Review - Batman: The Long Halloween

Batman: The Long Halloween
Written by Jeph Loeb; Art by Tim Sale
1998 Eisner Winner for Best Limited Series
1999 Eisner Winner for Best Graphic Album: Reprint

I know that I usually talk about the story first and the art second with these things but I'm in a charitable mood tonight so I'm going to start by saying that Tim Sale does a bang up job with Batman: The Long Halloween. He showcases some wonderful character designs, has some nifty page layouts, and generally produces some very nice to look at art. This is good for this book since his partner in the endeavor fails to produce something worthwhile. Jeph Loeb's story is a disaster; a brain dead lifeless lump that's only interesting when he forgets about his overarching plot.

At the start of his career as a vigilante the Batman is pressing the mobs of Gotham City hard. To finish them off he forms an alliance with newly appointed police commissioner Gordon and district attorney Dent. Complicating their work is a serial killer who is murdering on holidays. They spend a year hunting for this killer and working their way through the new breed of strange criminals who are taking the place of the old families.

The opening of this story is a rip-off of the opening of The Godfather. I don't drop the term "rip-off" lightly and I definitely do not mean "homage". An "homage" would be opening at the wedding of the daughter of a powerful crime boss or perhaps using a line of two of dialog. Loeb lifts chunks of the script whole and transplants them into his story. This sets the tone for Loeb's plotting which often involves taking from better writers than himself and putting Batman into it. This is not a formula for a decent story; the reader is getting carbon copies a bit more fuzzy and you might as well go to the original.

I suppose it could have been worse since the parts that are not taken from other works are the some of the worst parts of The Long Halloween. Toward the end Loeb decides to pile on plot twists in a way that makes the story pointlessly convoluted. I'm trying to avoid spoilers here but if you take all the information given to you as a reader toward the end of the book and try to fit it in with the information you had before then you're only going to get a headache.

There's also a real problem with the pacing of the series. Each issue of the series is tied to a holiday. While this is an intriguing format it means that characters will talk about doing something immediately and then it takes them over a month to actually get around to it. Events that should take only a few days are played out over months because that's the pacing of the issues.

The one good part of The Long Halloween, as I stated, is Tim Sale's artwork. His character designs for this story are terrific and distinctive; this is not a situation where every character is the same body with different clothes and hair. He draws a large cast and manages to make them all appear unique while only using the extreme shapes for the freakish supervillains. And his page layouts for action sequences look terrific. I genuinely wish that I could have seen this quality of artwork tied to a readable story.

So the only reason to check out Batman: The Long Halloween is for the Tim Sale artwork. Loeb's story suffers from the his taking from other, better source and never finding a compelling story of his own to work with. His mystery falls flat in the end making the reading the book feel like time that has been wasted.

Review - Amazing Spider-Man: Coming Home

Amazing Spider-Man: Coming Home
Written by J. Michael Straczynski; Art by John Romita Jr. and Scott Hanna
2002 Eisner Winner for Best Serialized Story

Thanks to the recent movies Spider-Man has been elevated to the most recognizable superhero in the world. His record with the Eisner awards, on the other hand, has been weak. While Batman inevitably has something that wins an award Spider-Man is the perpetual runner up. The one exception when it comes to stories is Coming Home which started the long run of writing Spider-Man by J. Michael Straczynski.

If you listened to fans on the Internet as it was being released Coming Home was the worst thing that ever happened. The problem for these people was that Straczynski came on the book and immediately got around to setting up a new status quo and that tends to upset comic fans who get nervous around new things. From the beginning where Spider-Man is confronted by a man with identical powers who asks him if it was a radioactive spider that gave him his superpowers or if it was just the spider itself. He is confronted with the possibility that his powers are shamanistic in nature and facing a villain who is built to hunt down and consume him. At the same time our hero looks to take a new job teaching at his old high school and the story draws to a close with the promise of an even bigger change.

