A Midsummer Night's Dream In Thirty Seconds

It's that time of year again. Chris over at the Invincible Super Blog has called upon comic book fans to summarize stories very quickly with shoddy artwork. Two years ago I went big created The History of the DC Universe In Thirty Seconds. Last year I went for broke and played with the sacred cow of comic books with Watchmen in Thirty Seconds.

This year I thought I'd bring things back a little bit and just do one issue after I had so much trouble cutting Watchmen down to a handful of poorly drawn images. So I give you:

(Click on the pictures to make them readable-sized!)






Finally, I'm leaving on a two week vacation starting Saturday morning which means I probably won't be able to reply to any comments to this post. So in advance I want to wish good luck to my competitors; I'm sure they'll all be a lot of fun.

Review - Hellboy Library Edition Volume 2

Hellboy Library Edition Volume 2
by Mike Mignola
1998 Eisner Winner for Best Writer/Artist
Contains the 1998 Eisner Winner for Best Anthology

When I talked about the first volume of the Hellboy Library Editions I mentioned that while I liked Hellboy the problems with those earliest of stories turned me off to it for while. The stories in this second volume are a concentration of what I enjoy in the series. It also happens to be the only Christmas themed Eisner winner I happen to own since the stories from the Hellboy Christmas Special are included in it.

To keep the synopsis short Hellboy is a demon who was supposed to bring about the apocalypse but wound up hanging out with paranormal investigators with whom he spends a lot of time punching monsters. What makes it interesting is that Mignola creates a blend of pulp adventure and old folklore that keeps things moving quickly.

This second volume consists overwhelmingly of extremely short Hellboy stories. The first one, for example, is just two pages about him eating pancakes. It also happens to be an ingenious two pages about the title character eating pancakes that manages to squeeze in a plot twist and touch on the metastory that Mignola is building. In the context of that larger story it's just a joke but it sums up so many things about Hellboy in a tiny space.

Of course not all of the stories are that slight. The common formula is that Hellboy goes to check out some thing strange. A ghostly king, for example. Or a baby that has been replaced with a changeling. He then gets ensnared in the legends around those events which he handles by hitting them or occasionally shooting them.

The stories in this volume are generally extremely tight, extremely dense bits of plotting that makes them fast paced. And yet somehow I never felt like things were rushed. Mignola has just perfected a style of jumping straight to the action in the story and it's helped that as a protagonist Hellboy is relatively simple. There aren't a lot of deep motivations or character aspects to explore with him. On the other hand Mignola does dig into his character a bit with a few of these stories. They work mainly by forcing him to confront his origins which Hellboy has been avoiding.

The Christmas story in the volume is as strange as you'd expect from a book that blends myth and pulp. An old woman is dying on Christmas Eve and she has been visited repeatedly by her dead daughter. Hellboy finds the place that she vanished to and (naturally) punches out the monster that's there. I actually found it to be the weakest story in the book since it does have the flaws I noted with the previous one; there's a lot of cool things happening but no real plot thread tying them together.

Mignola's artwork was good before; it's kicked up a notch to great with these stories. Mignola has improved his visual storytelling at the same time he has improved his actual plotting. His artwork was better than his writing before and that remains the case now. He's gotten a kind of visual rhythm that works great and he's even better with his style of mixing his angular impressionistic figures with detailed backgrounds.

One of the really great things about Hellboy Library Edition Volume 2 is that it works just as well as the first volume as an introduction to the series. In fact I like the short story format so much better than I'd recommend reading this one first. The ongoing plot information required to understand the story is minimal (I think my one sentence summary covered it nicely and one of the stories is a recap of events to that point). So while I don't think this book is perfect I did think it was a lot of fun and a great way to be introduced the character.

Review - Batman: The Killing Joke

Batman: The Killing Joke Written by Alan Moore; Art by Brian Bolland 1989 Eisner Winner for Best Graphic Album 1989 Eisner Winner for Best Writer 1989 Eisner Winner for Best Artist
So how does one follow up the creation of what is generally considered the high water mark of a medium? Orson Welles created another masterpiece only to have the studio bosses hack it to pieces behind his back. Alan Moore fared a bit better since he took the same concepts he worked with in Watchmen and applied them to Batman. The result is one of the three Batman stories that I think are exceptional (the other two being Miller's bookends to the character Year One and The Dark Knight Returns, naturally).

I'm sure you're familiar with Batman and The Killing Joke follows the familiar beats that kept the character in continuous publication for seventy years. The mad clown known as the Joker escapes from the asylum that holds him in order to do terrible things. Batman chases the Joker down where they hit each other until the Joker gets sent back to the asylum to start the cycle over again.

