Bloody Pulp is the latest offering from Jeff McComsey and Jorge Vega. McComsey is one of the brains behind American Terrorist, which is available now on G1 and soon on iPhone. Its subtitle says it all: “Confession of a Human Smart Bomb.” Jorge Vega is the guy behind Gunplay, a book on vengeance in the Old West that I thoroughly enjoyed last year. Together, they have created Bloody Pulp.

Bloody Pulp has a few of my favorite things. It’s got crime and fisticuffs, for one. The lead is John “Pulp” Polopowski, who is brilliantly described in the synopsis on the Zuda site as “a nightmare for hire.” That’s an inspired description, and from what I’ve seen of Bloody Pulp, it’s true. When you need someone to be thoroughly beaten and disposed of, Pulp is your man.

The twist, of course, is that he isn’t entirely on the level. He’s been secreting people away to a safe house, rather than killing them. It’s kind of like witness protection through a funhouse mirror, only someone might beat you to death for disobeying the rules.

The hook is the arrival of Eustace, “a Negro bandleader”. The synopsis promises that sparks are going to fly due to his presence, and I’ve got the good word from Jorge that says he’s going to dig into the race and class issues of the ’30s. I’m definitely interested.

We’ve got eight pages to look at on ZudaComics.com. Check it out and, if you like it, vote for it on the site. As things currently stand, Jeff and Jorge are ranked #1. If they maintain that position, they get a slot on the Zuda site. The eight pages were just enough to get me interested, and Jorge and Jeff’s prior work were pretty solid. I’m going to be taking a look at a couple of their books, specifically American Terrorist and 9 Months, very soon.

In the meantime, though, you need to vote for Bloody Pulp and tell your friends.

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.

The Best of Simon and Kirby
Joe Simon & Jack Kirby, edited by Steve Saffel
240 pages, 9″x12 1/4″

Titan Books

I’m a Kirby fan.

It’s obvious if you know me, I think. I love the Captain America & the Falcon stuff he did, I love the New Gods, and I think that his character design is top notch. Of course, all of my favorite Kirby work was created after he’d become Jack “King” Kirby. This was late era Kirby, if you go by the length of his career.

Early Kirby, the raw stuff from the beginning of his career, is mostly a mystery to me. I have one of Marvel’s Visionaries hardcovers that collects a lot of it, like the Two-Gun Kid stuff, and it’s pretty fascinating. A lot of what made Kirby Kirby was there in the text, though in an unpolished form.

Titan Books recently released The Best of Simon and Kirby, a volume collecting a lot of those issues that I’ve never seen. I’ve got to say that they did a stellar job with it. It’s oversized (essentially a coffee table book), printed on non-glossy paper, and a real work of art. The extra size really lets you get into the art, which is part of the point of this book.

Joe Simon and Jack Kirby were a team for years, and worked in a variety of genres. This volume collects stories featuring superheroes, criminals, and (the deep, dark secret of Kirby & Simon) stories from the original romance book, Young Romance. I’d known that Kirby had a hand in popularizing romance comics, and it’s nice to finally get a chance to read them.

The Best of Simon and Kirby also reprints a couple of titles from DC and Marvel. Captain America, The Vision (the old one), Sandman, and a Boy Commandos tale wrap up the Big Two work in this book.

I really, really like this book. It’s a historical collection, but the way it’s presented is as more of a conversation piece. Each genre gets a chapter break in the form of a short essay that also doubles as a biography of the careers of each man. It’s conversational in tone, and detailed enough to educate you about a time you rarely hear about. It makes it easy to burn through the book, too, since it provides an easy stopping point for each genre. I spent a couple of days knocking out a series of stories before bed.

The most striking thing about this book, I think, is how un-Kirby a lot of it looks. The thick lines and insane layouts that dominated Kirby’s later work are present in the occasional story here, but most of the work isn’t as undeniably “Kirby” as, say, the Fourth World volumes. My first thought is to say that it was Joe Simon’s inking that makes it look so different, but something I keep forgetting is that a lot of these stories were over twenty years old before Kirby put pen to paper on Fantastic Four #1. Over the course of twenty or thirty years, anyone’s style would, and should, change around a little bit.

