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Saturday, October 30, 2010 ( 10/30/2010 12:15:00 PM ) Bill S. WEEKEND PET PIC: Here's Ziggy Stardust, caught between clumping over to the backyard's small patch of green and chowing down on some grass:  THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark." # | ( 10/30/2010 07:06:00 AM ) Bill S.  “THERE ARE THINGS IN THE WORLD THAT HUMAN BEINGS MUST NEVER TOUCH.” Though its title gives the impression that March Story (Viz Signature) is a tale for early spring, it truly is one for the Halloween season. A horror manga with a suitable tinge of period gloominess, Hyung Min Kim and Kyung Il Yang’s “mature” rated series is set in an 18th century Europe bedeviled by malicious demons called Ills. These creatures hide in collectible works of art -- jewelry, masks, tiny glass figurines -- waiting for some poor sap of a human to touch them. With physical contact, the victim’s deepest yearnings are awakened until they “lost all sense of reason” and become possessed by the murderous Ill.Combating these creatures is March, a young tracker for Ciste Vihad, who either exorcises or kills the Ill’s host, depending on far gone they are. March possesses some of the Ills’ power and is capable of wielding great thorny tendrils to imprison the demons. Ill victims spout horns on their heads as a sign of their altered state, but if these horns are still white, it means they haven’t yet taken a human life and are still salvageable. In the four pieces featured in the series’ first volume, March has to take on Ill possession of both degrees. It’s the fully subsumed who provide the darker stories, of course. Thus, in the opening entry, March has to save a young circus girl whose deepest desire to be an aerialist instead of a clown. This yearning leads to a near-tragic accident, but the results prove nowhere near as creepy as the full-blown possession depicted in the second story. In it, a young mask maker takes over a village, forcing its inhabitants to all cover their faces; if they don’t, he pulls them into the sky to “dance” with him, then drops them to their death when he’s finished. No way is this second challenge gonna be a simple exorcism, we realize. Volume One’s stories alternate between lighter and bleaker fare, the better to highlight the latter entries’ more tragic elements. In the third story, with its echoes of the hotel sequence in Ghostbusters, we’re introduced to two more series regulars: Jake, the amusingly oversized old lady fortune teller (she looks like she could’ve come out of a Miyazaki anime) who keys March into the whereabouts of dangerous artifacts, and Rodin, the unscrupulous antiques seller. Jake plays a major role in the book’s fourth episode, which depicts March’s tragic origin, and what in first appearance comes across as a somewhat comical figure acquires a measure of grandeur in the series. “Personally, my favorite part of the story is Jake,” writer Kim says in a cartoon afterword. “She’s so strong and overflowing with charisma.” This reader agrees. The fourth tale centers on a Countess Bathory figure who slaughters most of the child March’s village and hangs their blood-dripping corpses from hooks in her castle, is the book’s most out-and-out horrific. (There’s a moment where March has to crawl over a mound of dead bodies which reminded me a similar scene in Stephen King’s The Stand.) It’s an intense piece but not a gratuitously splattery one. Still, this and the occasional flashes of female nudity firmly place March Story on the shrink-wrapped books category. Korean artist Kyung Il Yang’s handling of this material can be both explicitly detailed and atmospherically suggestive, though doubtless the panels that receive the most attention will be the m-rated ones. He’s particularly skilled at portraying the series’ imaginary 18th century setting. There’s a full-page panel in the second tale showing a character being dropped from the sky over her village that’s especially breathtaking, while some of the more phantasmagoric scenes like a two-page nightmare flashback to March’s past beautifully capture more than just the look of horror. Yang's rendering of the androgynous looking March appears a bit light in the book’s opening, but our series lead and the storyline gain both more emotional heft as the book progresses. This is an impressive debut volume that definitely provides the goods to lovers of dark fantasy. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: sixty-minute manga # |Wednesday, October 27, 2010 ( 10/27/2010 06:31:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: Here's Richard Thompson with Christine Collister taking the Linda Thompson part on the great "Wall of Death." # | Sunday, October 24, 2010 ( 10/24/2010 11:52:00 AM ) Bill S.  “THE NEW CHAMP OF SPLIT-SECOND ACTION.” Though two of their more enduring creations -- Captain America and Sandman -- were featured in Titan Books’ opening entry to the “Simon & Kirby Library,” follow-up Simon & Kirby Superheroes focuses on the prolific creative team’s less familiar heroes. Featuring comic book work from the forties and fifties, the hefty beautifully packaged 480-page collection gathers lesser-known supertypes like the Stuntman, Fighting American, Captain 3-D and the Shield into a spiffy digitally remastered hardcover. For admirers of Jack Kirby, in particular, the book provides an enjoyable overview of this inventive comic artist’s ever more dynamic compositional sense.If the first Simon/Kirby collabs, a trio of tales from the early forties starring a forgettable costumed detective named the Black Owl, seem more than a little conservatively hemmed in, the next set of works from 1946 prove much more action-packed. Starring the Stuntman, an acrobatic hero who body doubles for a wannabe detective movie actor, the series (which was frequently credited as a “Simon & Kirby production”) put many of its mysteries in show biz settings to good effect. Scripter Joe Simon, writing for a young boy readership, balanced action and comedy deftly in this series, which unfortunately only lasted two issues before dying in the midst of the era’s publishing glut. (Superheroes includes stories from an unpublished third issue, along with a couple of two-page splashes for unfinished stories.) To these eyes, the Stuntman stories are some of the best superhero material this pair ever produced. More interesting from a social history perspective -- if not exactly a story one -- is the guy who receives the most space in Superheroes, Prize Comics’ Fighting American. A Cold War creation, the series centers on commie hater and radio commentator Johnny Flagg, who dons the fighting tights to take on the red menace. Initially written by Simon as a straight-faced fifties era super comic, Fighting American slid into broader and broader satire, making the Russian baddies grotesques who wouldn’t look out of place in Dogpatch. In one of the last Fighting American adventures, for instance, our hero and his boy companion Speedboy tackle Super-Khakalovich, a Russian “superman” whose primary power is his overwhelming body odor. Perhaps writer Simon was gearing up for Sick Magazine, the Mad imitation he’d be editing in the 1960’s, but the results are still a bit much. Much more successful are those comics where the humor was better modulated. In The Vagabond Prince stories from the forties, for instance, greeting card poet Ned Oaks takes on crooks who prey on the inhabitants of a city slum or the greedy manufacturer of interior automotive deaths: a social crusader with a penchant for spouting doggerel. One thing that many of the proponents of camp criticism never seemed to get was the extent to which comic book writers like Simon were intentionally complicit with their readership, winking instead of nudging ‘em in the gut with their elbows. It was easy to miss because his artist Kirby was so boyishly serious about his own visual outlandishness. In Captain 3-D, Simon and Kirby imagine a superhero who steps out of the mystical Book of D to take on hostile feline cat people. (The original comic, which was printed in green and red to work with 3-D glasses, has been refitted into regular color comics format for this book.) If ever there was a comic book artist suited to the eye-popping compositions of 3-D, it was Jack Kirby, and you can see him modifying his increasingly more kinetic style to make maximum use of the format. With the exception of one comic published in 1966, the material in Superheroes predates Kirby’s ascent into graphic arts royalty through his collaborations with Stan Lee in the 1960’s and his solo groundbreaking “Fourth World” expansions done for DC in the seventies. One thing that Superheroes makes clear, though, is how much Kirby owed to his former collaborator when it came time for him to begin scripting his own comics: his writing voice was much closer to Simon’s than it was the chattier Stan Lee. None of the material in Superheroes is as enjoyably grandiose as comics would later become in Kirby’s free-wheeling hands -- these are six- to twelve-page stories written by Simon as self-contained little adventures for a young readership, after all -- but they still remain a treat for fans of All in Color for a Dime storytelling. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: golden age goodness # | |
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