you, Victoria's Secret. You've been propagating lies for years, and now you're not even helping the people who need you most.

Ahem.

At any rate, readers of Dragon are treated to a smorgasbord of male semi-nudity, including the character Barbaric who has a sort of Sumo thong situation going on in back. We get a pretty explicit crotch shot of good ol' Super Patriot, and it appears that 1 out of every 10 freak males, good or bad, wears a shirt. Shirtlessness and hairy chests are the name of the game in this book, and I have to say that with outsized arms and shoulders tapering down to tiny waists, the male depictions are as distorted as the female.

The weird thing is that the equality of nudity only seems to make it MORE noticeable. It brings up the bigger issue, I'd say: Why do women in comics always look like pin-ups?

Okay, I know there are tons of examples of women who don't. But I'm not talking about Aunt May, Aunt Anna, or anybody's aunt anything here. We all know the prototypical female form in comics, but why is it that way?

I have some completely unresearched theories I'd like to share.

1. The less detail you have to devote to characters, the more iconic they have to be, the more you have to rely on visual stereotype clues to make everything easily identifiable. What are the visual body signatures that say "female" immediately, without a second glance? Hourglass, eyes, lips. Keep in mind, we don't see anyone move, we don't hear them talk, so there's no real way to know if a character is male or female without some kind of visual clue. Even the character Horridus from Savage Dragon wears a bra, which seems silly considering that there's no real reason for her to have breasts of any fashion if the rest of her is made entirely of spikes.

As an experiment, try looking at the faces, just the faces, in a lot of books. They're fairly androgynous a lot of the time, hard to tell them apart without hair and bodies attached.

Or, take as an example, what comes out of trying to do a female version of the Thing from Fantastic Four. Look at this. How is anyone supposed to know whether this character is female? Well, without the hair, face, or general body shape, they give it the bosom of a babushka. Not pretty, but we have to know somehow.

2. Boys read comics.

We all know that. I don't think that boys are necessarily writing emails and letters demanding to see a little more skin, but since when has the comic book industry ever listened to the quiet majority of comic book readers who really don't mind some ugmos thrown in for good measure? So it's kind of an industry thing that nobody really needs, but people are a little afraid to do away with all together.

3. Why the fuck not? Seriously, why the fuck not?

Look at TV. So many TV shows are cast with characters who are much prettier than we are in real life. Friends was a show about the 6...five-ish most attractive people on television at the time, and they all live in the same building somehow. For all his faults, George on Seinfeld must have dated more attractive women than any bald, middle-aged, doughy, neurotic, jobless fool on the planet. Even the Office, which is about as close as it gets to real, is probably hotter than your office. If your office is hotter, please let me know where you work and which positions are most likely to open up in the next 1 to 1,000 weeks.

The downside, we all know, is that sometimes you have to trade a little acting skill for hotness. Not to keep picking on the Fantastic Four movies time and again, but never has a better looking cast disappointed me so thoroughly. I would have settled for someone who looked less like Ben Grimm yet made me believe something he said now and then. And Jessica Alba? I don't even buy her in surfing movies, which is pretty much her real life as far as I can tell.

The difference in comics, however, is that you can make any character, with any traits, look exactly how you want. If you want to make a scientist who looks like your favorite centerfold, you can. Just throw some glasses on her and a labcoat, boom, scientist. And in comics, she IS a scientist. There's no believability curve like watching Franco be scientific with his gorgeous hair. It's all what you made up, so why not make everyone hot?

Mark my words: The first human-looking robot, the one that actually looks like a human, will be made to look beautiful. It's just how things work.

Now to some extent you can argue that, if people can do whatever they want, why aren't they doing more interesting things? Why not a crazy port stain like Gorbachev now and then, or maybe a nose with different -sized nostrils, or a modestly-chested female character. Okay, no need to make freaks , but you get the idea.

There is some credence to that argument, but the clear water tells us that it's a revival of a different point. That's not about them being pin-ups or not, just about them not being very interesting.

