Super Spy: The Lost Dossiers: Now found, along with various other material

Super Spy: The Lost Dossiers
By Matt Kindt

While this book might be billed as the second volume of a series, it's really more of a "DVD extras" bit of supplemental material, but for any fan of Matt Kindt's excellent graphic novel, it's essential reading, providing a glimpse at a few "deleted scenes", a bit of "making of" material, and some unrelated material (sketches inspired by movies, a story about a troupe of circus freaks) that might be unrelated to the espionage theme but still gives readers a chance to experience more of Kindt's similarly-styled work.  It's a slim volume, befitting its  status as a collection of odds and ends, but a fascinating one for those so inclined to experience it.

What's especially remarkable here is that Kindt's ability to craft compelling, realistic spy stories while weaving emotional threads into them and examining the human cost of a life dedicated to lies and murder remains even in such small doses.  A brief strip about a woman training to be a spy while planning to leave her husband is devastating, as is a brutally harsh tale involving a woman posing as a prostitute and helping a colleague make a prudent, but terrible decision.  A short story consisting only of seven panels (each covering one day of a week) sees a third woman use sex and trickery to help her side rain death down upon the other.  It's the same awful, affecting material Kindt covered so well in the original book, only a small example of what he is capable of, but no less impactful for its short length.

And in addition to the great storytelling on display here, Kindt's willingness to experiment and find new ways of telling stories using the comics form shines as well.  The aforementioned "seven days" story uses stereoscopic 3-D imagery, one tale is presented as an illustrated journal, the "carnival freaks" story is presented as a series of illustrations with text pieces written from the perspectives of each of the different characters, and Kindt even encourages readers to cut up the pages of one story in order to arrange them in the correct order for reading, along with fashioning a sort of pop-out comic using the image of a gun on the covers.  It's fun to read, even among all the emotional devastation.

This might be a sort of victory lap for Kindt, but he's earned it through dedication to his subject and pouring his soul into his characters, while still coming up with fun, fresh ideas about how to tell stories without sacrificing good storytelling and compelling characters.  If you're not already a Kindt fan, this book might not be strictly necessary, but it's required reading for those who were blown away by its predecessor, and it provides a great deal of anticipation for the many projects of Kindt's that are soon to come down the line.

Censorship! Or possibly prudish editing

Here's an interesting oddity from Peter Bagge's Other Lives.  In one scene, a character named Ivy is exploring the virtual "Second World", which seems to consist mostly of locales for online sex, and she comes across a disturbing sight:

Strangely, that second panel seems as if it has been enlarged and cropped, and the word balloon seems re-lettered, as if it was changed in "post-production".  What's the story here? Did Bagge go to far even for the "adult" imprint of Vertigo in his depiction of virtual perversion?  The world may never know, but we can always wonder, filling in the actions that bleed outside the panel borders with the worst depravities our minds can conjure.  Sweet dreams, everyone!

I still can't draw, but I can apparently trace

Here's an interesting project: Images Degrading Forever.  It's by Robin Blanchard, who, prompted by Matt Seneca of Death to the Universe (another interesting blog that I'll have to start reading), has posted five images from Dave Sim's Glamourpuss (Blanchard was featured in the 12th issue of the series), encouraging anybody and everybody to download and ink them, then send him the results.  He'll take the images people send and replace the originals with them, continuing to do so over and over, with the intent of making them, well, degrade forever.  I liked the idea, so I gave it a try with a drawing app on my Iphone, and here's the result:

There, now anybody who wants to try it has to draw over me!  This is a cool idea and a fun project, so I encourage anybody reading to give it a try.  Art!

Other Lives: Damn that newfangled internet!

Other Lives
By Peter Bagge

Peter Bagge's comics have an odd energy, delivered at a pitch for which "histrionic" would be too strong a word, but definitely more intense than reality, characters contorting their bodies over-expressively and making sure every feeling of theirs is known to the reader by explaining themselves to a great extent either by talking at length or filling thought balloons with their unspoken opinions about others.  It's a bit of an old-fashioned take on comics storytelling, probably standing out effectively against the wordy comics stories of decades past, but seeming kind of backward looking when compared to the increasing sophistication of the medium's current output.  And that's kind of fitting, considering Bagge's subject matter here, exploring the way the internet has affected people's social lives and personalities, but mostly bungling it by seeming to mistrust newfangled technology and dancing around the issue without saying much of anything.

Bagge does have the germ of a good idea here, but his exploration of it is pretty wrongheaded and unfocused.  The intent seems to be to look at people's perceptions of themselves both online and off, but the theme never coheres, focusing mostly on the character who uses the internet the least and veering off in other dramatic directions.  It doesn't help that none of the characters are at all likeable either, ranging from self-loathing and whiny to sociopathic.  Even if you're used to Bagge's usual hysterical body language, it's not an especially pleasant read.

