Due to reviewing the Lone Wolf & Cub books once a week, I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple of months thinking about justice and revenge. The reasoning behind revenge, the stresses it puts on someone, the sacrifices necessary to pursue revenge, and even, occasionally, my own personal feelings about it. It’s a little draining, to be honest, but fascinating at the same time.

Garth Ennis and Peter Snejberg’s Battlefields: Dear Billy, published by Dynamite Entertainment, takes the idea of justice and revenge head-on, but not exactly in the way I expected. Most creators, when writing a story about revenge, tends to take the obvious route. Something horrible happens, usually in graphic detail, someone makes a promise, and then a whole lot of people die. You’ve seen it with Ultimate Hawkeye, whose entire family was murdered. Ogami Itto is stacking the bodies up like cordwood. Daredevil’s gone on multiple revenge quests. Omar from The Wire spent the bulk of the fifth season of the show killing men who wronged him.

Ennis and Snejberg present an entirely different scenario. During World War II, on the way to Java, Carrie Sutton, and several other British women, were captured, raped, machineguned, and left for the dead by Japanese soldiers. Carrie was the only survivor.

After her convalescence, Carrie is discharged and becomes a nurse for the British in the Eastern Theater. She meets a man, the Billy of the title, and they fall in love. Their romance allows both of them to escape from the war, both mentally and physically, as they were both brutalized by the Japanese. Billy had been caught after landing his plane, and was bayonetted, though Carrie pretends not to know that. She keeps Billy in the dark about her past, as well. Billy likes the idea of portraying the war as no big deal to his little lady, and she enjoys indulging him in that fantasy. However, it isn’t enough. When a Japanese prisoner of war is brought into Carrie’s hospital, she smothers him with a pillow.

Carrie and Billy’s relationship disintegrates when he says the wrong thing to her. After a night out drinking with friends, they get into an argument about what’s going to happen after the war. Carrie asks, “If the Japs are to be groomed as allies, what the hell are we supposed to do about them?” Billy replies, “Now we learn to love them, Carrie.” And Carrie cannot take that, and so their relationship, and the book, ends.

Carrie went through a harrowing experience and had no outlet for those emotions. There was no way she could actually have justice or closure for her suffering. There would be no trial, no execution, no recompense. So, she killed men. It didn’t make her feel better, but it did do something to make her feel less bad, if only for a moment. The thought of learning to love the people that had traumatized her was too much.

I think the fundamental question at the heart of this book is “What is forgivable?” Being raped and near-murdered left a hole in her heart, and it was an injury that she never truly recovered from, despite finding solace in Billy’s arms. The only thing she wants out of the Japanese, the only thing that makes sense to her, is revenge. After they’ve surrendered, she feels that the British and American should twist the knife and “make them pay.”

Obviously, Carrie murdering the defenseless men is a crime. It’s an act of evil. At the same time, I feel like I understand where she’s coming from. After being hurt, the only thing you want, the only thing you dream of, is hurting someone back. That’s where messy break-ups, painful divorces, alienations, and falling outs come from. It’s the “get-back.”

So while reading, I condemned Carrie with the rational side of my brain and empathized with the other side. It forced me to look at myself and try to figure out how I would react if put into a situation where revenge was easy. And I found that I don’t have an answer. Carrie’s actions are inexcusable, but she was hit very hard by the war. Where Billy could be content with victory, she could not. No act could ever salve her wounds. I’m not saying it’s right, but I understand.

Ennis throws the idea of suffering in silence, British valor, and stiff upper lips directly under the bus. Carrie never gets to discuss her ordeal with anyone, choosing instead to keep it in herself, and it festers and rots inside her. Billy can talk about his injuries with other military men and gain some semblance of comfort, because that’s what men get to do. This may be the key difference between Carrie and Billy’s approach to the war. Carrie is forced to keep it inside, while Billy gets at least a moment to air it out.

Dear Billy is one of my favorite Ennis works, in part because of the ambiguity it spawned in my thoughts. There are no easy answers to be found here. No comforting condemnation of any act. Ennis leaves it up to the reader to decide the morality of Carrie’s actions, and how that applies to us as human beings. This is definitely one of the most melancholy things that he’s written.