Erik Larsen isn't a stranger to comics, and there's no doubt he knows exactly what he's doing. I'm sure there are a million theories out there about how Dragon, in particular, is about taking common comic book themes, visual and otherwise, and exploding them to a ridiculous size in order to point out the comic book-y ness of the whole affair.

I don't know if that's what he's doing or not, and I don't care. Because these are compulsively readable, and if he's poking fun at comics, he's doing it well enough that you can enjoy the stories and art without getting into that too much. If he's not, then I say good for him. This is a comic that does right something a lot of comics can't figure out. Reading these comics FEELS like reading comics, and I'm up for that any time.

Half Black, Half Latino, All Spider

The big talk in the world of comics is that there's a new Spider-Man. And he's non-white.

In fact, he's half Latino, half black, so he's about as non-white as a person gets in comics.

There are a lot of times, in comics, when these sorts of changes are made for the sake of "changing things up." I really hate that phrase, "changing things up." How does making a character gay, for example, really change things up when the primary context I see him in is flying to other galaxies and punching aliens in the head(s)? Not to seem uninterested, but when the dude gets back home and is sitting on the shitter, flipping through a magazine, I don't particularly care whether that magazine is Playboy or Playgirl. Or King, for that matter.

My basic question: Are there stories you want to tell that require this kind of change, or is the change being made in hopes that the change itself will bring about stories? Because changing something like a character's race in hopes of bringing about stories....well, what kind of story would YOU categorize as "Half-Latino, Half-Black" stories?

I'm going to admit up front that I'm not the most racially sensitive person. When trying to type "latino" I keep typing "lotion" over and over again, if that's any indication. But I do think it's great to give room to characters of different races, and it can have a positive effect on the world.

As a young man, I had a fairly racially-charged experience with Spawn comics. For those of you who aren't familiar, Spawn is about a guy who gets killed, goes to hell, comes back with powers and lives like a bum while also occasionally fighting an obese clown. His whole face and body are covered by burns, so he is unrecognizable and wears a mask most of the time. Also, his name is Al, which might win the award for most underwhelming superhero name, especially as Married With Children was in heavy syndication at the time, so it was hard not to make a comparison.

I got a collection of the first few issues one Christmas morning, and I sat down and read the whole thing twice in a row. It wasn't until the second time through that I finally understood a scene that was bothering me.

Al decides that he wants to go and visit his wife, who's still alive and lives nearby. He uses some of his satanic power to make himself look normal, and the result is here on the left. Not bad, I thought. You could do worse than a ripped dude with the hair of Ghostbusters' Egon Spangler. Al, however, was not pleased with the new look, and it wasn't until the second time through that I realized it was because Al, before he died, was black.

And in my little, white, suburban heart, I had to accept that I felt...disappointed.

In retrospect, I feel okay about it and understand my young self. I don't think the disappointment was in the fact that he was black. It was that he wasn't like me, and as a kid it was important to me that I identify with characters, and the best ways I'd found to do it at that point were superficial. It's not uncommon. Babies like to look at picture books with photos of babies. White kids end up with white dolls.

But at the time, I felt disappointed when I found out the character was black, then kind of sad because I didn't think it should matter, but it did to me. On college admissions essays, I would always say I was an early reader, an early writer, and an extremely early adopter of white guilt.

Thus ended Pete's Christmas Racial Symposium of 1995.

The whole experience was kind of great. It was an early time for me to face my own racial beliefs that I didn't even know existed. And if it weren't for comics, I never would have confronted them. My elementary had somewhere in the neighborhood of .8 black kids in it. My high school had maybe 3. So this is not something th=at would have cropped up until way later if it weren't for that comic where an ice cream man is killed and chained up and stabbed with popsicle sticks.

The lesson was that white is not necessarily the default.

Which brings us back to Spider-Man, and this quote from an Italian artist who helped with some design work on the new Spider-Man:

"Maybe sooner or later a black or gay — or both — hero will be considered something absolutely normal."

That I agree with.

But there's a really big difference between what they are doing with Spider-Man and what happened with Spawn.

Al, Spawn, was a black man. He was always a black man, and continued to be a black man (as much as is possible when 90% of your skin is burned off, I guess).

Spider-Man was white, and now is not.