When a new creative team starts work on a long running title it comes down to that first story for them to define what their run is going to be about. On that level Coming Home succeeds brilliantly; it says that this is going to be a bit more spiritual Spider-Man, gives him a new setting to work with, and establishes a new group of villains. It made me interested in seeing what happened next.

Straczynski gets the tone of Spider-Man's character right. The character shifts between the joking prankster and brooding smoothly without it feeling like it's two separate people. Straczynski does a better job with the lighter moments but I don't have any major complaints about any of it.

The biggest problem with Coming Home is that it just boils down to a fairly unremarkable superhero story. If you've read superhero comics then you've read this basic story plenty of times. Pure hearted hero, nasty villain who is stronger than him, they punch each other a lot before the hero outsmarts the villain. Straczynski tells it well enough that if you like your superheroes then I'd expect that you'd like this but it isn't going to make anyone who is turned off by vigilantes in costumes excited.

Romita's artwork might be the best of his career. This was the comic book that made his father famous and he worked on Spider-Man many times over the years. Of course historical significance wouldn't mean much if the book looked bad and his storytelling abilities are on full display through the story. Take the above page for example: it's perfectly executed with the the panel layout, body language, and structure. While every page isn't quite up to that quality there are more than enough of them to make the art stand out.

I enjoyed Coming Home quite a bit and my enjoyment of Spider-Man has been spotty at best. It's unfortunate where the end of this run wound up but that's not enough to make me say that it should be avoided. If you started reading Spider-Man here and continue on to later volumes of J. Michael Straczynski's run then my advice is to stop reading it as soon as you stop enjoying it; it won't get any better. This is a good example of terrific superhero comics; it's a light, breezy, adventure story.

Review - Herbie Archives

Herbie Archives
Written by Richard E. Hughs; Art by Ogden Whitney
2009 Eisner Winner for Best Humor Publication

Until last year if you asked fifty comic book fans what they thought about Herbie forty-nine of them would say "Who?" and the fiftieth would start babbling about bopping people with lollipops. While Herbie's stories had received a quiet reprint in the early nineties they had been forgotten by the vast majority of comic book fans. With Dark Horse's Herbie Archives reprinting every single Herbie story they've been rediscovered by a fresh generation who are just getting exposed to the manic brilliance of Herbie for the first time.

There is no other word to describe Herbie other than surreal. The stories follow their own kind of strange logic where the titular star is constrained only by what he's willing to do. If he decides that he needs to go to Mars then it's going to happen. It's a series where the main character regularly travels through time by sucking a lollipop and riding in a grandfather clock. Famous figures of the early sixties populate the series and turn up at the oddest moments.

Herbie himself is a boy who brings new meaning to "rotund". Besides being generally spherical with a bowl haircut and thick glasses there is nothing that Herbie would rather do than lie in his hammock and enjoy lollipop all day. His father is disturbed by his son calling him, "A fat little nothing," and pushes Herbie to do things. What his father doesn't know is that Herbie is a world-famous go getter who makes women swoon, world leaders shake, and induces terror in monsters. Through the power of his lollipops Herbie flies (well, walks on air with a lazy gait), travels in time, and occasionally bops someone who deserves it.

There isn't much in the way of dramatic tension in the Herbie stories but that's okay because they exist mainly to set up the gag of Herbie strolling into a situation and watching it spiral out of control as people try to deal with him. Herbie is a fairly passive character to the point that even his speech is structured to the minimum number of words required (Alan Moore has said that he based Rorschach's speech in Watchmen on Herbie) so he'll typically stand there and take the abuse dished out by that story's villain whether it's the devil, a would be cave-girlfriend, or Fidel Castro. There are short, light comedy pieces. The fun in Herbie is in having a character that is both visually and personality wise the exact opposite of the reaction he has on the world.

While Whitney's artwork is very traditional in style he has a great sense of playfulness in the individual images that helps make up for his weaknesses. The comics are filled with the small humor touches that keep me laughing. Whitney's sense of comedic timing gets used quite a bit as some of Hughs's jokes depend on Whitney hitting the right visual beat.