Battlefields: Dear Billy is part of a three part cycle. Night Witches and The Tankies round out the trilogy, which will be collected into a Battlefields hardcover later this year for thirty bucks. I’m not sure why Amazon lists Dear Billy as not released, as my own copy and Dynamite’s site suggests otherwise. It’s cheap, just thirteen bucks, and worth your time.

We’ve got a surprisingly DC-centric Fourcast! this time around. Highlights:

-We’ve got theme music! It’s 6th Sense’s 4 A.M. instrumental. It’s licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. 6th Sense / CC BY-NC 3.0. I dig his work, so it was a treat to find “It’s a 6th Sense Beat Yo!!” on the Free Music Archive. 6th Sense is a great producer. I play about 30-some seconds after the intro and before we get into it, and then the full track at the end of the cast as an outro. Hope you dig it!
-We get right into a discussion of Brave and the Bold #24, courtesy of DC Comics, Matt Wayne, and Howard Porter. We both enjoyed it, though I’m not sure that’s clear on my part, and we both had a few misgivings about Porter’s art.
-A brief digression into the relationship between Static and Blue Beetle. Here’s the image in question, from Heroes #4, written by Matt Wayne, drawn by Chriscross:

It’s a good series, I hope DC reprints it asap.
-Michael Johnson, Mike Green, and Francis Manapul’s Superman/Batman #61? That’s a fun comic right there. The Mash-up story has been really dumb, but very fun, and between Penguello and Brainycat, has some awesome designs.

-We get into our Continuity-Off at the end. Esther explains Supergirl’s past boy/girl/horsefriends, while I break down Gambit’s tortured past. Or is that torturous? I can’t tell sometimes.

We’ll be back in a week with the beginning of a DC vs Marvel knock-down, drag-out, fight to the death.

When I started this, I didn’t expect to read about Ogami Itto mowing down several people with a shotgun. However, he did, I did, and now I get to tell you about it.

Volume 5, Black Wind, has five stories this time: “Trail Markers,” “Executioner’s Hill,” “Black Wind,” “Decapitator Asaemon,” and “The Guns of Sakai.” I found “Trail Markers” to be pretty snooze-worthy. It’s a short tale, just thirty pages, and it’s almost like a recap/infodump of sorts. We find out how Ogami finds his clients, which seems to be based entirely around luck and being in the right place at the right time. The Yagyu clan reveals that it has been around two years since their last encounter, and that the shogunate has heard rumors of Ogami’s current status and how he came to be there. They’re beginning an investigation, which means that it may be the end of the road for the Yagyu clan.

And you know, this story was pretty boring. I realize that it sets up “Decapitator Asaemon,” but it could’ve just been left out with no issue at all. We see Retsudo, and he’s menacing, and they send people out to kill Ogami. He effortlessly dispatches him and reiterates the fact that he doesn’t care about the life of a samurai any more. His way is death, he knows only meifumado, blah blah blah.

“Executioner’s Hill” fares somewhat better, but still ends up being predictable. We meet the Zodiac Gang, they see Ogami, they realize that he’s the guy who decapitated their lord back when he was kogi kaishakunin, and decide that they want revenge. They lure Daigoro away with the sound of the drum that candy salesmen use, which was a fascinating reveal, and then attack Ogami. He dispatches them easily.

“Executioner’s Hill” had one moment that stood out to me. When Ogami realizes that Daigoro is being kidnapped, he rushes after him. Once he catches up to the gang, and they threaten Daigoro, Ogami simply tells them to kill his son. All that will remain are corpses in the sand. The Zodiac Gang call him out on this, since meifumado is supposed to be emotionless and hard. Why did he show concern for his son?

Ogami explains that he was simply following natural law. It is the nature of man to avoid danger and death. However, once you are in the midst of it, the only sensible thing to do is embrace it and approach the situation with a clear mind. I thought this was the best part of the story, as it explained something that genuinely needed an explanation.

“Black Wind” was my favorite of the book, for the exact same reason I liked volume 4 so much. It dealt with Daigoro more than Ogami, and in doing so, revealed something about the life the father and son are leading. It opens with Ogami working in a rice paddy with the women of a village. Daigoro is not confused, exactly, but he looks at Ogami as a “new father,” as he’d never seen this side of Ogami before. He enjoys it very much, and for the first time, he wants to do what his father does. He never gave a thought to being an assassin, but this looks good. It makes him warm.

