Review - I Am Legion

I Am Legion: The Dancing Fawn
Written by Fabien Nury; Art by John Cassady
2005 Eisner Winner for Best Penciller/Inker

I should give you a warning up front that this is another instance where I have only part of the story and it is unlikely that I'll ever read the whole thing. I Am Legion started as a set of French graphic albums. DC comics published the first of those albums in the U.S. but in the long delay between the release of the first and second the division of DC which published it folded. Last year Devil's Due publishing broke the albums up into shorter comic books and started to release it as a miniseries but now they're vanishing fast to financial woes.

So I've got I Am Legion: The Dancing Fawn which was the part that the Eisner was awarded for but I haven't read the full story. It's unlikely that I'll get the opportunity to read it any time soon. There won't be a full collection available in the United States any time soon.

As I've picked through the Eisner winners who have won for their artwork I have been almost inevitably annoyed by the story. It's almost like the category was the dumping ground for the pretty but dumb books. That isn't the case here. This is a twisting, complex tale that isn't told in the most straightforward way. It's a story of intrigue and I want to find out what happens next.

In the early days of World War 2 a German research facility in Romania has made a supernatural discovery. There is a creature that lives in the blood, that can spread itself among many hosts, and use them as its puppets. This ancient being is responsible for the legends of vampires and Biblical accounts of demons and the Germans are trying to train it to be a weapon. The British spy network is already in motion looking to assassinate the head of the research project but they don't know exactly what is being researched and someone at the highest level has already been compromised.

I Am Legion is an espionage story and I can already see the hints at the edges of the plots and counterplots as more sides that are immediately apparent play off each other. The portion I have is all set up for that as the players move into position so that things can be overturned, plots collide head on into each other, and loyalties will be questioned as the story progresses. I can't judge it from the first third but I want to see if my suspicions are correct or if Nury has something even more devious in mind.

I did have a problem with the plotting due to Nury switching scenes mid-page with little transition. I would be watching one group of people and then things would suddenly switch to a similar looking group of people who were doing things that on first appearance are still part of the same scene. Since this is a fairly complicated plot the unclear storytelling was a hindrance. It wasn't enough to make me want to walk away from the book; it just made things a bit more confusing than necessary.

Cassady's artwork is nice to look at though I suspect that the Eisner was intended more for his work that year on X-Men and Planetary. He does tend to draw faces and figures for his men too much alike. There's a cast of dozens in I Am Legion and it can sometimes be hard to tell them apart. This book didn't have a lot of action in it which I think works against Cassady's strengths. Still he does a reasonable job of presenting the many talking head scenes that are used to establish things in an interesting way.

I can't really render a final judgment on I Am Legion since I only have one third of the story. As it is I'd recommend it to anyone who likes both espionage and horror stories but that's only assuming they can read the whole thing. You wouldn't want to get stuck like me with only one third of a spy story.

Review - Top Ten

Top Ten
Written by Alan Moore; Art by Gene Ha
2000 Eisner Winner for Best New Series
2000, 2001 Eisner Winner for Best Writer

You won't find a lot of disagreement that Alan Moore's finest work is Watchmen. There might be the odd holdout for V for Vendetta, an appreciation for the richly textured From Hell, or just plain love for his other works but when you break things down what he'll be remembered for is the monumental impact of Watchmen. That series has cast a shadow over superhero comics since it was released as many creators took it as the handbook on how to create adult superheroes. I doubt that Moore intended it that way; Watchmen is a deconstructive work in the sense that it pulls apart the assumptions of the genre and tries to fit them together in a new way but there's more than one way to deconstruct.

Top Ten strikes me as Moore's response to how Watchmen affected the comic book industry. It is bright, cheerful, and hopeful in a way that superhero comics were in the past. It has the adult undercurrents that run in parallel to the goofiness in a balanced way. The book revels in the past and pop culture. And it takes the concept of the superhero and places it in the context of the everyday hero. Top Ten deconstructs superheroes like Watchmen and it shows a different way that things could be taken.

Top Ten is set in a city where everyone is a superhero. The entire population wears funny costumes, has some odd superpowers, and everyone works in archetypes. A city of superheroes still needs police and the men and women (and superintelligent dog) of the tenth prescient do that thankless job day in and day out. Early on it seemed as though the book would focus on the rookie and her hard boiled partner but Top Ten was an ensemble book with a huge cast. Together the cast deals with normal problems like a drunk , a traffic accident, or a homicide only the drunk is a giant monster, the traffic was in teleporters, and the homicide was the god Baldur who keeps getting killed by Loki.

The obvious comparison for Top Ten is the television series Hill Street Blues. Top Ten is also about the day to day life and problems of the police on the beat but it moves them into the realm of the fantastic. It would have been easy to just copy and paste the concepts of the police drama over and put a superficial layer on it but Moore's plays with the contrasts. They're similar enough to be recognizable but different enough that you couldn't transplant the stories easily back to a normal setting.