The difference is, when you change a character from one thing to another, you can't expect people not to notice and to pretend that is doesn't matter. Because it does. Obviously it does, because otherwise you wouldn't have done it. To use a parallel example, a man being gay isn't a newsflash, but if you knew a man for forty years who was living a straight lifestyle, wife and kids and all that, and then one day he announced he was gay, you would still be his friend, but I think both parties would be surprised if you acknowledged the new information and then moved on immediately without talking about it. It's even more confusing with race because in real life you can't really change your race. Lord knows I've tried. They've got that scholarship money locked up tight, I'll tell you what.

The other thing is that people don't like character changes in comics regardless of who the new character is. Green Lantern has reverted ALL the way back. The Flash has been 40 different guys, but somehow the old ones keep coming back. As someone smarter than me pointed out, Peter Parker was once replaced by his EXACT CLONE and people were outraged. I suspect that the race is far less an issue than the replacement of a known character.

The story here, in my mind, isn't that Spider-Man is half black, half Latino. It's that he BECAME half-black, half-latino. Maybe this will be a good thing, and maybe some kid will see that picture of him lifting the mask and it will improve his life in the long run, although in the short run it kind of ruins his 1995 Christmas. But in my personal opinion, this doesn't really open the door to new Spider-Man-centric storylines of interest, and though it remains to be seen whether the stories are great or not, I'm skeptical, as always when it comes to change for change's sake.

And finally, I'm sure that nobody should be offended by this change, but I don't know what is really empowering about it. These sort of changes, changing a character from white to black, straight to gay, man to woman or whatever change that's made with no real thought other than change itself doesn't really acknowledge the true, deep-seated cultural differences beyond a tip of the cap.

A Drifitng Life, Reviewed by Pete the Friendly Jingo

Holy lord, that bastard was long. I mean long. I mean like [Apatow joke] long.

This epic graphic novel follows the life of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, from a young manga fan to a writer to, apparently, a manga master.

I don't know much about manga, so don't take my ignorance here as a slam on ol' Yoshi.

The best parts were the stories from his personal life, and the small details about living in post WWII Japan were interesting. For example, it was years after the war before Japanese citizens were allowed to drink Coca-Cola. It was all saved for the occupiers, I guess. Ah, freedom.

I do have to say, based on a few incidents in this book, Japanese teens of the 50's and 60's were grossly uneducated about sex. At one point, Yoshi is gettin' bizay with a young lady, and she asks him what that hard thing is. Not in a, "Is that a hard cock in your pocket or are you just happy to have someone touch the hard cock in your pocket" kind of way. In a way where you realize, holy shit, this teen doesn't even know that a penis gets hard at some point along the way. If she saw a boner in a boy's pants, she would assume that it was...well, I don't know what she would assume. It does make me wonder if Japanese underpants are different, and if they may be better designed for the suppression of teenage boners. Or maybe they're just too busy studying all the time. But too busy to know that a boner is a thing? I just don't know about that.

On the flipside, most chapters start with little historical bits that don't really mean a lot to me, what was going on culturally, especially pop-culturally, in Japan at the time. The big movies, the big songs, and so on.

Here is where the review borders on culturally insensitive. Brace yourselves.

I had a hell of a time connecting to these parts because they all read like this to me:

[Japanese name] came out with [bizarre magazine name] which revolutionized manga with its [Japanese word] style.

I shit you not, there must be a couple hundred different Japanese names in this book, and being only a seven-year student of Japanese, wink, I had a hell of a time keeping them straight, and eventually I just skipped them over if I had a sense that the characters weren't sticking around long. It would be like a Japanese person reading an American book, and the names were Joe, Joey, Joseph, Jake, John, James, Jamie, and any other bullshit name you can think of with a J in it.

Johnny.

On the plus, this almost seems like a book made for Western audiences, by which I mean the boys look like boys, the girls look like girls, and the characters look different from each other. It's super not okay to say that all people of a certain type look the same, but I think it's okay to say something like, "All the men Frank Quitely DRAWS look the same," and it's honestly a problem I have with a lot of Japanese comics. But this one, between its differentiated characters (Flop of Hair in Front Guy, Beret Man, Glasses Dude) left-to-right style, and fairly consistent layout is a breezy read for most comic folks.

