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Wednesday, May 06, 2009 ( 5/06/2009 07:51:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VIDEO: It's the Raveonettes' "Aly, Walk With Me, a great proto-psychedelic/surf song, with an equally cool video done by an artist's collective known as ohhmarymary. Love the JAMC guitar noise in the middle. # | Tuesday, May 05, 2009 ( 5/05/2009 06:08:00 PM ) Bill S.  "NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME IN COMICS -- THE WIDE ANGLE SCREAM!" Safe to say that comic books would've been a whole lot different were it not for Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. If they weren't, as Mark Evanier notes in one of the interconnecting essays contained in The Best of Simon And Kirby (Titan Books), the first writers and artists to take advantage of the visual possibilities of a comic book page, they were arguably the first true giants. Bringing an unmatchable boyish energy to the medium, Simon & Kirby produced comics that popped right off the page.Spanning the duo's career as two of the hardest working talents in the comics biz, the 240-page Best opens with their groundbreaking superhero work from the early forties, then takes us through examples of the twosome's various genre comics (s-f, war, romance, crime, western, horror and sick humor) from the forties and fifties. With perhaps the exception of the Mad-styled humor entries -- closer to Al Feldstein's Panic imitations than to the divine insanity that was Harvey Kurtzman's creation -- each section shows two artists at the top of their game, finding new ways to expand the medium. Much of the earliest work presented in this handsomely produced coffee table book collection is the hero stuff: Captain America, Sandman, and the Vision. With the oldest pieces you can see the two struggling to see how far they can push the parameters of comic book tier storytelling -- the Vision entry, for instance, contains a page where one of the panels seems to slip out of the sequence altogether -- though the learning curve is pretty steep. In the Sandman adventure, created a year after the Vision story, we're provided a full-page brawl between NYC cops and Viking gangsters that practically kicks you in the face. In the Stuntman episode from 1946, the two are producing the kind of panoramic shots that Kirby would make his trademark in the sixties Marvel comics. Compare the panel displaying the story's circus performance with a similar image in an early Hulk comic introducing the Ringmaster and His Circus of Crime. If anything, the Stuntman panel is even more dynamic. Per Evanier's essays, it's difficult to tell where the two writer/artists begin and end, though plenty of the visual compositions that they developed were carried on by Kirby when the two ended their partnership. To readers who grew up on the jaunty blend of wisecrackery and post-adolescent angst that characterized Kirby's work with writer Stan Lee in the Marvel Age of Comics, the superhero scripts, in particular, can read as stiff as too much of the comics work from the Golden Age. The art has more personality than most of the heroes, though for Kirby fans that's probably sufficient. It's in their other genre work where the real surprises come. Simon & Kirby basically invented the romance comic in the late forties, and they did it with heroines who were a far cry from the weepy ingénues who'd later dominate the form. These were sturdy women in the mode of the best movie tough gals, and their stories reflected this. Reading 1950's "The Savage in Me," for instance, you can imagine Barbara Stanwyck playing the missionary's daughter in love/lust with a scoundrel; the moment when she lets her hair down is sexy in a way that a later generation of romance comics would never dare to be. The war comics prove equally revelatory, most specifically in an atom bomb cautionary from 1947 that ends with New York City under a mushroom cloud. It's as strong as anything EC would've produced in one of its apocalyptic fantasies. In terms of uncompromising storytelling, the duo's "true crime" comics are as commendably ruthless as any Warner Bros. gangster epic. Their take on "Scarface," for instance, contains the killing of an underling that's as startling as Al Capone's murder of a fellow gangster in Brian DePalma's Untouchables. The collaborators' horror comics also prove atypical for the era in which they were produced. Where other horror comics creators worked to duplicate the grisly pulpishness of The Crypt of Terror, Simon & Kirby focused on more psychological frights, producing a book focused on recreating and analyzing its protagonists' nightmares. EC returned the flattery by later devoting a comic to Psychoanalysis, though The Strange World of Your Dreams got there first. If the more subdued approach wasn't as unsettling as the all-out horror comics of the fifties, the samples in Best have some great visual moments: the dream depiction of an "old and dismal town," for instance, visually anticipates the monster comics Kirby would later be producing with Lee -- as well as his even more personalized "Fourth World" series for DC comics. Titan Books' collection features work done for big name companies like Timely (later: Marvel), DC, Archie and Harvey, as well as long-forgotten entities like Hillman and Prize. While the DC and Marvel work is somewhat familiar to comics aficionados (Captain America has had several archive collections published over the years), the lesser-known material definitely deserves to be rediscovered. My interest has been particularly piqued by the Stuntman, a former circus high-wire acrobat named Fred Drake who turns out to be a double for the fatuous actor and self-proclaimed amateur detective Don Daring. Together, the two solve crimes in a Hollywood setting, and you can see this show biz milieu sparking the excitement of its movie mad creators. Though the full story isn't reprinted in the collection, the book's hardcover features an opulent two-page spread from that series, showing our hero in costume on the set of a Robin Hood movie. According