I’m not sure who Oberon Sexton really is (he’s the Joker), but I bet he reads This Week in Panels every Sunday.
The A-Team: Shotgun Wedding #3
Joe Carnahan, Tom Waltz and Stephen Mooney
Avengers: The Origin #1
Joe Casey and Phil Noto
It’s 1983 and you’re fresh off a break-out run on Daredevil and an acclaimed Wolverine miniseries. Everyone wants you to revolutionize their books like you did Daredevil. What do you do? If you’re Frank Miller, the answer is to produce Ronin, a deeply weird samurai/sci-fi/cyberpunk love story, with DC Comics.
I’m convinced that, as a career milestone, Ronin may be more important than Daredevil. It was composed of ideas that were completely Miller’s, rather than derived from the minds of Stan Lee, Bill Everett, Chris Claremont, or Len Wein. While Miller clearly had a large amount of freedom on Daredevil, it remained a Marvel comic and had to conform to those standards. Miller has said he never had censorship trouble on Daredevil, barring a brief spat with the Comics Code Authority that resulted in an anti-drug issues being shelved for a couple years. Other than that, he described his time on the project as fairly painless, due in part to his relationship with his editor and Jim Shooter.
So, what does Miller do when he can cut loose without worrying about ruining someone else’s copyright? He does something very, very weird, and yet undeniably Frank Miller. While it is interesting to read, the most interesting aspect of the book is how it serves almost as a blueprint, or at least loose notes, for Miller’s later work.
There is a kernel of the woman worship that informs much of his Sin City work lurking in the subtext of Ronin. Casey McKenna, head of security for the megacorp that provides much of the drama for the book, is cast from the same mold as Gail, Martha Washington, and even Carrie Kelly. She becomes the object of the ronin’s quest, desire, and obsession partway through the book, after he spent the series being pointedly chaste. Casey fulfills a fantasy that the ronin has of heroism and love. This is a familiar fantasy and one that is echoed throughout Miller’s body of work, whether via Goldie from Sin City: The Hard Goodbye, Ava from Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, or even little Nancy Callahan from Sin City: That Yellow Bastard.
Despite his intimate relationship with violence, the ronin has a very specific code of honor and seeks to do right by everyone he can. There are lines he won’t cross, and when he is tricked into using a racial slur to provoke a fight, his first move is to apologize. When that apology is rejected, he severs the man’s hands. When Casey is sent under the streets to be killed, he risks his life to go and rescue her.
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Frank Miller’s career has spanned over thirty years, with a number of bona fide classic runs and books under his belt. From Daredevil to Sin City, Dark Knight Returns to 300, Miller has changed the face of comics. If comics had a hall of fame, he’d be a shoo-in.
This week, I tapped a few of my favorite people to see if they had anything to say. Luckily for me, they said “Yes,” so here we have it: Booze, Broads, & Bullets. A series of posts on a number of blogs over the next seven days focusing on various aspects of Frank Miller’s body of work. The Portfolio Review last week was just a prelude. I’m going to keep this post updated with links to the new posts, as well as adding links to their posts from my own.
I hope you dig it.
4thletter!
Booze, Broads, & Bullets: Ronin
Booze, Broads, & Bullets: Elektra Lives Again
Booze, Broads, & Bullets: Man Without Fear
Booze, Broads, & Bullets: Spawn-Batman
Booze, Broads, & Bullets: Sin City: The Big Fat Kill
Booze, Broads, & Bullets: I’m sick of flags.
Booze, Broads, & Bullets: All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder
Booze, Broads, & Bullets: Every 4th Quarter He Likes To Mike Jordan Them
Chad Nevett
Booze, Broads, & Bullets: The Hard Goodbye
Booze, Broads, & Bullets: A Dame to Kill For
Booze, Broads, & Bullets: The Big Fat Kill
Booze, Broads, & Bullets: That Yellow Bastard
Booze, Broads & Bullets: Family Values
Booze, Broads, & Bullets: Booze, Broads, & Bullets
Booze, Broads, & Bullets: Hell and Back
Tim Callahan
Tales of the New Gods: Nativity by Frank Miller
When Words Collide: Frank Miller’s New Gods
Chad & Tim
The Splash Page Podcast Episode 12.1
Tim O’Neil
Tao of Miller
Sean Witzke
Emma Peel Session 30 – IF YOU INTEND TO DIE, YOU CAN DO ANYTHING.
