h1

Best of 2010: From My Two Favorite Genres

January 4th, 2011 Posted by david brothers

Acme Novelty Library 20, Afrodisiac, American Vampire, It Was the War of the Trenches, King City, Parker: The Outfit, Pluto, Thunderbolts, Twin Spica, Vagabond 9


jacques tardi – it was the war of the trenches

I’ve liked war comics since I was a kid. My uncle had some Sgt Rocks that I tore through, sometimes literally, and I thought the action was really great. I liked normal people doing things, and being in a military family, it was cool. Not enough about the USAF, I figure, but good enough. Garth Ennis adjusted my view of war comics years later, by focusing on the people, rather than the action.

It Was The War of the Trenches works in that same lane of emotion over action. Tardi delivers several short anecdotes about World War I, with large panels and clean rendering. He’s not doing anything particularly flashy, but he is creating an effective and believable world.

The characters in the book are transient and almost anonymous, with only their names and locations separating them. We get a brief moment to get to know them before being subjected to the horror or inanity of war. Men die screaming for days upon days, others are shot for having human reactions, and still others let themselves become monsters. We don’t see the Germans all that often, but when they do appear, they’re just as normal as the French.

That anonymity works in the book’s favor, particularly in terms of delivering the book’s point about war. You’re left feeling like you just read about the same person experiencing several different events, trapped in a hell not of his own making. It Was the War of the Trenches isn’t as mean as something like Kyle Baker’s Special Forces, which just laid on the sarcasm so thick you can read it as being played perfectly straight. It is, though, a mean book, one with no patience for the ideas of glory in war, a just war, or any war, period. Nobility? Honor? Patriotism? It’s all a joke, and the punchline is dying while trying to hold your own guts in, weeping quietly and asking for your maman.

Tardi depicts war as a faceless meat grinder, one that destroys you and your loved ones regardless of how they feel and who they are. There’s very little in the book that tops the scene where a man who is clearly a vet is battered by a crowd who is angered by his talk of peace. It’s that sort of thing, that willingness to stand behind nationalism and send your boys off to war, that Tardi opens up and dissects. No one’s happy to be in this war. They’re tired, filthy, and sick of dying. And in the end, who wins the war doesn’t matter, because everyone who fought it is dead.

darwyn cooke – parker: the outfit

I bought The Outfit the day before New York Comic-Con. I’d intended to read it on the plane, but things didn’t work out. Instead, I read a third of it sitting on the convention floor, the final third elsewhere, and the middle third during one of Marvel’s panels. I’d finished copying down whatever scant news they’d generated and gotten the post ready to go by about halfway through the panel. Corporate panels are mostly boring, though, especially the Q&A parts, so I figured I’d wrap up a book that I was enjoying.

I think I hit the part in the middle, Book Three, while Peter David was talking about some comic I don’t read. And everything tuned out after that, because I was hooked. This is how comics should work. They can take something very simple, like two men robbing a night club or the life of a crime boss, and turn it into something incredible. It doesn’t have to be something with gutters or melodramatic dialogue. The art doesn’t have to stay the same throughout, as long as the shift makes sense thematically.

Cooke shifts styles several times in Book Three. Structured mostly under the concept of “The Lowdown,” a weekly crime mag, Cooke details several heists and they each get their own style. One’s a novel excerpt (positioned as a true crime story) with spot illos. Another looks like a those goofy cartoons where everyone’s face is always facing the camera and grotesque. Styles upon styles upon styles is what he has.

The contrast between what I was reading and the announcements I’d just written down for Marvel were striking. The Outfit is based on a novel that’s over forty years old, but it was full of old ideas made fresh and clean. The experimentation in format took those ideas and fired them at your face, rocketing off the pages at escape velocity. Mean, vicious, and undeniable.

The Outfit isn’t a graphic novel. It’s not even just a good story, another solid graphic novel from a guy who already has more quality under his belt than most people get. It’s a classroom. It’s a lesson in storytelling, in how to put together a comic, and how far you can stretch the formula before it isn’t a comic any more.