The art is tidy and well-expressed, and there's a definite impressive quality to the simplicity of the drawings that is worth a looksie. Outside of that, I can't honestly think of much reason to read this unless you're a fan of the man or really interested in the history of manga, but a history ending thirty years ago.

Dracula: CEO and Loving It

The minute I finished this I was sure what I wanted to say about it. Then another minute went by and I thought, “Wait a minute. Why the hell did I read a Dracula comic in the first place?”

Credit where credit is due, I have to take some of the blame for reading this one. Because there is really no excuse for reading another Dracula book. There just isn’t. Mark Waid did his best to try and invent one for me, but that might have only made things worse.

We all know Dracula as the guy who kicked ass, impaled mofos, and did a bunch of evil magic shit to turn himself into a vampire. Until now, however, we didn’t really appreciate him as a shrewd businessman, because after all, what is a medieval country if not the equivalent of a modern-day big company?

Therefore, the characters conclude, if we want to instigate the hostile takeover of another company, the easiest way of going about it would be to resurrect Dracula and use his powers of magical persuasion to convince CEO’s to sell their companies to us, an extremely costly and dangerous endeavor that will force us to close a bunch of plants in order to shore up enough cash to get everything rolling.

With that reasonable, well thought-out, foolproof, unambitious, clearly defined plan with no real endgame, I don’t see how anything could go wrong.

It reads a little bit like one of those weird business books where we try to learn business plans from the unlikeliest of sources. Like “How to Manage Like Oscar the Grouch” with chapter titles like “Managing in the Can: the Essence of Hands-Off Management.” Dracula is presented as being a good manager because he worked out a small country and fought battles with swords and shit. I’m no historian, and I am certainly no city planner, however I would say that a city surrounded by people staked on large poles that were intentionally blunted and greased to increase both the pain and the sliding action is not a city that is operating in a sustainable, realistic fashion that is enjoyable for all. Just a hunch.

Even if I were convinced that Dracula was a great middle manager at heart, I think it’s still a tough sell to convince me that we really should bring him back to life in order to solve some kind of problem. For starters, trying to create what sounds like a great business plan out of sheer craziness is a little hard to swallow. It would be like watching the Social Network, and halfway through the Mark Zuckerberg character decides that they need a great mathematician to help out, and because Egyptians were known to be very mathematical, they decide to resurrect a mummy. Or maybe we take it in an Air Bud sort of direction and bring back a lagoon creature to be on the high school swim team. It’ll be a great laugh when he’s filling in his age on the form and has to say 4389, huh?

And of course, we have our crew of vampire hunters which consists of the standard formula: hot babe, crazy person, and one guy who seems sort of effective, or at least big.

It’s partially my fault for picking it up, but rarely does a book combine so fluidly two of my strong disinterests: business and vampires.

This last part goes out to CEO’s, business people, and anyone in a movie, book, or whatever who comes up with a crazy scheme involving evil forces or super-powered robots or anything of the such:

Whatever you do, just kill the thing the second it starts fooling around. Don’t give into its demands for a nighttime rooftop meeting, don’t give it a telephone that it rewires into a deadly taser, none of that shit. Just make it do what you want and then throw it in a goddamn volcano.

Superhero Movies and the Cloud

Having not seen Green Lantern, I just learned a disturbing fact:Parallax, the main bad guy, is a cloud.

Now, just so we're clear, "Cloud" is not some kind of slur that I invented for a racial group or something, although doing so would be a wise decision if you talk a lot about putting down races. Nobody disagrees when you talk about how those "damn Pine Beetles" are always ruining the environment, and most would share
your shock and dismay when you said that Pine Beetles were always expected to provide tech support despite a complete non-grasp of your language.

No, when I say Cloud, I mean he's a Cloud. I'm not an expert at cloud identification, but I did take a Meteorology class in college because it was the only lab science that didn't require a field trip (the weather is all around us!). Based on that knowledge, I would say this cloud appears to be a Cumulo Skullshits.