Emma Peel Sessions 31 – make em laugh! make em laugh!
Booze Broads and Bullets week mini-review!
Emma Peel Sessions 32 – Egg Salad
Emma Peel Session 33 – armageddon in effect
Emma Peel Sessions 34 – ain’t flingin tears at the dusty ground
A lot of quality books got nods this year. Naoki Urasawa got five nominations, and Darwyn Cooke, Ed Brubaker, and Mark Waid got three a-piece. I’m very pleased to see more and more manga represented in non-manga categories, because ghettoizing it is dumb. It’s just comics, baby. If you don’t know Urasawa, click here and get to scrolling. I’ve got something cooking on Pluto 8, but that’s a few days away at the earliest. For Darwyn Cooke’s Parker: The Hunter, click here.
There’s a lot of cool stuff in here, including several books I have not read, but will be reading asap. I also want to point out the Eisner nomination for Laura Hudson’s Comics Alliance, a site I freelance for, making me 1/15th Eisner nominated! Congrats, Laura. You deserved the nom, and you definitely deserve the Eisner.
It’s so nice that nothing like Justice League of America #11, the Brad Meltzer/Rags Morales story that got an Eisner a few years back got nominated. You know the story, it had Arsenal and Vixen trapped in a building that was underwater, but they were too dumb to realize they were upside down? Yeah, that was kind of a lame win for DC. This year, though, there’s nothing like tha
Best Single Issue (or One-Shot)
:negativeman:
Click here to check out the official list of Eisners, or just hit the jump, where I got my copy/paste on.
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We’re a month away from the release of the two-years-awaited Iron Man 2 and only a week or so ago, the novelization came out. Like with all the other Marvel movies, I picked this one up. Surprisingly, this one isn’t written by Peter David, but by Alexander Irvine. You might recognize the name if you’ve read Daredevil Noir.
So what’s going on in the story? It takes place six months after Iron Man – although Irvine flubs that by referring to it as two years at least once – and sometime before Incredible Hulk. Tony hasn’t done too much in terms of righting wrongs as Iron Man, but he does flaunt it when possible and gets in trouble with the government because of it. They insist he should hand over the tech to them, which he totally disagrees with and points out that the rest of the world is 20 years away from reaching that level anyway. Also, Tony has a couple events marked off on his calendar and every one of them is a backdrop for an action sequence. Really, every action sequence can be summed up with, “I can’t wait for _______! I hope nothing bad happens! Oh, crap! Explosions!”
Let’s go over the characters, starting with our hero.
Tony Stark is getting ready for the Stark Expo (hey, guess what that means?), but at the same time is secretly disturbed by the realization that his arc reactor isn’t so perfect after all and it’s slowly killing him. He and JARVIS have been working on a way to reinvent the arc reactor, but so far nothing’s doing and things look grim. In response, Tony has been acting even more reckless than usual and becomes a grade-A asshole.
At this point I stick to the DC side of the Faux Comics War merely because I’m not prepared to memorize the continuity, seek out the current stories, (Seriously, Marvel, what is wrong with your website?) and be enraged about the twists of yet another universe full of superheroes. There are only so many hours in a day.
Still, there are a few characters out there who are fun enough and simple enough for me recommend wading hip-deep into murky water of weeklies, if only to pick up an issue or two for when DC weeks are lean.
If you asked me to sum up my Wondercon experience in a couple of short, witty phrases, I’d just tell you that I ate six pieces of pizza over the course of two days and that I spent more on karaoke than I did on anything even remotely comic-related.
That’s not the full experience, though. It was an interesting con for me, due in no small part to the ongoing evolution in the way I approach comics, and being a fan of comics. I got no signatures, no sketches, no freebies. I paid for three books and got one for free. I spent maybe twenty-five whole dollars at the con, a drastic decrease from the usual foolishness I get down to. I’ll get to that, though.