The first clever bit of this story is that Moore acknowledges that Sisyphean cycle. The Killing Joke opens with Batman going to visit the Joker in his cell to try to break it by reaching out to him. The Joker has already escaped and it attempting to break the cycle by escalating it to the level of a suicide pact. The conflict this time isn't about a climactic fist fight (though that's in there too); it's about one man trying to pull the second back from the abyss and the second trying to pull the first in.

This leads into what I think is the only misstep that Moore makes in The Killing Joke. It's not entirely his fault; when you're the man who sets the trends for the medium you can't take blame when others over use your techniques and do them badly. The sequence is the maiming of a long standing female cast member followed by a sexual assault. If it existed in a vacuum then it would just be a disturbing sequence that established that the Joker was trying to mentally break Batman. Unfortunately in the years that followed this exact kind of method has been used often for cheap shocks and lazy writing. Moore didn't invent it but he brought the concept of using this level of brutality against female characters as an emotional hook to comics and these days it seems like every other woman in superhero comics winds up being abused like that.

Besides that it also has an unfortunate affect on the conclusion of the book. There's some unpleasant connotations that are raised by the last few pages given the earlier events.

The Killing Joke uses this shock to tie Batman and the Joker together thematically. Moore flashes back to a possible origin of the Joker as a decent man who had one very bad day and snapped and now the Joker is trying to replicate that. It's the classic hero and villain are closer than they seem theme but it's executed very well.

So Moore's story is extremely good. You'll notice that his partner Brian Bolland won an Eisner of his own for this book and it wasn't because he was swept in by the popularity of The Killing Joke. There's several points in the story where the action becomes a textless montage. It's a challenge to carry the narrative without text and Bolland does it perfectly. All of his storytelling ability is on display through the book. thing that makes his artwork truly spectacular is how he depicts the Joker. The nightmarish grin has never been depicted so gruesomely. Bolland's Joker doesn't always smile but when he does the face distorts in a way that is unnerving. The gums show more than is natural, the chin distends, it looks like his whole jaw fractures to make the smile taller.

The Killing Joke is a an alchemical fusion of the perfect writer for a subject and the perfect artist for a subject. Together Moore and Bolland created a masterpiece. If you like Watchmen then I recommend reading it as a companion.

Review - Grendel: Black, White, and Red

Grendel: Black, White, and Red
Written by Matt Wagner
1999 Eisner Winner for Best Anthology
"Devil's Advocate"
Art by Tim Sale
1999 Eisner Winner for Best Short Story

There are times when I know that I am not the intended audience for a book. The run of YA novels that have won the literary awards are a good example of this. And still I have rarely felt as unwelcome as I read than I did with Grendel: Black, White, and Red. Not only was I not the target audience for this book, Wagner was clearly uninterested in approaching anyone other than that audience.

I had never read Grendel before. I was generally aware of the series and I knew vaguely that it was about a super assassin. Wagner was unwilling to make any kind of concession to new readers in Grendel: Black, White, and Red. After reading this book I'm even less likely to try Grendel.

Black, White, and Red is an anthology of eight page stories most of which spin out of a facet of the original story. Consequently I got an vague understanding of the original with none of the emotional context that would be necessary to appreciate the story. It turned this book into a slog that was only occasionally brightened by a story that stood on its own.

"Devil's Advocate" (all of the story titles start with "Devil" which got on my nerves quickly) is the first story in the book and it is the best one. It's a simple story of a lawyer who is blackmailed by Grendel into working for the mob. I felt it was just too short, though. Eight pages were not enough to explore the subject since it leaps forward quickly without letting the beats of the story sink in. It feels like it's missing huge chunks of the story and conveys all of the concepts in exposition instead of letting Tim Sale's artwork express things. Still it wasn't actually bad, just abrupt.

All of the stories, there are twenty-one in total in the collection, are abrupt. There's two or three that use the short format well to give just a tiny window into things. Those are the stories that I enjoyed. You would think that a super assassin would have a built in format for such short tales but there is very little in the way of assassination in the book. Instead the stories are mainly character moments for characters that Wagner never bothers telling the reader who they are.

The best aspect of this book is the art. Each story features a different artist and there isn't a weak link in the bunch. They range from the incredibly cartoony style of Jason Pearson to the detailed sketches of David Mack to Bernie E. Mireault's nearly abstract designs. All of the artists match the tone of their stories well so even if the stories weren't interesting to me I could appreciate the pictures.