That's an amateur opinion, however.

What's really fucked up, to me, is that this is not the first time a cloud has appeared and claimed the spot as main bad guy in a comic book movie. There may be more, but by my count, this is the third.

Wha?

Fantastic Four: 2, aka Fantastic Fourtwo.

Yes, instead of being a giant purple guy, Galactus appeared as a cloud. A space cloud, to be more correcter.

Okay, I understand that some things have to be changed in comic book movies in order to have everything make sense. And sometimes it's a good idea. I don't really need to watch Peter Parker construct mechanical web shooters, devices that would certainly net him hundreds of thousands of dollars, let alone his web formula. But I digress. The point is, some things change for the sake of making a movie make a little sense, and sometimes those choices are good ones.

And sometimes, it means that a giant purple guy turns into a big space cloud.

Now, this might sound like a sensible change, and it does on paper. But let's also consider that this is a film in which we have a silver man who rides through space on a surfboard, and a Fantasticar that was apparently cobbled together from a Dodge. Reality is broken, and I am prepared to accept some form of...well, I'm ready to accept a form.

The problem is that we've got a flame man, a stretch man, a rock man, and an invisible man who is a woman. Oh, and a silver man who surfs. These are visually interesting if nothing else, but we don't get to see them do anything cool. Punching, stretching, flaming, invisibiling, and hanging 10.5, minimum. Which brings us to our good friend the Hulk.


Hulk aka Not That One, The Shitty One. Shittier One.

(note: cloud bad guy in Hulk may have looked a little different. I only saw it once, okay?)

Again, we have a big bad guy, and it's a goddamn cloud. It's a weird electric cloud, but there is something very important I learned about clouds in my meteorologic education:

They cannot, per se, be smashed.

This is a quality that is not terribly important day to day, and we should all be thankful that clouds don't smash into shit all day, or fall down and smash. But in the Hulk movie, it would be nice to see him smash some shit.

It would be only five years later when we discovered that a bad guy who can be smashed still can't really save a movie. But it helps.

I would like to suggest things that the Hulk could fight as opposed to a cloud man.

-Giant man made of glass.
-Giant man made of wood.
-Evil car that comes to life.
-Giant evil car that comes to life.

Basically, anything that can come to life and be smashed should be just fine.




On the plus side, at least the Green Lantern folks figured out how to make a cloud into a toy so that we didn't have to go toyless. Thank god.

4 Indie Books

For this entry, a look at 4 different Indie books.

I'm not so interested in looking into publishers and how much cash was behind each book. Just know that by "indie" I mean, "fitting into the stereotypes of indie, such as being drawn and written by one dude and being about, you know, emotions and shit."

I decided to rank this in order from most-enjoyed to least. That way, even if you don't get all the way through, you'll hear the good instead of the bad.

1. Mid-Life by Joe Ollman

A favorite amongst these titles, Mid-Life focuses on a guy in a time period of his life that I feel is adequately explained by the title. As a matter of fact, three of four books in this entry are about a man in that time when ex-wives are abundant and unattractive physical features are rendered in dark ink.

Mid-Life reads like total autobiography, the disclaimer being that some parts may or may not be real. The details are so vivid, though, that you finish the book feeling like all of it was real and the only purpose of the disclaimer was to avoid trouble with the other "characters."

The main character is a guy who's been married a couple times, has two grown daughters and a baby son, and ends up crushing on a girl who is a semi-famous children's performer. Imagine Raffi with nice cans. Through some complicated shit, he gets the chance to actually meet boob-ed Raffi in a business setting and talk to her one-on-one.

It's an interesting premise because we all have our celebrity crushes that are totally okay because they are totally unrealistic. Most people don't mind when their girlfriend has a thing for Brad Pitt because for anything to happen they would somehow have to meet, Pitt would have to somehow be mysteriously yet powerfully attracted as well, and somehow they would end up falling in love together, you suddenly upset at Brad Pitt's changing shitty beards that were just some man's hair to you only days ago. In short, you might as well fall in love with a unicorn, because it's about equally likely that things will work out, especially since unicorns are well-known wifebeaters.