I left work a couple hours early on Friday to hit the con and get my pass. It was painless, with less than two people in line ahead of me. Other than my pass saying “4thletter!/Popcultureshock.com” for some reason, it was easy like Sunday morning.
I figured I’d walk the length of the hall from wall to wall, but the first thing I did at the con was find Matt Maxwell, Jeff Lester, and Heidi MacDonald chit-chatting in Artist’s Alley/Small Press. I killed some time with them for a while, talking about the con and comics, and that more or less set the tone for the con.
I spent a lot of time talking to people about comics and only attended a few panels. I stopped in on the DC Nation panel because a few friends (Esther, JK Parkin, Graeme McMillan, Carla Hoffman, Laura Hudson, a couple others) were there. It was, in a word, abysmal. They completely flubbed looking like they had any idea what they were doing with digital comics, there was a lot of “Wait and see,” there were a few “Wait until San Diego” answers… it was boring. I liked when someone asked about plans for Nightwing and got a succinct “Yeah, he’s Batman” in response, and I love that Dark Knight: Boy Wonder got announced, but it was a snoozer. I had a similar experience at the Marvel panel I accidentally attended the next day, again because friends were in effect and I had an opening in my schedule. I spent most of it poring over Darwyn Cooke’s The Man With the Getaway Face.
I attended a couple panels that were cool. The Greg Rucka spotlight moderated by Laura was a trip and well worth the price of admission. It was in a huge room, for some reason. The Boom! Studios panel was also pretty good, and Ian Brill seemed genuinely excited to be writing Darkwing Duck.
There was a Disney Comics superfan in the audience, too, who kept interrupting to ask about minutiae. At the end of the panel, I went up to say hi to Ian, and as I turned to leave, the superfan was right behind me. He was mumbling something about how we should print the Disney newspaper strips in black and white and not colorize them and something something Carl Barks. I tried to tell him I wasn’t part of Boom!, that that was the other black guy in the room, but he just said, “Yes, yes, but I think that…” and kept going. I shrugged and walked away while he was talking. I’m not getting trapped in an infinite conversation ever again, and that definitely had the makings of one.
(You ever had one of those? When someone keeps going and going and you can’t find a polite way to excuse yourself because they’re so focused that all they want to do is talk about whatever? Yeah. Infinite conversations. They’re gonna be the death of somebody one day.)
I attended the Black Cartoonists as Social Commentators panel, too. It was good, but the moderator was a little too overbearing. It was clear he had a very clear and academic formula he wanted to follow, but Keith Knight and Darrin Bell are hilarious, personable, and have great anecdotes. I would’ve much preferred to see them let loose with a conversation about themselves and their work. The glimpses we got were great, though, and if you aren’t reading either, get familiar. Bell’s story about how he was getting hate mail after hate mail before Hurricane Katrina and zilch after… that was a good one. It was a good panel.
I spent most of my time walking around with friends like Lauren Davis and Ana, digging in the various half off book booths and looking for stuff to buy. I didn’t buy much, as I said before, in part because I know exactly how much stuff is sitting on my coffee table, waiting to be read. I stuck to books I knew I’d love and get to relatively soon. This means I missed out on deep discounted hardcovers, but that’s okay. I think.
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The trick with interviewing comics creators is not coming off like that kind of fan. You know the one: the fan that takes things personally, gets overly involved in every story arc and character moment, and generally makes life miserable for anyone unlucky enough to get their attention.
This is particularly hard when you most definitely are that kind of fan, especially when it comes to – oh, I don’t know, let me pick a character out of a hat – Batgirl. I admit, when I came up to Bryan Q Miller, the current writer of Batgirl, I was bouncing on my heels a little. Despite everything, though, he agreed to an interview.
LeSean Thomas’s blog had the link of the day for me.
Remember Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks? Heir apparent to Dave Chappelle’s The Chappelle Show and one of the most brutally funny shows on TV?
It’s back!
There’s just glimpses of things in here– Huey vs White Jesus, Stinkmeaner possessing Granddad (!), tons of anime/kung-fu/rap references, VladTV… this season is gonna be something serious.
Who linked me to this on Twitter? I love you madly.