The book is, as the title suggests, in black and white with occasional splashes of color to punctuate each page. For the most part it's effective though in some stories it seemed to be more of an afterthought than a different method of presentation. I appreciated when the technique was used to play with perspective but it was much less effective when its only use in the story was to mark a character.

There was a lot of things in Black, White, and Red that turned me off of Grendel in general that I haven't mentioned because I lack the context from the original. Still it is worth saying that I disliked the vast majority of stories in this book and that's enough for me to say that I don't recommend it. On the whole they just weren't very interesting even as eight page stories; they seemed to be relying on the reader's familiarity with the characters in the place of characterization. Perhaps fans of Grendel may enjoy this anthology than I did for everyone else it is not worth their time.

Review - The Sandman: Endless Nights

The Sandman: Endless Nights
Written by Neil Gaiman
2004 Eisner Winner for Best Short Story
2004 Eisner Winner for Best Anthology

There's one more stop on my Sandman blitz since I'm going to hold off on The Dream Hunters for now. Endless Nights is not a continuation of the series. It doesn't even reference events that occur toward the end. What it contains are seven short stories (and I'd hesitate to call two of them "stories"); one for each of the Endless who are at the center of the series. Consequently this is an excellent sampler of what Sandman is like.

Leading off the anthology is "Death" which won the Eisner for best short story. It is the story of a group of decadent Venetian nobles who avoided death by living the same day over and over. Another person who encountered Death waiting at the gate to their manor as a young boy and returns to her as a man after he has seen too much death.

This story also happens to be my favorite of the seven. While it uses elements of Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" (it's impossible to avoid when you have nobles partying away while Death waits just outside their gates) Gaiman spins them into something more compatible with Sandman's Death. It's a classic structure that feels fresh due to Gaiman's skill. The men who have found immortality in the repetition of one perfect day are not just simplistic characters either; they're hiding from their own doom while at the same time have become lost.

P. Craig Russel provides art and much like his Eisner winning work on Sandman #50 he vividly displays the division between a decayed society sliding into ruin (or the sea in Venice's case) and the decadence of it of it at that society's summit.

The other stories feature topics such as a woman who uses lust to her advantage, portraits of absolutely crushing depression, schizophrenics who are each lost in their own worlds but still come together for a cause, love found and lost at a meeting of stars, the many ways that man will kill, and a brief look at destiny. There isn't a single one of these stories that is like the others. Four of the chapters use conventional comic book storytelling but that is the only thing they have in common.

Oddly enough the Dream chapter is the one I found to be the weakest. It was still very good, it was just the chapter where things were the most straightforward. Gaiman indulges his rarely exposed comic book nerd side in that one and that's where he puts the subtlety in that story. Without the comic references it's a simple story of a lover's betrayal. It's interesting but lacks the punch that the other stories have.

I don't want to break down every single one of them but there are two more things that I have to single out as spectacular in Endless Nights. The portions on depression are extremely depressing. I felt like I needed Prozac after reading that chapter. The other thing is that Bill Sienkiewitz's are in the chapter on madness was the high point artistically in the book. I cannot think of another comic book artist who is more capable of capturing insanity on a page than Sienkiewitz and his jagged, raw art sets the mood exactly right.

I have only one aspect to this book that prevents me from recommending it completely. The identity of one of the seven Endless was a minor mystery over the course of Sandman and because there's one chapter for each of them in Endless Nights it means that someone who starts here will have that spoiled. Still I think that's a small price to pay for what is both the best follow-up a series could hope for and a terrific primer for those who want to try out Sandman before dedicating more time and money to the series.

Absolute Sandman Volume 4

Absolute Sandman Volume 4
Written by Neil Gaiman; Art by Marc Hempel, Michael Zulli, and Jon J. Muth
Art for Sandman #75 by Charles Vess
1997 Eisner Winner for Best Penciller/Inker

You'll note that Gaiman didn't win an Eisner for his writing on the second half of Sandman. It's not because the issues were poorly written, it was because the competetion was tough. For those years Alan Moore won the Eisner for From Hell. To give this some additional perspective for the first ten years of the Eisner awards only two people won the award for writing: Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore. Once their major works ended the field finally opened up to other people.

The two collections that provide material for this last volume of Absolute Sandman are The Kindly Ones and The Wake. In The Kindly Ones the bits and pieces from the rest of the series come together and reveal what the actual plot has been. Dream's actions catch up with him and beings who can destroy him tear apart the dreamworld to get at him. With the climax of the series finished The Wake is an extended denouement.