The Best of Simon and Kirby is forty bucks, which is a little pricey, but worth every penny to Kirby and Simon fans, or even people interested in comics history.

One of my favorite games, from both a story and a gameplay standpoint, is Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. I played through it on either Xbox or PS2, I forget which, but it was a great time. The gameplay combined platforming mechanics and traditional combat to create a kind of gameplay that was extremely fun. The enemies provided a way for the Prince to make his platforming easier, turning creatively acrobatic combat into a crucial gameplay component.

Where the game really shined for me, however, was the story. Shortly before the end of the game, you find out that the game you’ve just played, deaths and all, was not a game– it was a story that the Prince was telling Princess Farah, the daughter of the Maharajah. There are a number of twists involved, but what it boils down to is that, due to an error, the princess died. The Prince reversed time, and now he must convince her of what happened and save her life. So, he told her the story of his adventure.

This wasn’t exactly out of the blue. The Prince narrates the game, and every time you died, he’d say something to the effect of, “No, that’s not how it happened,” and begin again from just before your death. It turned the story of the game into a story within the game, and it’s a plot twist that I greatly appreciated. If anything, it heightened my love for the game and hooked me for life.

First Second Books released a Prince of Persia graphic novel late last year. I picked it up and read it a couple months after release, but never really got around to talking about it on here.

Rather than do a straight adaptation of any of the handful of Prince of Persia titles, writers Jordan Mechner and AB Sina and artists LeUyen Pham, Alex Pulvilland, and Hilary Sycamore instead told a tale that spanned two timelines under the loose umbrella of being about a “prince of Persia.” There is a nice nod early in the novel to the way that the Prince of Persia series has changed over the years. A king calls for his son, the prince, but all three of his children, two sons and a daughter, come together, rather than the prince he wanted. When quizzed about why they all came, they respond, “For I am the prince!”

In a way, I enjoyed Prince of Persia more due to Sands of Time. They both showed a deft way of telling their story in a way that I didn’t expect at the time. The story takes place over two timelines, and they tend to blend in and out of each other as the book goes on. It can be confusing, but not in an off-putting manner. It simply gives the book a different tone than I’d expected. It’s much more whimsical, or fairy tale-like, in tone than a straight up adventure novel. It isn’t quite magical realism. Everything that happens fits within the story and is perfectly believable. However, there is a definite dream-like quality to the story.
Read the rest of this entry �

Hunter.

I’m a huge fan of Darwyn Cooke, which should come as no surprise to anyone who reads 4l!. I’m also a big fan of Payback’s Straight Up Director’s Cut, one of the few Mel Gibson movies I still watch on purpose. I first saw it when I was a kid and enjoyed it, but the new cut makes it more true, in tone at least, to Richard Stark/Donald Westlake‘s The Hunter. This series is about an unrepentant criminal getting into situations that sometimes involve evil actions to get out of, which basically makes it right up my alley as far as story concepts go.

So, what’s all this got to do with Darwyn Cooke? I’m a fan of a lot of things, but rarely do things that I’m a big fan of intersect like they are going to when Darwyn Cooke draws an adaptation of Richard Stark’s The Hunter. That link contains a link to the preview, which is a downloadable PDF.

What I’m trying to say is that you need to read this, or else you’ll hate yourself forever. The release date can’t come fast enough.

A bit of an update from my side of things. A few days ago, my computer up and died. Died as in going to a shutdown and restart screen upon turning on the computer. Hard drive had died of old age and you honestly couldn’t care about any of this.

The short of it is that for several days, I was without computer. This was infuriating for two reasons. One, I was unable to watch the full 2 and a half minute version of the Spongebob Got Back Burger King commercial. Two, I have been completely unable to get any writing done. Which means that the Deadpool countdown thingy will be delayed, though probably no longer than a day or so. That’s not too bad, right?

During my forced Amishness, I dove back into my collection of Essential Power Man and Iron Fist. Coming back to this here site, I found that hermanos posted several pages from it. Feh. If you want a REAL example of how great that comic was, look no further than this:

Haha, Iron Fist is such a dork.