We’re treated to more of Daigoro throughout the story. He finally gets to pick with the women and his father, and he enjoys it. He eats dinner with some members of the village, and they’re all impressed at his poise and manners. He’s an exceptional child, and it shows. He smiles. And then, when men come to the village and threaten his father, the boy’s face turns empty again and shishogan sets in.

The revelation of why his father is doing the planting, which is considered beneath the status of even a ronin, is fascinating, as well. A young girl was killed by accident during the course of his quest, and her dying words were thoughts of her family and hometown. While doing the planting, Ogami buried strands of her hair with the rice. It was a surprisingly tender turn, and shows that Ogami still has some sense of decency.

“Decapitator Asaemon” is straightforward. The shogunate sends Asaemon, the third best swordsman in the land, to investigate and find out if Ogami has genuinely become an assassin. Retsudo interferes with their battle, and Asaemon dies. Nothing particularly special here, though it does set up Samurai Executioner, another Koike/Kojima production.

“The Guns of Sakai” is… something else. There’s a lot of talk about what it means to be a man, to innovate, and to be honorable in it. I really enjoyed it. It features an expert gunsmith, one of the subordinates of the five gunsmiths of Sakai, the official gunsmiths of the shogunate. He’s under inspection because he is creating new weapons without the permission of the shogunate.

Ogami catches up with him, and grants him one last request. He speaks to his apprentices of honor, of innovation, and of what the soul of a gun is. He curses the shogunate and the fact that guns went from being killing machines to expensive ornamental pieces of stagnated junk. Later, he reveals that he knows that they sold him out and kills them. Before Ogami kills him, he declares that Ogami should use this new weapon and keep the plans for a repeating gun.

That, of course, leads to this, when the five gunsmiths catch up to him:

And well, there it is. Volume 6 next week. I won’t be sick, so it should be up on time.

Two instances of dumb ways to write “ethnic” characters, one counter-example, and a brief explanation.

The first two! On the left, we have Brother Voodoo Brudder Voodoo. On the right, we have the Shaolin Scientist Squad. From New Avengers #53 (Brian Michael Bendis and Billy Tan) and Punisher #6 (Rick Remender and Tan Eng Huat), respectively.

A counter-example for Brudder Voodoo, from Gambit #9 (John Layman and Georges Jeanty):

A brief explanation:
Brother Voodoo was needed to fill a role. As part of filling that role, he’s got to talk with a comic book Carribbean accent, I guess. Even though he hasn’t been portrayed as talking like that recently, nor originally, I believe. But, you know, he practices voodoo, and voodoo dudes need to have that authentic accent. Never mind that he’s a psychologist and Haitian ex-pat who’s been living in the States for years– he needs to be de likkle Claremontian stereotype, brudder. Just so you know he’s foreign.

The other is the Shaolin Scientist Squad, who are kind of like an evil Sons of the Tiger, I guess. My problem with them? Having Chinese villains refer to a “Great Western Satan” is like having a Jewish villain screaming about how Captain America is merely an avatar of Yacub, maker and creator of the Devil. GWS is something I’ve only ever seen in regards to Islamic extremist rhetoric, most notably courtesy of Iran a couple decades ago, not Chinese.

Nah, son. You got to do better.

I dug the first issue of New Mutants, but #2 hit one of my few nitpicky pet peeves. This bit right here:

Naw, son. In addition to being browner back in the day (what’s up with the coloring in this book? everything is set to “superbright”), Bobby is Brazilian. They don’t speak Spanish down there. It’s Portuguese. In fact, here’s a bit from a letters page I found in an X-Force comic I was reading about a month back. It’s from somewhere between issue 80 and 82, I think. The page it was on had reactions for X-Force #76, so you do the math.

Listen to Giancarlo Lima, fellas! I’d have emailed this directly to whoever’s editing the book, but New Mutants doesn’t have a lettercol email setup, near as I can tell. And leaving Zeb Wells a Youtube comment just seems… weird.

I think what I enjoy the most about Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie’s Aya is that it isn’t really about anything. I don’t mean to say that it’s aimless, or doesn’t have a plot, or anything like that. What it isn’t, is an afterschool special or sociopolitical statement. It isn’t a book about how “Africans are normal people, too!” It’s just a story about young girls living in Côte d’Ivoire.