to the introduction by the still-vital Joe Simon, the complete tale will be reprinted in a second upcoming collection from Titan, The Simon And Kirby Superheroes. Reason enough to reserve a copy of that rascal. Labels: golden age goodness # |Monday, May 04, 2009 ( 5/04/2009 10:06:00 AM ) Bill S. BOOK STUFF: Been spending a good part of the weekend working on some advanced promo material on Measure By Measure, the romantic size acceptance epic written by wife Becky Fox and yours truly. Planned publication date is mid-June, though this, of course, could change since our small-press publisher Pearlsong Press has been experiencing computer problems. For me, the first time I actually started feeling like this publication bizness was real occurred when publisher Peggy Elam emailed us some possible covers -- and the sample covers contained a UPC code on the back. Anyhoo, if you're interested, the first draft promo flyer can be found here. Labels: measure by measure # |Friday, May 01, 2009 ( 5/01/2009 11:26:00 AM ) Bill S.  "EVEN THE ATTICS OF THE RICH ARE COMFORTABLE AND SPACIOUS." An Eisner Award nominee for 2009, Kazuo Umezu's Cat Eyed Boy is a gleefully disturbing horror manga about the shifting boundaries between human and monstrous. Its title hero is a small boy with pointed ears and cat-shaped eyes that allow him to see in the dark. This look is enough to get him shunned by both humans and demons (the latter consider his human physiognomy "too extreme"), so our protagonist moves from home to home, taking up hidden residence in the attics of each home he selects. "The residents don't have a clue that I'm living here," he tells the reader, adding that "Wherever I appear, something frightening happens."Though he's forced to scrounge for food and shelter -- and his schoolboy outfit has holes in it -- Cat Eyed Boy (we're never given another name) proves a remarkably cheerful creature. Following the residents of the houses he has chosen as his temporary shelter, he watches their stories unfold, occasionally intervening to stave off catastrophe but just as often letting the horrifying events run their course. The first volume of Umezu's 2006 series, published by Viz Media, is a meaty 536-page tome featuring five stories, though it should be noted that the last tale, "The Band of A Hundred Monsters," carries on into concluding Volume Two. In each piece, at least one unfortunate human is victimized by a hideous creature, though in most cases we don't feel too badly about it since the victim is not exactly a paragon of virtue. In "One-Legged Monster of Oudai," for instance, a young boy with an unhealthy fixation on catching and pinning insects to a specimen board ("When I pierce them like this," he states, "I get such a rush.") is warned by a one-legged mountain demon to cease this practice and "apologize to the insects" else he "suffer a terrible death." The kid doesn't listen, of course, so the O-LM enacts some EC-styled vengeance on the little sadist by forcing him to experience the same death he's inflicted on his bugs. To expedite this, the hopping demon takes over Cat Eyed Boy's body with a nail that burrows under our hero's skin and travels to his stomach. When our hero attempts to get the nail removed by an "eccentric doctor," the possessed Boy spits poison in the unfortunate physician's face. The first volume's centerpiece is "The Tsunami Summoners," which tells the story of the Boy's birth and early years in a village by the Mountains of Omine. Born to mountain demons, the young "Nekomata" (cat goblin) is cast away by the community of grotesques for not looking sufficiently demonic. He's adopted by a village spinster named Mimi, but the rest of the villagers refuse to have anything to do with him. When our hero learns that a group of demons capable of bringing a tsunami down on the village are gathering in strength, Cat Eyed Boy attempts to warn the humans. But his demon-like appearance interferes with their ability to hear his message; even his adopted mother turns away from him and ultimately falls victim to the tsunami. "Even I betrayed Cat Eyed Boy in the end," she thinks as the waters overpower her. "This is my punishment." As with Umezu's post-Apocalyptic horror classic, The Drifting Classroom (also nominated for an Eisner), Umezu illustrates his tales with a boyish love of cartoonish overstatement. Nobody reacts quietly in an Umezu horror tale, and who can blame 'em, when the monsters he creates look like something Basil Wolverton might've cast aside as being too excessive. At first, the artist's typical page layouts (four tiers with two or three panels in a tier) may strike some readers as being overly old-fashioned, though it soon becomes apparent that Umezu is using this cramped and conservative construction to add impact to the moments when his monsters go berserk. Cat Eyed Boy is given an "Older Teen" rating by Viz Signature in its English-language edition, though there are times when it appears to be aimed at a younger, if no less blood-thirsty, audience. The young hero/observer regularly breaks the wall to speak to the reader, occasionally threatening to spend time in the reader's home. At one point, our childish lead pisses on a regenerating corpse through the attic floor; in another, he gives an injured mad scientist diarrhea medication instead of something to help with his wound. In such moments, you can imagine a pre-teen reader (Sho from The Drifting Classroom, for instance) snickering at Cat Eyed Boy's antics. As a horror manga, Cat Eyed Boy is free-wheeling, over-the-top and inventive, if considerably less gripping than Classroom -- primarily because we never truly worry about the safety of our title lead as we do the plucky protagonist of Uzemu's futuristic survival story. Bound and caged, for instance, the Boy digs a tunnel to freedom with his mouth, spitting out dirt as he goes. "Only I could pull this off," he tells the reader. "I'm different from your average human." Now that's an understatement. Labels: sixty-minute manga # | |
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