Anyway, the Deadpool thing should hopefully be up sometime Saturday night/Sunday morning.

I keep trying to think of an appropriate goodbye for 100 Bullets.

In the past year, I’ve lost The Wire, The Shield, and Garth Ennis’s Punisher MAX. After this past Wednesday, 100 Bullets is gone, too. That’s four great pieces of crime fiction, or noir, or whatever, gone in just under a year. It sucks, but they all got to tell their story to the very end. 100 Bullets is probably my favorite of the four, or at least it is right now, and I have this driving need to pay homage to it somehow.

An issue-by-issue, or trade-by-trade, retrospective sounds so unbearably pat and boring that I just can’t do it. I wouldn’t get anything out of it, and neither would you. I think instead, I’m going to do something different from what I usually do.

100 Bullets, 100 moments. I’ve said before that many moments from 100 Bullets stick out in my memory. I skimmed through all 100 issues and found 100 moments I thought I’d share.

The twist is that these aren’t going to be your usual scans_daily-style “Aw man that rules look how awesome that dude is there doing that awesome thing.” 100 Bullets excels in that Azzarello’s words, Risso’s art, and Mulvihill’s colors mesh into an amazing thing. They build characters, whether that character is a person or a city or a car. The storytelling comes from an odd angle, whether it’s from above meathooks or beneath a table.

So, here’s the plan. Five days. Twenty moments a day. I say moments, as there are a few that are full pages, but most of these are just single panels. I’ll put links at the top for the trades represented, but no commentary is coming otherwise. Just panels, posted in chronological order, that show the team at work. There will be cursing, maybe some violence, who knows.

Fans feel free to chime in down in the comments. I’m sure that a lot of these will kick up memories for you. On Saturday, I’m going to do my big 100 Bullets post to close out the week. If you don’t know 100 Bullets, this won’t spoil much, if you care about that kind of thing.

Ten new headers are up, too, to commemorate 100 Bullets week. Check out the whole series on Amazon here, and I’ll catch you in the morning.

Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s 100 Bullets #100 drops today, and it’s the end of the series. I’m planning on picking my copy after work.

I’m kind of sad about it, but a different kind of sad than I was when I finished the first issue of Flash: Rebirth. Rebirth was a signal that the DC Universe is moving in a direction that is pointedly Not For Me. The end of 100 Bullets is the end of a series that was definitely, 100%, absolutely aimed directly at my temple.

100 Bullets started before I got back into comics, and to be honest, I’m not sure exactly when I started it. I think it’s Thomas Wilde’s fault, and skimming covers and wracking my brain leads me to believe that I began picking it up regularly during the Chill in the Oven arc, mid-2003. I know that I read the first arc, then Counterfifth Detective, and then started over again from the beginning.

Since then, I’ve bought every issue and every trade, something I rarely do. Double-dipping is a sucker’s move, but I dig the series enough that I didn’t mind paying twice. While looking over the covers, I was struck with memories ofa series of moments from the series. The Saddest Thing in the NOLA arc, Cole’s one-shot, the peckerwood joke in Chill in the Oven, the history lesson in issue 50, Lono and Loop’s discussion of the d-spot, Victor Ray indulging himself on a mission by doing the Frank Castle thing, Graves losing it when someone important dies, Dizzy’s ascendance, Lono’s look as he realizes that he killed a friend, the teenage pregnancy drama that plays a background role to Graves telling a mother exactly why her daughter died, Remi Rome going from amazing character to my most hated and back around again, the way that Loop’s dad was Mr. Hughes to the Minutemen, never ‘Curtis.’ Dave Johnson’s amazing covers.

These are just moments in the series. The moments build to the story arcs. Dizzy going from hood rat to high class. Loop learning how to be a man via Graves’ guilt over how Loop’s father was treated. The reconnection and dissolution of the Minutemen once again. The fall of the Trust.

It’s a series I’m very fond of, and was hands-down the best comic of the week each and every time. It’s one that rewards repeat readings, and even readings where you skip all of the words and just take in Eduardo Risso’s art. It made me a believer in Vertigo in a way that Sandman and the rest of the boring fantasy books that’d previously made up the bulk of Vertigo didn’t.