So, although it gets there through a very indie lens, at the heart of this book is an actual story as opposed to a series of pages expressing feelings and detailing impossibly small moments, a staple of this genre.


2. Life With Mr. Dangerous by Paul Hornschemeier

Life is a much shorter book, and it's a little closer to the indie stereotype in that the story is pretty much about the small little nothings of a relationship that exists mostly in the main character's head.

You have a female main character who makes some clumsy attempts at love, most of which are a little depressing and ultimately fruitless.

The thing that made this book work for me is that the story, though it can be sad at times, doesn't feel like it's purposefully shooting for sad with every turn of the page. There are some lighter moments, the art is more cartoon-y than realistic, and although the situation is a little rough it's 100% believable (see below).

This story didn't have that strong thread to it, the thing keeping you turning pages. But it does wrap itself up nicely and have a sense of flow. If someone showed you the pages of this book completely out of order, you could put them back in their proper places, which means it passes the test of having SOME kind of narrative.

The female character is seen a little less often in the role of a lonely, single nerd pining a bit too much. The character wasn't terribly feminine, but it was nice to see some different takes on the cliches, such as a mom who is a little overbearing but with her own set of problems, and a distant love who isn't a lying asshole of some variety.

Mr. Dangerous didn't blow my mind or anything, but it did what a quiet indie book is supposed to do, which is lend a little emotion and then get out of the reader's way.


3. Mr. Wonderful by Daniel Clowes

Well, you're probably familiar with Clowes' work by now. If not, I'd say give this one a try. You'll know whether you like him within a few pages.

This book, also about a guy in his mid-life getting back on the dating scene, has the Clowes' touch of having a lot of good, realistic touchstones, but with a few pages of bizarre interpersonal stuff that makes no sense to me thrown in as well.

Clowes' characters often find themselves in uncomfortable situations. Think about those cringe-worthy moments on a show like the Office, but ratcheted up and taken to a place where the discomfort is too frightening to laugh through.

I will say that this ended better for the character than most Clowes books. It also had more story to it than a book like Wilson, which is something I've come to value in indie books. So if you're into this, it's worth reading through the end.


4. Reunion by Pascal Girard

I wanted to like it. I really did.

The basic premise was about a guy headed to his high school reunion. He went to a small enough school that he knows everyone, so he decides to get in shape just a bit make a good impression. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to his wife/girlfriend/whatever, he exchanges some emails back and forth with an old flame in preparation for seeing her for the first time in a while.

In the beginning the book did a decent job of getting me to believe the whole thing, throwing in a couple fantasies about how Pascal thought the whole thing would go that were just outrageous enough to laugh at. He set himself up as the ex-nerd with a little something to prove.

But by the end, not only does the reality contrast with the fantasy, you don't even want the fantasy to come true for Pascal because he's such an asshole.

The book takes a sharp turn at the reunion. It's like one of those Fokkers movies where the guy can't seem to do anything right, and people are very aggressive on calling him out on his shit. For example, the invite said "bring a beer for a tasting party." Like a dope, Pascal brings a single beer, a weird peach one, and then takes shit the entire time for not participating properly. He makes a dumb mistake that doesn't make sense, and then the level of outrage is a little out of proportion.

At another point he is on a bench having his leg examined by one fellow attendee while another is giving him a full oral exam. Someone snaps a picture which goes up online. It's WAY too much. Even if this story is 100% real, it's just too strange and over-the-top to be entertaining. Instead of watching events unfold, the reader spends most of his energy debating the truth behind it, which means that the author failed to either

A) Create a world in which these events are believable
or
B) Temper true-life events so that they are believable.



So, what makes for an indie book that I like?

-Art-
It counts, folks. It's nice when a writer can ink his own shit, but if the art is sub-par, the story is tough to get through. Fortunately, the art in all of these was pretty good. Mid-Life has a very Peter-Bagge-esque style. Mr. Wonderful hits a lot of the simpler notes of Chris Ware with an interesting color palette and well-defined lines. Clowes is a style to himself, and Reunion was sort of a light version of what's best about Jeffrey Brown.