There is an overarching plot to Top Ten but when it came down to it I never felt like that plot was really that essential. I enjoyed the stories a lot more when they were about the minutia and the bulk of them were just that. I liked seeing the cast deal with the crazy guy who thinks he's Santa or an escalating Crisis on Infinite Mices. It's the little off kilter things that make the book so enjoyable.

And that brings me to Gene Ha. He a fine job illustrating the characters and building the story in his artwork. It wasn't at a level I'd call brilliant but I think that Moore's infamously detailed scripting tends to leave his artists with little room for expressing themselves. Where Ha shines and earns my respect is that every single panel is jam packed with pop culture references. The skies are filled with identifiably famous vehicles and heroes, the city is covered in advertising for products that are references. Top Ten might be the champion of nostalgic references as a given page will contain dozens of call backs but because they're all background details they don't become annoying.

What really makes Top Ten a spectacular book is its cast. There's over a dozen officers who wander in and out of scenes and all of them are interesting. They're not necessarily good people but they are interesting and seeing how they react to their troubles is fascinating. I wanted more about all of them but Moore's work with the series is just too short.

I have to confess that the setting of Top Ten doesn't make a bit of sense if you think about it for more than a second. And if you think about it for a second after that you'll realize that it doesn't really matter. To confront the oddness of the setting would be to confront the inherent problems with superheroes and that's the point. Top Ten is one of my favorite works by Moore but at the same time it is firmly grounded in spinning superheroes in a new direction. As long as you can accept that idea then it is worth checking out.

Alex Ross's Eisner Winning Covers in 2000

Alex Ross took the award back from Brian Bolland in 2000. Ross continued his string of covers for Astro City but that year also provided cover art for Alan Moore's new line ABC Comics and the Batman special that started the No Man's Land cross over. The Batman cover used a layered effect that does not reproduce well but here's a sampling of others that won:

Review - Batman & Robin: The Gotham Adventures

Batman & Robin: The Gotham Adventures
Written by Ty Templeton; Art by Rick Burchett
1999 Eisner Winner for Best Title for a Younger Audience

The way I've chosen to collect the Eisner winning comics is in trade paperback format. The advantage of this is that when I am done (or rather when I decide I am done) I will have a nice collection on my shelves. So I've been avoiding the single issues almost entirely. This does mean that there are going to be gaps in my collection. Evan Dorkin's Eltingville Comic club stories have won multiple Eisners but the stories have never been collected. Garth Ennis won for Hitman #34 but the collectons stop at issue twenty-eight (though that may be changing soon enough). Sergio Aragones did a pair of parody books for DC and Marvel that will likely never be printed in a collection just due to how the publishing industry works. And then there are the children's books.

In the dark days of the nineties when any superhero worth his salt had to wallow in self-pity DC comics did a Batman series based on the animated series. It was light-hearted, adventurous fun and if that wasn't enough they were also good. This series changed with the times and when the cartoon entered its last season the comic was relaunched with the title Batman & Robin: The Gotham Adventures. The series won five Eisners over the course of its run and had a grand total of two collections which gathered just the tiniest fragment of the winning material. Mad Love collected the work that the animated series creator Paul Dini did for the comic (and includes the entire contents of another collection). The bulk of the writing though was handled by Ty Templeton whose only collection was this book that gathered the first few issues of the final series.

The comic has a similar basis as the animated series: it's target audience was under twelve but there was no reason to not give them a good story. And these stories need to be fast-paced and self-contained since they want any kid who picked one up to be satisfied enough to come back for the next one.

The first story in the collection is the best one and a concept that could have worked well with the regular Batman comics: as Batman closes in for the capture of his arch-enemy the Joker a rich man publicly offers a ten million dollar reward for the person who kills the Joker. It throws the city into an uproar and leaves Batman in the position of having to protect the psychopathic clown.

Similar moral questions come up in the second story where another villain confronts his abusive, gambling addict father. And in the story after that where a villain is who had abandoned his wife wants to save her new husband. While these stories may not be given as much weight as they could have been it's surprising to see them at all in a comic book that is for children.

Templeton is working in the constraints of what he can do with a tie-in book for a cartoon series and you can see the edges of that. While there's action they never become too violent. The big questions are raised but they have to be addressed in a simple way. I don't think he's wrong about his approach but it's something to be aware of.

Rick Burchett does an admirable job of aping the cartoon's style though occasionally I was bothered by the lack of detail. It wasn't the characters themselves that bothered me. Too often things lacked background and action felt like it was taking place in a featureless void. It's decent enough but not strong enough artwork to stand out.

While I wouldn't recommend Batman & Robin: The Gotham Adventures to most people I would say that if you liked Batman: The Animated Series at all then it's worth reading. On the other hand if you're under ten then you'll find that this is the greatest thing ever. At least my inner ten year old thinks so.