100 Bullets was, for me, a Thing. It’s the only comic I’ve bought for six years straight, month-in, month-out. It was my only mainstay, and now it’s gone. I think the comics world will be poorer without it. I can’t think of a comic I’ve enjoyed as consistently as 100 Bullets. I can’t even think of a creator who’s delivered as consistently as Azz and Risso have.

100 Bullets is The Symphony. It’s talented creators dropping in, doing some amazing work, and dropping out, leaving the track, or the genre, or the industry, or their peers, a drooling and shuddering mess. It’s Wu-Tang Forever, with RZA’s arrogant insistence at the end of Bells of War, halfway through Disc Two, that Wu-Tang Forever is so ahead of its time that “niggas ain’t gonna figure it out til the year Two-G.” It’s Raekwon on The Closing on the same record, explaining that he looks at other emcees and realizes that they’re going to stay garbage because they don’t know any better.

Azzarello and Risso’s 100 Bullets is a challenge. It’s saying, “Look, we did this. This is us. Ante up.”

I’ll be sorry to see it go. I keep thinking that I want to do this big, bang-up, blow-the-doors-off outrospective, but I don’t even know if I know where to start or if I even should. Luckily, Tucker’s got an Off the Shelf for us, and I hope to see Matthew Brady writing about it, too. I really enjoyed his Monster series, though I don’t think I ever remembered to link to it, and I know he’s a fan. I’m curious to see what kind of send-off the best comic book to come out of Time Warner will receive.

100 Bullets is 13 volumes, and pretty cheap on Amazon. You can catch each volume for around ten bucks new, less from a third-party seller. In fact, the first book’s like five bucks right now. Links below. If you haven’t started, you should. I’m not at all exaggerating when I say that it’s easily my favorite comic, and one of the most rewarding I’ve ever picked up. Click here to look at the entire 100 Bullets catalog on Amazon.

I fell out of love with Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series. I thought the first volume was strong, the second volume less so, and I don’t think I even finished The Black Dossier. I’d changed or the series changed, I’m not entirely sure. It just wasn’t my thing. The series has moved to Top Shelf now, and the beginning of the fourth volume drops in April.

I gave the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume a look. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1910 #1 (of 3) is a mouthful to say and a handful to read. It’s the first third of the new LoEG story, and, as the title suggests, takes place in 1910. The story itself will take place over the course of the 20th century, but this particular tale takes what seems like a very short period of time.

There are a few principal characters in the story. Jenny, daughter of Captain Nemo, has forsaken her father and his wishes for her life and gone to live in London. Rather than a life of luxury or spent lopping the heads off pirates, she ends up washing dishes and scrabbling for a living. Life sucks, in other words.

Mina is back and she’s leading this incarnation of the League. The team (which includes Allan Quatermain Jr. [a rejuvenated Quatermain], Anthony Raffles, and Orlando) is investigating a possible apocalypse, and doing a so-so job of it. There’s some light infighting within the group, and Mina seems constantly frustrated with her team, which provides some fairly interesting tension.

Finally, there is Mac the Knife, the real Jack the Ripper, a secret cabal, and a crew of unnamed and fairly sinister London citizens.

The various stories progress separately, before coming together shortly before the end of the book. It’s a tried and true storytelling device, and one that serves to make the entire book feel like it isn’t just a few completely disconnected stories. On a higher level, it ties into the three-issue structure of Century itself, and makes me assume that we’ll get a similar payoff once it’s all done.

O’Neill’s art, even in the b&w proof I was sent, is still stellar. The same attention to detail that he’s put into his past work, including previous LoEG volumes. Evil schemers look about as they should, Mina’s almost permanent exasperation with her team comes through very clearly, and the action scenes are gory and shocking.

Todd Klein’s lettering, as well, is definitely up to par. Lettering is tough for me to critique– if the letterer does his job, as Klein has done here, it adds a lot to the book, but in an intangible, “no duh” kind of way. It’s easier to talk about a bad lettering job than it is a good one, and Klein does a good job here.

Moore’s writing still strikes me as very well-crafted and good, if not a little distant. I don’t know that I left the book truly caring about any of the characters, though I was definitely invested in their adventures. There’s just something intangible there that still doesn’t quite work for me.