-Story-
After reading a lot of this kind of stuff, I prefer a book with a story that I can sum up, and it helps if there's an interesting hook. Mid-Life is the main example here, giving us a love story of sorts but with a nice twist. But indie books that have a summary along the lines of "I don't know...it's pretty much about this dude's life" are so abundant that there isn't much room for them on my bookshelf.

-Realism-
Because these stories hinge on things being realistic, when the reality feels broken it leaves the book rudderless. There's a fistfight in Mr. Wonderful that feels pretty damn perfunctory, and it breaks the reality of this intense business going on under the surface.

-Natural Empathy-
The best indie books cause you to have a natural empathy for the character. Though you might not agree with some of the feelings expressed, you can acknowledge their existence and emotional logic. But when Pascal, in Reunion, borrows a suit from his brother that is WAY too big, then takes shit all night for wearing a weird suit, it's one thing. But when the book seems to be asking you to feel sorry for him, it loses all its edge. These characters, because they are meant to feel real, have to occupy a somewhat real world and react in somewhat realistic fashion. When a character acts like a complete lunatic, I just stop caring because now we're just watching a lunatic.

DC and It's 52

By now everyone has heard that DC is relaunching 52 of its titles with new #1's in August.

I have mixed feelings.

52 of them, to be exact.

1. I can't help but think that DC is just plain out of goddamn ideas. Like when I would get really stuck in Nintendo and just hit the reset button out of anger rather than for the mystery of what might come.

2. Day-of distribution of digital versions is excellent and a necessary step, although I'm not really sure what it has to do with a reboot or why you aren't doing it already.

3. Is it just me or do almost all of these characters look the same with only the addition of a slightly higher collar, which I assume is for those little rank dots the Star Trek guys wore.

4. Jeff Lemire (who wrote the very cool Sweet Tooth) is the only reason I could possibly conceive of for being excited that there will be a new Frankenstein comic. So I guess we all lucked out on that one.

5. I'll save everyone the first 6 issues: Bruce Wayne's parents were shot, just like before, but his dad owned a smartphone at the time.

6. I still fail to understand how making a character gay, just deciding that he or she is now gay, is being considerate and helpful to the gay community. I feel like that's a fundamental misunderstanding of how homosexuality works and what the consequences are, good and bad (good: youp*** videos. bad: HGTV)

7. Is there anyone on the planet who can name 52 DC titles?

8. Better yet, is there anyone on the planet who can name 52 DC titles they would like to read?

9. The results for me personally: I'll read the best 3-5 from the 52 trades that come out.

10. I can't decide what's worse: re-reading an origin I've heard 4,000 times (Superman) or re-reading an origin I didn't give a shit about in the first place (Metamorpho).

11. For the love of god, can Catwoman finally have a gun?

12. I know I can't let it go, but why do we need a Frankenstein in a world where superpowered aliens protect our cities and write our newspapers? Isn't that enough?

13. Every comic book company does a relaunch of some kind when a new movie comes out to capture that movie audience (Green Lantern). Couldn't they just create a limited series that begins at number one, thereby capturing that audience while it's excited and dropping the series once the heat dies down?

14. So we get a new Jonah Hex series that's taking place in the past. Why, why, why does it have to take place in the old west version of Gotham? You're always doing this shit, trying to weave these little pointless connections.

15. See: Sgt. Rock, who is a modern soldier and (for no goddamn reason!) the grandson of the original Sgt. Rock.

16. Do we need a Batgirl AND a Batwoman?

17. If so, can we also get a Bat-Tween and BatBabyGirl?

18. So we've got Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps, Green Lantern: the New Guardians, and Red Lanterns? Perfect. Because I wasn't getting enough of Guy Gardner, Kilowog, and...you know, those 40,000 other dudes.

19. You're canceling Northlanders and launching a new series with swords and knights and shit under a different title, author, and with no following? Dum-dums!

20. Etrigan the demon gets his own title? Legit? You'll have to excuse me, I think that's for shit.

21. I, Vampire, a book featuring topless vampire teens on the cover. Hooray. It's about time someone captured the market for lame vampire teen romance. How is it that vampires are immortal, yet they act like they're 12 when they fall in love?