In a way, it succeeds as a statement for those same reasons. The usual mental image the word “Africa” conjures is one of mud huts, bone noses, and warlords running roughshod over the countryside. Aya presents a scenario that is made of the same kind of drama that small town life anywhere is buried in. There are teens going out to the designated make-out spot, a father sucking up to a local high powered businessman, a girl who wants to sidestep all that drama, and surprise pregnancies. Who hasn’t had a friend hook up with somebody you liked? Aya is, at its heart, about small town relationships.

Aya is the main character of the book, though a few characters end up being the ones who drive the story. Aya observes what’s going on, dancing in and out of the drama, while trying to make her own way in the world. One of the first things she does is ditch a party to finish her homework. Later, she explains to her father that she wants to be a doctor so that she can help people. She isn’t a nerd. It isn’t about how a Nerd With a Heart of Gold walks through the valley of the shadow of death, showing the Jocks and Frat Boys and Mean Girls what’s what. No, she’s just a normal girl. She’s studious, and aware of who she wants to be, but that’s not anything exceptional. She isn’t a flower.

Aya’s surrounded by a decent sized cast. She’s got her family, including a little sister, her friends, who in turn have their own family, and then the various boys that are interested in one girl or another or both. Oubrerie’s art does a good job of differentiating between them. Their faces are distinct, obviously, but there are even little differences in posture and body language.

The scene where one girl explains to her boyfriend that she’s pregnant is a great one. Oubrerie isn’t afraid to do a bit of cartooning, and it’s employed to great effect here. I like that he employs some classic techniques to get his point across. Proportions warp, eyes bug out, shadows cover a face, stars and sweat drops abound… I like it. I could totally see this as a cartoon. Something like Home Movies after it dropped Squigglevision.

I really dug Aya, and I’m probably going to order the next volume, Aya of Yop City, this week. I’m a little irritated at myself for never having tried it before now, but Drawn & Quarterly did good bringing it over.

Killer Mike’s I Pledge Allegiance to the Grind II was one of my favorite albums last year. I don’t know that it was 100% good, but I dig it. It was an album with a strong message, and one I can support. The Grind that Mike pledges allegiance to is Getting Rich INDependently. A goofy acronym, but an important one. If you’re working for someone else’s dream, you probably aren’t working toward your own. “If you have a boss, maybe you should fire your boss” is a profound statement. It’s full of arrogance, but it’s also very apt. It’s about getting off your butt and working for you, for something you believe in, rather than someone else’s money machine. The most important statement on the album, for mer personally, is at the end of “If I Can’t Eat Right.” “If you knew how much you were worth, you would ask for more than you get.”

Larry Leong is a friend of mine, and I’d like to think that he subscribes to a similar mentality. He’s been doing stunt work and acting in Hollywood for the past few years, and working on his baby, Yeah Sure Okay. YSO is a martial arts film, but it’s also a response to a lot of trends Larry saw that he wasn’t too fond of. Jump-cut, MTV-style editing, and a general lackluster sense of creativity. He wrote and directed a martial arts movie with no dialogue, no names, and a ton of action, and it ended up pretty entertaining.

The story is simple. There are two friends. One wears a blue shirt, the other a red one. There is a girl, whose face is never seen, that they both fall in love with. There are also several other guys, and all of them want the girl. As these things go, these guys are skilled in various kinds of martial arts, and our heroes end up in the middle of a city-wide battle for love.

YSO isn’t all action. There are moments of personal reflection in the occasional downtime and a couple of flashbacks. Blue has recently broken up with his girlfriend and is in a funk because of it. Neither Blue nor Red have luck with dating. You get the point pretty quickly, and it helps that the story is so familiar. It gives Larry a chance to string along a series of clever and inventive fights while keeping your interest up.

The fights are definitely the highlight. The Zero Gravity team came out and represented well. All of the fights are pretty good, and feature some pretty impressive stunts. They aren’t just the fast-paced, Bourne-style, bone-breaking stuff that most movies have. There’s a real sense of flow, style, and most of all, comedy. Some of the fights have laugh out loud funny moments, which keeps YSO from being an unbearably serious movie.