Before Dark Horse printed the Herbie Archives my experience with Herbie was extremely limited. A few extremely beat up old comics and some talk about how crazy his series was. I'm glad that these three volumes are available because without them I'd have never almost all of the series. Now I'm pleased to have the entire run sitting on my shelf. These are some funny books and if you don't know Herbie then you need to check him out.

Review - Little Nemo in Slumberland: Many More Splended Sundays

Little Nemo in Slumberland: Many More Splended Sundays
by Winsor McCay; edited by Peter Maresca
2009 Eisner Winner for Best Archival Collection/Project: Comic Strips

My immediate reaction on seeing Little Nemo in Slumberland: Many More Splendid Sundays was awe. I was unaware of the exact format of the original collection Many Splendid Sundays and while Amazon's listing for this book mentioned it was oversized I couldn't wrap my head around how big it was. Here's a photograph of the book with a slightly irritated cat to give you a sense of scale.

I would say this book is huge but that's an understatement. I own huge books and Many More Splendid Sundays dwarfs them. It is by dimension the largest book I own by a wide margin. It's far larger than any of my shelves so I have to store it between bookshelves. I've only seen a handful of books on this scale ever.

The point of this monstrously huge book is to present the Little Nemo in Slumberland strips in their original format. When they were first published the newspapers the strips took up a full page of the Sunday comics. All reprints since then have had to scale the images down to fit a more manageable size. Many More Splendid Sundays measures twenty-one inches by sixteen inches in order to present the artwork in a lavish style.

The reason I'm going on at length about this is that the size is the entire reason that Many More Splendid Sundays is notable. There are other collections of Little Nemo that are much more affordable for those interested in the strip but this and its predecessor are the only ones that capture the full artwork.

Little Nemo in Slumberland was a very early newspaper strip. How early? Here's the strip that was published one hundred years ago:


I'd use the strip that was one hundred years old this week but it contains a racial caricature that I wouldn't want to inflict on anyone who was unprepared for it (there is a reoccurring "jungle man" character who turns up).

The strips follow a simple format; Nemo wanders his dreams having adventures which conclude when something causes Nemo to wake up in the last panel. McCay's writing is clumsy at best and his dialog is so highly stylized that it is awkward. The real reason to check out Little Nemo is the stunning artwork. McCay was putting surrealism into the Sunday newspaper before surrealism was an artistic movement. He developed a touch for beautiful flowing panels where you can feel the motion captured between them. And his sense of design is terrific; I could examine these panels looking at the details all day. McCay was the first artistic genius in the medium of linear art.

The biggest problem with Many More Splendid Sundays is that the comic strips have already been mined for Many Splendid Sundays making this volume a kind of runner up to the original. Maresca does take advantage of a blank slate by running long sequences of strips where a storyline continued from week to week for several months. Still I found myself hoping for certain strips that I was familiar with to be included only to find out that they were in the first book.

This is a book to buy specifically for the packaging. Before Many More Splendid Sundays the only Little Nemo strips I had read were shrunk down so far you had to squint to make out the words. The selection of strips may not be the greatest but that has simply made me want to get the first volume. I'll cheerfully recommend it to anyone interested in Winsor McCay's art with the caveat that if you are not familiar with Little Nemo you'll want to examine the strips in a less expensive format first.

Review - The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
by Bill Waterson
2006 Eisner Winner for Best Archival Collection/Project: Comic Strips
Also contains all material from Calvin and Hobbes: The Revenge of the Baby-Sat, 1992 Eisner winner for best comic strip collection, and Calvin and Hobbes: Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons, 1993 Eisner winner for best comic strip collection

The past few years have been good to comic strip fans. While the newspaper strips have been dying off new efforts to compile the high points of the medium have been occurring. Fans used to have to get their collection of strips in what were essentially "Best of" sets where an editor picked out a handful. Now there's a movement toward being complete and there are more of these projects than I can count. One of the major triggers for this movement was the publication and success of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.