Here’s the answer: it will always be a comic. Comics can do anything. All you have to do is stretch.

Post to Twitter Post to Facebook Post to Reddit Post to StumbleUpon

h1

The Cipher 12/22/10

December 22nd, 2010 Posted by david brothers

Sittin’ in the mornin’ sun, I’ll be sittin’ when the evenin’ come
created: Oh yes, we’re still going strong with this Digital December ish on CA.

DC Comics! IDW launching something new! Marvel Comics and their vault! I also contributed #s 7 and 4 to the Best of the Year over there. King City and The Outfit, of course. Who loves you, baby?

-Anyone notice which question almost everyone skipped? Pay attention. There will be a quiz, and after the quiz comes beatings.

-Over at TFO’s Best Music countdown, I chipped in number 14 (Gorillaz, “Stylo”), definitely one of my favorites this year. I’ve got another song coming and I’m really happy with how that review turned out, plus a bigger piece that I’m collabing with somebody on. Yes.


Watching the ships roll in
consumed: I’m about to consume a bunch of burgers, hot dogs, corn on the cob, and steaks, but I gotta cook them first, right? So pardon if these are short. I’ve got 4th of July BBQ for Christmas Eve Eve Eve to get to.

-Warren Ellis’s Supergod: Sucks, manages to combine several of Ellis’s worst tics into one terrible, poorly paced, and clunky story.

-I played some more Persona 4. I’m back burnering it for a couple months, though, since I think I’m close to the end.

Boardwalk Empire is good!

-Newsarama’s poll probably should’ve been better thought out.

-Paul Cornell and Gail Simone have both done some pretty net-pleasing things lately. Using “mansplaining” like that’s a word people should say out loud, getting revenge for Ryan Choi. Ehhh. I’m not down with all the pandering. Just do good stories, that’ll please us plenty. Those of us that aren’t insane, anyway. Cheap pop is just that, so don’t be that guy.

-I listened to a lot of Dungeon Family apparently.

-New music and books are on pause while I work this Digital December thing, not counting new Rock Band songs for extracurricular activities. Plus, next week, Amazon should have some crazy music deals for me to indulge in, so I don’t need to be buying new stuff anyway.

-With that said, I bought the new Ghostface for five bucks and reread Darwyn Cooke’s The Outfit and Graham’s King City (three or four times on that last one, actually).

-Marty’s review of Gil Scott-Heron’s new album is great.

-Spurgeon has interviewed Matt Seneca and Joe Casey. These are always worth a read.

-Dirk Deppey has been laid off from TCJ, and he was kind enough to mention us in his outgoing post. I really do appreciate that, because when I was first getting into blogging, it was Dirk and Tom and Graeme and Heidi who I learned the most from. Curious to see what he does after taking a couple weeks off.

-These burgers ain’t gonna grill themselves, so let me see what I can do to wrap this up real quick…

-[Generic dismissive thought about Marvel’s upcoming Fear Itself event]

-[Clarification that I love Stuart Immonen and that I hope it makes him eleventy million bucks]

-[But on the real, you’re sick if you think I’m buying a seven part event at four bones a pop]

-[CEOutro]


And then I watch ’em roll away again, yeah
David: Batman, Inc. 2, Hellblazer 274
Esther: Batman/Superman #79, Batman Incorporated #2 Possible: Batman Annual #28, Green Lantern: Larfleeze Christmas Special
Gavin: Azrael 15, Batman Incorporated 2, Green Lantern Corps 55, Green Lantern Larfleeze Christmas Special 1, Justice League Generation Lost 16, Chaos War Dead Avengers 2, Deadpool 30, Deadpool Pulp 4, Incredible Hulks 619, Namor First Mutant 5, Punisher In Blood 2, Secret Avengers 8, What If Dark Reign, Incorruptible 13

Post to Twitter Post to Facebook Post to Reddit Post to StumbleUpon