The fights having their own personality is vital to the film, as well. It makes each fight into an event, rather than a hurdle to be passed before getting to the big end fight. It’s not just “Oh yeah, Blue vs Purple!” when describing it to friends. You recall specific moves, like a guy straightening the creases in his jeans, the scowl on a man’s face, or a classic twin jump kick.

YSO isn’t an unqualified success. There are issues with the lighting, and I’m not too keen on the pacing. It’s a little more stop and go than I’d like, and a tighter editing hand may have helped out with that. I’d also have liked to hear a dual commentary track, though geography apparently prevented that. Larry’s solo commentary is interesting, but I think that the best commentaries happen when a couple of people get a chance to talk over their decisions over the course of making the film.

Overall, though, it’s a fun movie to watch. The complete lack of dialogue has novelty value, but it also helps to show how storytelling can work. If anything, it reminds me of old Tom & Jerry pictures, where the acting was the action. It makes the movie more visually interesting than a lot of films, and well worth a watch. You can pick it up for ten bucks, plus shipping.

Grant Morrison gave a great interview to PopImage shortly after he left Marvel in 03/04. The whole thing is a good read, but my favorite bit is on page three:

As for all this talk I keep hearing about how ‘ordinary people’ can’t handle the weird layouts in comics – well, time for another micro-rant, but that’s like your granddad saying he can’t handle all the scary, fast-moving information on Top of the Pops and there’s really only one answer. Fuck off, granddad. If you’re too stupid to read a comic page, you shouldn’t be trying to read comic books and probably don’t. As creative people, I feel we need to call time on the relentless watering down of comics design and storytelling possibilities in some misguided attempt to appeal to people who WILL NEVER BE INTERESTED in looking at or buying hand-drawn superhero comic books.

This will surprise absolutely no one, but I agree with Grant here. No caveats, even. Even with the “if you’re too stupid to read a comic page, you shouldn’t be trying to read comics.” I didn’t like his “channel zapping” approach in Final Crisis. I don’t think it came off anywhere near as well as Morrison expected it to, but I could respect the idea behind it. I liked seeing a comic where the reader had to do a bit of the work and interpret what was going on themselves, and giant blocks of exposition were delivered in a way that wasn’t just a bunch of people standing in a room. If you think about why Wonder Woman, Batwoman, Catwoman, and Giganta are called Furies for half a second, you’ll get it. You don’t need that box that says “Wonder Woman is evil now, and leads the reincarnated Female Furies.”

Still, thoughts? Is Morrison being fair?

Remember Marvel’s plan to release Captain America #600 on a Monday due to mainstream press coverage? Here’s a reminder:

“REBORN #1, by Ed Brubaker and Bryan Hitch, will be receiving nationwide press on 6/15, possibly on par with the media coverage we received during Civil War.

However, this means that the solicit and covers for Reborn #1 cannot be shown before the FOC of 6/11. Marvel will do everything possible to ensure an overprint is on hand to counter huge anticipated demand, but the incentives below and qualifying for free variants will only be available for orders placed before FOC”

In essence, Marvel asked retailers to take a gamble. Open on Mondays, pay extra for shipping, and we will drive customers to your store by way of a big newspaper article. The NY Daily News ended up with the scoop. However, when I say scoop… I’m being sarcastic.

I’m going to put this behind a cut, because I’m sure someone, somewhere, is going to be upset that I’m about to spoil the least surprising reveal since Dick Grayson became Batman. Read the rest of this entry �

Number three is a little shorter than numbers one and two due to unavoidable technical difficulties (Thanks, Garageband!). However, we hit the ground running with couple of interesting conversations.

-We talk about the honor and nobility, or lack thereof, of certain types of supervillains. This leads to a conversation about why certain acts by villains cause fans to get worked up.
-What’s the secret connection between Megan Fox and Chuck Dixon? What does Wonder Woman have to do with torture? I don’t know, but I sure do make an amazingly ill-advised comparison between two of these!
-We get down to the nitty-gritty after (not much of a) smooth segue that and discuss the sex lives of two heroes: Connor Hawke and Wolverine.
-Having sex in front of your mom– cool or uncool?
-Guess which one hooked up with a ghost. Guess which one has a big ol’ pile of dead girlfriends.

As ever, you can listen or download to the podcast here on 4l!, subscribe to the podcast-specific RSS feed, or even subscribe on iTunes. If you dig us, review us!