For those who have never seen Calvin and Hobbes (and I suppose that's possible since the strip ended fifteen years ago) it is about a young boy and his best friend who happens to be a tiger... or a stuffed animal if anyone else is looking. Calvin is prone to flights of fantasy and has an off-kilter world-view that's grounded by the tiger Hobbes. Together they get into every kind of mischief that a hyperactive six year old can get into and enjoy the suburban adventures of childhood.

This might be the easiest review I've ever written: I highly recommend this collection. Extremely highly. Doubly extremely highly. Adverbly doubly extremely highly. Calvin and Hobbes easily ranks among the greatest comic strips ever published. And unlike some strips Waterson ended it before it sank into a daily grind. That means that the more than three thousand strips are of a consistently terrific quality. Having the entire set in one beautiful package is well worth it.

The strips themselves possess a kind of timeless sense of humor. Anyone who spent their childhood wandering through imaginary vistas will be able to instantly connect with the strip. And anyone who knows the sheer volume of mayhem a six-year-old can cause will see that reflected in the stories.

The typical artwork in Calvin and Hobbes is great as Waterson is a master of character acting. As wonderful as it is to see how a tiger and boy can play off each other visually it goes from great to absolutely gorgeous when Waterson illustrates the lunatic imagination of Calvin. A dinosaur at the kitchen table looks just as natural as the mundane schoolrooms.

Okay, enough selling the content to those six people on Earth who are unfamiliar with Calvin and Hobbes; the main event is The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. It's a three volume set with either one sunday strip or three daily strips presented on each glossy page. Each volume is about five hundred pages and is just large enough that it isn't unweildy to read though I wouldn't want to hold it up for too long. The slipcase is heavy duty even has the cloth binding of the books. As a unit it is the heaviest publication I own. The production values could not be higher for this set.

The set is gorgeous and durable enough that I think that replacing any paperback collections that you have is worth it. This is the definitive format for owning one of the greatest works of comic art ever created. If you have any affection for Calvin and Hobbes then you will want to get The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. And if you don't then I pity the shriveled, black stone that passes for your heart.

Review - The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of

The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of
by Thomas M. Disch
1999 Hugo Winner for Best Related Book

Here's a sign of a bad book: I honestly cannot tell you what The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of is about. It reads like the old-kilter rants of drunk man that progress down strange, incomprehensible paths and leap from subject to subject with little concern for bridging topics. It's a mashed together mess of the history of science fiction, the affect science fiction has had on culture, an overview of the genre, and critique of all of that. Disch's lack of focus means that his critiques are poorly supported and it contributes to making this book feel pointless.

Let's start with his opening chapter since it establishes a concept that Disch returns to throughout the book while establishing how shaky his reasoning is. It argues that American culture is somehow attuned more than other cultures to revere the liar; that deception is an American virtue. Now as much as that may make some people say, "Of course!" his support for this assertions is the same appreciation of tricksters, conmen, and audacity that has been evident in humanity for as long as there has been a written record. It's not an American thing to enjoy the tweaking of authority's nose by a clever person, it's a human thing.

Similarly he declares that Edgar Allen Poe was the first science fiction writer. Most of you are going to be scratching your head and saying, "Yeah, he grew out of the same gothic traditions that science fiction grew out of but he never wrote anything that could be remotely mistaken for science fiction." Disch's argument is based on Poe's place in pop culture of the time and literary style rather than the context of his stories. It's an argument that makes me wince because it could be used to justify the absorption of nearly any popular author since the nineteenth century into science fiction.

And so it goes through this book. His arguments are so ridiculous that I half suspect that Disch was making them spuriously so that people would react to them. Whether it's "The Cold Equations" as an example of how misogynistic science fiction authors were or using a self-help book based on Star Trek as the strawman for Star Trek's ideals so much of the book comes across as just wackiness. And with that first chapter dedicated to lying I have to ask if the book is a bit of a prank. Of course in the end I don't believe that; I've read enough off-the-wall literary criticism presented as reality that I can accept Disch's as genuine.