22. So we're re-numbering Batman Inc. and then continuing the storyline currently in progress? Is there any context in which that makes sense?

23. Justice League International aka Justice League Cast-Offs + Batman. Not to get too geeky here, but if you have an international team, why would you include a member who can't fly, can't teleport, and basically can't ever be on scene? Oh, wait. Because nobody cares about Booster Gold.

24. Mr. Terrific.

25. DC Universe Presents? Presents what? You have 51 goddamn options, what could I possibly be interested in beyond that?

26. Two Legion books? So, according to my calculations...46,000 characters to not care about, and Brainiac 5.

27. Hawk and Dove is getting a relaunch, two characters that represent war and peace. Oh, and boredom.

28. Batman Beyond was a show I enjoyed at age 12. But again, can we just concentrate on having one good Batman title instead of 5 decent ones?

29. So Batgirl will be de-paralyzed. Here's to hoping that, much like Professor X, this is the beginning of a long career of paralyzing and de-paralyzing.

30. Batwing: the Batman of Africa. Why?

31. Batman of Africa + Judd Winick = 2 issues before we get an AIDs arc.

32. Grifter gets his own book as a wisecracking assassin. If only Marvel'd given Deadpool hair...

33. Gee, do you think the new Kid Flash will be A: Experienced, B: Methodical, or C: Impulsive?

34. Can we talk about Blackhawks?

35. I hate how these teams of soldiers are sort of like soldiers except they seem to be allowed to wear whatever they fuck they want, including red sunglasses, low-rise pants for bare midriff, pink sneakers, and an Irish newsboy hat.

36. There's one guy flying around in the background. How come they always have one guy (like Snakeyes) who has a stealth suit that nobody else seems interested in? If I was on a baseball team and one dude was wearing a hat that gave him powers, I would think we should all have access to these magic hats.

37. Good thing they have a tough red-headed guy who is probably not from America.

38. Deathstroke the Terminator is getting his own series. Should be interesting. Won't be, but should be.

39. Wait, Demon Knights is about the Demon leading knights...in Camelot? Why didn't you say so? I always say, "More Camelot Stuff!"

40. The main character in I, Vampire has to decide to potentially go against his own kind to save humanity. Vampire betrayal? That's a new one. Well, unless you count Blade, Underworld, Interview with a Vampire, Twilight, Buffy, Morbius....you know, stuff with vampires in it.

41. Does this Madame Xanadu wear rollerskates and exist in the era of disco?

42. According to my count, we have 11 Batman-y titles coming. 11. That's approximately 21% of the relaunch.

43. Batman and Robin will feature Bruce Wayne and his son. Nothing like keeping it in the family to squash those rumors about what Robin was doing in those tight pants.

44. Oh, wait...

45. Batman: the Dark Knight is at issue #2 and will be going back to issue #1? Hang on, it's going to be a bumpy ride to undo 2 issues of shit there.

46. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Digital comics will be priced at $2.99, same as the physical issues, for the first four months? I feel strongly that the give and take of e-comics is the lowered price making up for the fact that you won't own a physical, collectible object.

47. Also, lowering the price after four months shows just how hard you love squeezing people for cash before you're ready to lower it to a more reasonable price.

48. Oh, and don't forget the $4.99 poly-bagged version of JLA. According to my calculations, that means collectors can be sure to buy a regular edition plus two poly-bagged editions, one that they can keep in the bag and one that they can open to redeem the code for the digital download. So that's a good $18 for one issue. Nice one.

49. As nice as it is to relaunch a black character, Static is an electric guy. Not that exciting.

50. Also, I suspect that the "rumors" that Static's signature Malcolm X hat might be replaced by something that people would goddamn recognize will prove true.

51. I'm really up for trying new things. I really am. But this isn't trying anything new. This is redoing the same stories again and again.

52. I know this all sounds cynical. But overall, my feeling is that things are changing, but for all the hooplah they aren't changing enough. In fact, most characters seem to be "changing" to be more status quo than they were before.