Denouement is something that you don't often see in comics. Setting aside those comics which have to go on to the next story each month it is rare for a comic book writer to not simple have the climax and then end the story a few pages later. Sandman has a five issue long denoument that pokes a bit into what happens after the story is over, how characters are reacting to the ending, and a tale of another writer who was ending his run of great works. It leaves you satisfied at the end since it ties everything into a nice package for the reader.

Sandman #75, the last issue of the series, is a book end to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in which Shakespeare has written his last play for Dream. His plays had fallen out of fashion at that moment. After he sacrificed his life to telling those stories he has retired to Stratford-On-Avon but he has one last story to tell.

Vess's artwork for this final issue is a mirror to the quality he provided in his World Fantasy Award winning work. In particular he captures the magical atmosphere of the play in some striking illustrations. Outside of those he draws some varied and expressive figures which prevent the story from being just a simple set of talking heads.

So the very ending is something special. Unfortunately the climax doesn't quite live up to that promise. The Kindly Ones is oddly paced which makes reading it frustrating. There's many threads and strange events which don't seem to be even tangentially related. They're not even very atmospheric or drama building. It's all fine in the end but it's a rough rode to get to that ending and unlike the skill that Gaiman demonstrated through the rest of the series. It feels like he had too many ideas and too little space for them all.

And so Sandman came to an end. This wasn't an absolute conclusion since several comics were spun out the series though none were as good. Gaiman did two short miniseries based on Death (an oversized hard cover collecting those was just released), an illustrated story, and an anthology about many of the Endless while others did less interesting things. The best of these was Mike Carey's Lucifer series which expanded on the theology that was presented in Sandman though it never was as great.

Gaiman himself would switch to being mainly a novelist who occasionally dabbles in comics and while some of his comic book work since has been entertaining none of it has approached the level of Sandman. He created a masterpiece and it's unlikely that he'll create another one for comics.

Absolute Sandman Volume 3

Absolute Sandman Volume 3
Written by Neil Gaiman
1994 Eisner Winner for Best Writer
Art for Sandman #50 by P. Craig Russel
1994 Eisner Winner for Best Penciller/Inker
Edited by Karen Berger
Tied for 1994 Eisner Winner for Best Editor

I started reading the regular issues of Sandman with the Brief Lives arc. I had mostly caught up with the series. That means that this volume is where my issues start to overlap with the book. Which means at this point I've bought these issues at least three times over (four times over for a few of them). Fortunately I doubt that there will be any better edition in the future so the Absolute Edition should last rest of my life.

Again there's two major story arcs and a handful of individual issues in this book. In Brief Lives Dream is convinced by his sister Delirium to hunt for their missing brother who abandoned his office centuries before. They find that their journey is complicated by traps that are harming those around them as they search. The other major arc in this volume is World's End which is not really an arc. It's more of Gaiman's homage to The Canterbury Tales. Traveler are finding themselves delayed by a storm breaking reality and seek shelter in an inn. Though they are all from different worlds they spend their time sharing their tales.

It's strange for me to think of the beginning of this as the half-way mark in Sandman. The plotting always makes me think of these stories as a kind of climax followed by the wrapping up. Brief Lives concludes with the pieces set in place for the end of the story and then World's End is a short breather before the action concludes. Despite covering a year and half worth of issues it feels that very little happens here. You could cut the important bits of Brief Lives down to a few pages (assuming you define important bits as how much they affect the overall story arc).

Which isn't to say that these stories aren't good. It's just that they're more focused on filling in the edges of the world that Gaiman has created and just telling interesting stories about stories. It's in World's End that the theme of Sandman is explicitly spelled out. It was there before and that is the only time it is placed on center stage.

Sandman #50 which was singled out for its own award was a single story in which the ruler of an Arabian Nights style Baghdad bargains with dream so that the city can exist at the height of its glory forever. P. Craig Russel's artwork is magnificent as you might expect as he captures the wonders of the city.

The big change that occurred at this point was Karen Berger using Sandman to spearhead a new imprint. Sandman was part of the wave of comics for mature readers and DC Comics finally decided to gather these books under one banner: Vertigo. That imprint is still going strong and remains a place for similar books such as Fables. Editorially nothing changed for Sandman, the new imprint however made it clear that books like Sandman were something that DC Comics wanted to publish.

This book is mainly a bridge between the strong arcs that formed the heart of the story in the second volume and the conclusion in the fourth. The single issues (which were collected in Fables and Reflections and World's End) aren't a bad introduction to the series. I may have started reading the issues with Brief Lives but I read most of the earlier issues first and it would not make sense without that context. Which makes this book a connection rather than something that I could recommend on its own.