Things aren't all bad in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of. When Disch gets personal the book is much more interesting. His take on the political extremes in science fiction authors is tightly focused on a few individuals that he could be addressing directly. There are times when he's discussing the context of an author or movement without getting into theorizing that kept me going. Unfortunately these only lasted a few pages before things switched up again and I never knew what I was going to get next.

I can't recommend The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of for many reasons. Top of the list is the rambling of the Disch who comes across as the Andy Rooney of science fiction. There's better histories and examinations of science fiction out there; the only reason to read this one is if you're interested in Disch's personal take on authors.

Review - Akira

Akira
by Katsuhiro Otomo
2002 Eisner Winner for Best Archival Project
2002 Eisner Winner for Best U.S. Edition of Foreign Material

A short while into creating his epic Katsuhiro Otomo had to put it on hold. He was approached about making it into a movie. Instead of being something like the US where an author sells the rights to his book to a movie studio and then has nothing more to do with it Otomo adapted his work and directed the film which is justifiably considered one of the landmarks of Japanese animation. Unfortunately he also was only a third of the way through his story when he did this and consequently had to create an ending for the entire thing based on what he had made that far. The result of that is the movie diverges widely with the comic in the last reel and a lot of poorly informed American nerds blamed evil filmmakers for screwing up the adaptation. It also means that if you have seen the movie Akira that the book will be a fresh experience.

Twenty years after the destruction of Tokyo triggered a third world war a new city called Neo Tokyo has risen around the devastation. A motorcycle gang from the new city has a run in with a strange child with powers in the ruins which triggers a series of events that changes the world. For one member it leads one to becoming entangled with a terrorist organization trying to expose the secrets of a government program for harnessing psychics. Another member begins developing psychic abilities of his own and gets first hand experience in what absolute power does. And drawing both of them together is Akira, the government's greatest secret.

Akira is a wonderful example of what I don't like in science fiction. The ideas presented are huge, terrific things; the actual execution of those concepts on the other hand falls flat. Otomo isn't nearly as bad as many I've read since his writing is simply flawed instead of outright awful. It isn't as simple as a bad translation either. There's fundamental information missing, muddled storytelling in the art, and an awkward pacing that comes from stretching out sections for the serial.

There's also the problem that most of the characters in Akira just aren't interesting. The lead is a doofus who's just along with events for the ride. The terrorists who get the majority of the early focus are given no motivation beyond being dupes in a political struggle; it's never clear why they're doing the things they do or why they choose their extreme methods. They're the designated good guys despite the fact that the reader is never given a reason to root for them. On the other hand the character who is gaining vast power and losing control in every sense of the word is fascinating because while his only goal may be anarchy the reader can understand his purpose. Every time the story went to people discussing vague goals with characters whose motivations weren't explained I wanted to back to the guy who was destroying everything.

There is one thing that Akira has going for it: Otomo's art. He has a sense of environment design that is stunning. There are a lot of images of destruction in Akira and he makes each bit of it look unique. Similarly the machines he populates the book with are in some ways more interesting that the humans. I could examine his incredibly detailed backgrounds all day.

Similarly the way that Otomo draws action is impressive. Each explosion is a ultradetailed work of art. Every panel of an complex action scene examined individually tells it's own story. I can't say that I'm fond of how he lays out pages since it's pretty standard it is on a higher plain than most Japanese comic artists who hold to certain artistic conventions that typically muddy up the panel flow. When he brings his focus in on those kinds of scenes Otomo's artistic storytelling is terrific.

So Akira is an visually interesting but inherently flawed work. On one hand I'm not very fond of the story being told, but on the other it's the only Japanese comic that I own a supplemental art book for. Perhaps it's best to think of it like a movie, one of those summer blockbuster action movies like they used to make where they might not have been terrific films the images presented were exciting and fun. I'd recommend Akira on that level: come for the pictures and fun action. Just don't expect any more than that.