One thing I enjoy about Moore and Grant Morrison is that they expect a lot out of their readers. Morrison expects you to keep up and take things in stride, and Moore expects you to know a lot. I came away feeling entertained, but a little dumb. I can get by with Morrison’s ultramodern take, but here is what I know about early 1900s British pop culture: nothing.

LoEG is stacked with references, many of them I’d never heard of. I caught the obvious ones, such as Nemo, Mina Murray, and Jack the Ripper, but Pirate Jenny and a few others caught me flat-footed. Regardless, I kept going, making the effort to put some extra thought into the book, and made a mental note to look up the names on Wikipedia once I finished.

Despite the light feeling of being a little lost, which actually added a lot to the experience of reading the book, I found LoEG: Century: 1910 a rewarding read. At its most shallow level, it’s a comic about some pretty awesome pirates and early 1900s secret agents. Of course, since it’s a book written by Alan Moore, there are a number of levels that you can enjoy the work on. It even works as a primer for British literature. If you liked reading about Orlando or Raffles, google them up and check out the old tales.

LoEG: Century: 1910 shows what happens as a group begins the long, slow spiral into oblivion (or so I assume), and clearly sets up some things for the future, as well. There are parts that made me pretty uncomfortable, particularly a certain act set to song toward the end of the book, and parts I enjoyed, such as exactly what happens when the League meets up with a secret society.

I don’t think that it’s perfect, but it does give me the feeling I remember getting back when I read the first LoEG book. It feels new, in equal parts due to the fact that I’m not very experienced with the characters introduced in this volume and because there is a very interesting story being slowly unfolded. I’m very curious to see where Moore and O’Neill take it next, both on a story and a “spot the reference” level.

Steven T. Seagle and Tim Sale’s The Amazon is an interesting tale, both from a story perspective and a historical one. It began life in 1989 at publisher Comico. This was a huge surprise to me, as I’d off-handedly assumed that Seagle got his start writing X-Men for Marvel. Regardless, The Amazon was their attempt at the comic books for adults that were arriving back in the day.

The Amazon was intended to raise some awareness about the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest via comic books. The narrator of the story is a journalist, Malcolm Hilliard, looking for a story. He finds his story in the form of an American man who has gone native with the local tribesmen and begun sabotaging the equipment. Hilliard plays the role of skeptic, refusing to believe in the superstitions of the local workers, and seeker of truth.

The original run of Amazon was colored, but this re-issue has been re-colored by Matt Hollingsworth, who does a fascinating job of making the Tim Sale of 20 years ago look similar to the Sale of 2009. The color scheme ranges from vibrant, but subdued, jungle to gloomy sunsets. Hollingsworth is one of the industry’s all-time greats, and was a great choice over Sale’s pencils.

I’m not sure how much, if any, reconstruction went on with Tim Sale’s pencils and inks for the re-issue, but the art is still sharp. The book is largely made up of detailed landscapes and talking heads, and Sale does a solid job of rendering it all. He sells the expressions on the faces of the suspicious foreman, drinking workmen, and Hilliard.

Sale also does some fairly cool storytelling and panel composition work. The majority of the book is made up of horizontal panels, maybe four to a page on average. When we finally get to see our renegade American, the composition switches to page-tall vertical panels, emulating the experience of looking between trees in the jungle. There is also a particularly good panel that has a character hidden in the jungle, visible only by figuring out that a certain shadow isn’t.

Seagle’s done a solid job on the writing. The storytelling is separated into three tiers. There’s the standard dialogue, Hilliard’s internal monologue, and his article. The three intermix and coexist, and build an interesting picture of both Hilliard’s personality and distance between his own thoughts and how he approaches journalism.

The story definitely feels like the first chapter in a longer story, and may read better in trade, but this first issue is far from poor. Seagle does a good job building up the main character, setting up the conflicts, and even sneaking in a bit of education regarding the Amazon without coming across overly preachy.

I dug the first issue, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the series shakes out. If I hadn’t been told, I never would’ve guessed it was close to twenty years old. It’s well worth a look.