Review - Inhumans

Inhumans
Written by Paul Jenkins; Art by Jae Lee
1999 Eisner Winner for Best New Series

When I was much younger and "growing up" to the point that I wanted to nit pick anything that came long I would tear into any perceived flaw in what I was reading or watch. "I can't stand this; the interstellar craft make sound in space!" I would say. I've mellowed since then and have built a structure for my suspension of disbelief. A gallows of disbelief, I suppose. It starts from the idea that I have to allow the central conceit of the story and genre conventions though I may not like them. So I can, for example, accept for the sake of a story that there is an isolated society of people who look human but determine their cultural worth by distorting themselves. And I can accept that they will have superpowers and there will be a dastardly villain and heroes in brightly colored outfits. I can even enjoy it when the solution to life's problems is hitting someone until they fall over while acknowledging that if another reader was not as accepting of the simple morality presented that they would not like the same thing.

When it comes to Inhumans I handed out a fair level of suspension of disbelief to begin with. And then the story asked for more and I gave it that too. And then a bit more had to be given. By the time I was halfway through my patience had run out. I understood what Jenkins was doing with the story but it required far too many conceits from me as a reader especially when it came to the plans within plans plotting which required that everyone ignore the massive plot holes and coincidences that allowed everyone in the story to function. It's a story based on a high minded idea that lost the thread half way through and then collapsed into a messy conclusion.

The Inhumans are a group of beings who live in isolation behind an impenetrable shield. When they come of age they are exposed to something that transforms their bodies into strange forms. Sometimes superhuman powers accompany these transformations and the ones with the greatest power due to their genetic heritage rule their city. They live on an island which has been recently exposed to the outside world and they are carefully watched from outside their shield by the world's nations.

A dramatic upheaval occurs when one of the young adults undergoing his transformation becomes one of the slave caste that they used. He becomes a pawn in plan by an insane prince to take control of the city by handing an army of mercenaries outside the shield the key to breaching it. And as chaos starts to overwhelm the Inhumans their all powerful leader refuses to take any action against any of those involved.

Early on Jenkins seems interested in exploring the nature of Inhuman society and I can understand why since there's a lot of challenging concepts in a society that is built upon genetic superiority. It's something that should be uncomfortably messy and distort their worldview in interesting ways. Jenkins drops that concept quickly and Inhuman society becomes essentially modern day Americans once you're eighty pages into the book. They may have a king who can turn an invading army to salt and warp their bodies but they behave exactly the same as your typical American. It left me wondering what was the point of telling their story if he spent the first portion telling me how different they were and then spent the rest of the story showing me that they act exactly the same.

Jenkins relies far too much on readers already being familiar with the characters instead of developing them on his own. These are new versions using old names and while I was familiar with them I was also accutely aware that most of the characters are never given anything more than the most enigmatic touch. This is especially noticeable with the new characters since I didn't know them going in and I knew little about them coming out but Jenkins depends on an emotional connection to them that he never establishes. I should have cared about the person who was thrown out of their society for reminding of them of their great shame except I'm never given a reason to care.

Then there's the plotting. Inhumans has the problem that it's the plot is about a supergenius coming up an intricate plan. A good author can make that work, a bad author just has the story run on the events they decided had to happen and then have the plotter declare that it was their plan the entire time. It was their plan that a kid would on his own sneak into a maximum security prison. It was their plan that he would develop the exact superpowers that were required the next day. It was their plan that world leaders would turn a blind eye to a mercenary army attacking a technologically advanced city that they have their own eyes on obtaining. It was their plan that their enemy would react exactly the way that was necessary despite the story repeatedly demonstrating how unpredictable they could be. It was their plan that the bomb that explicitly could not be teleported and thus required intricate planning to get into the city would be given to an ambassador who got it into the city (by teleporting as it turns out but Jenkins apparently forgot that was why he was setting up the needlessly complicated plan at that point and it still worked). This was a poorly plotted mess that didn't make sense to begin with and got worse from there.

There's only one way to describe Jae Lee's art on Inhumans: dark. This book must have cost a fortune to print since they use so much black ink. Lee's improved in the years since this book but here he's still in the overly lined, spilling his ink bottle on the page phase which defined his work in the 90's. This is a muddy looking book that gives the appearance that everything was drowned in an oil slick and it's completely wrong for the tone of the book.

So obviously I did not like Inhumans at all. I take comfort in the fact that it won the Eisner for best new series and if that award was handed out when there were only four issues available I could see the justification. The first two were pretty good and the problems only became fully evident as the series completed. It ended so poorly that I had to go back and reevaluate my initial opinion. It was a good concept that was completely wasted and left me more and more annoyed as I got further into it.

I Have Been Way Too Busy Lately...

I completely forgot about the Nebula awards until last night when I said to myself, "Aren't those supposed to be announced now?"

The answer to that is no. They were announced last week.

So I've got Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl which won for novel on its way to me. Kage Baker's The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, the novella winner poses, a greater challenge for me since it was a short book from Subterranean Press and all of the copies out there were snatched up quickly. I avoided this problem before by getting the results live and ordering the books I needed immediately but it'll probably be a few months before I'll be able to read it. I should have time to get to Eugie Foster's "Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" and Kij Johnson's "Spar" which were the novelette and short story winners later this week.

Brian Bolland's Eisner Winning Covers in 1999

When Brian Bolland won another Eisner for his covers in 1999 he was providing the covers for Grant Morrison's chaotic series The Invisibles. And like his Animal Man covers they showed a unique view that matched the offbeat contents.