Of those ugly characters, the main one here is one Vader Ryderbeck (a pseudonym for the too-ethnic Vlad Rostov), a journalist working on an article about the theme of the book, which allows him to introduce the "dual lives" subject but never delve very deeply into it, since Bagge is more interested in his personal life, including his family history, his relationship with his girlfriend, and his guilt about his past.  We never learn what he finds out or how he interprets it, although we do get to see some of it play out among people related to him, including Ivy, the aforementioned girlfriend; Woodrow, a divorced gambling addict who takes Ivy under his wing in "Second World", a fictional version of Second Life; and Javy, a mentally ill mama's boy who fancies himself a terrorist-busting cyber-cop.  None of these people have much in the way of redemptive qualities, with time spent with them making readers want to avoid contact with people online altogether (which might have been Bagge's goal).

Bagge seems to be trying for a more sweeping look at duality of personality, how people perceive themselves even when they disregard what they look like or how successful they are, exploring how assumed online personas can facilitate a blurring between fantasy and reality.  Woodrow and Javy seem to be the most negative looks at this idea, with the former presenting himself as a powerful king and unbeatable gambler online while his real life falls apart and becomes increasingly pathetic, and the latter becoming increasingly paranoid about terrorism and surveillance the more time he spends in virtual places that foster that sort of thinking.  Vader, on the other hand, has problems completely unrelated to the internet, unable to mentally progress beyond the disgust he feels at himself for a former weight problem and guilt over an act of plagiarism, along with a weird sense of entitlement that was taught to him by his grandfather, who was an aristocrat in pre-Communist Russia.  As for Ivy, she doesn't get much of a personality beyond being led around by either Vader or Woodrow, tagging along with the latter in Second World and waiting anxiously for Vader to get over his personal issues and marry her.  Unfortunately, Bagge seems most interested in Vader, exploring his emotional problems and issues with his father, which is interesting enough, but just distracts from the main theme.  There might be something there about people reinventing themselves and keeping secrets from others about parts of their lives they don't want to share, but it's just not integrated very well with everything else.

For anybody who has read a Bagge comic previously, his art should be familiar, with the usual noodle-limbed, gaping-mouthed expressiveness, every character slouched over and contorted into frantic emotion no matter the situation.  It works for the tone of the story, whether or not one agrees that said tone is the best choice.  There is a slight departure in scenes that take place in Second World, with the expressiveness dialed down to reflect the stiffness of CGI avatars, mouths usually remaining closed, and angles seeming a little less rounded (people even have elbows!).  In Bagge-world, it's about as cold and impersonal as things are going to get.

It's certainly not a perfect book, but fans of Bagge might enjoy it just for the chance to see his inimitable style. It's got plenty of problems though, and could have stood to be rewritten at the script stage, tightening up the plot, making the themes cohere a bit better, and maybe doing some more research on the subject rather than just proceeding from speculation.  If anything, it should make for an interesting relic of this particular moment in time (or really, that of about five years ago), when concerns about how the internet was changing society ran rampant.  That sort of frightened pontification already seems to be a thing of the past, as does the cultural cachet of virtual worlds like Second Life, now that everyone from middle-schoolers to grandparents maintain a presence on Facebook and Twitter.  A fascinating exploration of this subject could be made, but this certainly isn't it.

Curio Cabinet: Yes, that is a fairly apt title

Curio Cabinet
By John Brodowski

While the indie comics scene was once dominated by whiny autobiographical pieces in which cartoonists bored everyone with their not-very-interesting lives (or so went the stereotype circa 2003), it seems to have been taken over by fantastical inscrutability, perhaps due to the inexplicable acclaim lavished on Gary Panter.  John Brodowski's doesn't necessarily fit into that aesthetic, but judging by this collection of short, mostly wordless pieces, his work has its own strange incomprehensibility, often seeming based on inside jokes or something that makes sense to him and nobody else.  He does have an interesting style, but the reader will probably be left with a sense of confusion rather than be especially entertained.

Most of the stories here seem to present an idea, before veering off into bits of weirdness that might be engaging if they made much sense.  One story sees side-by-side examples of apparent awesomeness, with animals laying down in front of a hunter, ready to be slaughtered, while elsewhere a giant pipe organ opens up to reveal a hooded motorcyclist who races across a series of ramps and comes crashing through a stained-glass window.  The hunter and rider are then revealed to be two nerdy guys sitting at a table (maybe they were telling each other their cool story ideas?); their skin subsequently melts off, and the skeletons high-five each other, sending hand bones scattering.  And that's it.  Huh?  Most of the rest of the book is like that too: a guy spends years making a squirrel suit, eventually leaving his family to live in the wild; a couple is out picnicking when the man is scooped up by a giant wolf-headed bird and dropped off at a cave to fight monsters; a bagpiper plays a tune that causes a dinosaur to rise out of the ocean and melt a nearby army with its roars (and the help of a rock band); a couple 70s guys are cruising down the road when a giant dog's paw reaches in from outside the panels and scoops one of them out of the page entirely; and, in what could be an affecting tale if not for another head-scratching ending, a man spends his entire life working in a mine, aging from page to page, growing older, and forming a family, before wandering off one night with what appear to be plant-like aliens who move around via tank tracks attached to their pots.  Who knows what all this is supposed to mean, if anything at all aside from whatever surreal imagery popped into Brodowski's head.

It is certainly interesting to look at, for the most part, every page full of gray-washed imagery, lumpy, ugly people wandering about and encountering weirdness.  The monster designs are effective, and some of the bits of surreality really stand out alongside the stiffness of the characters, but everyone sports such strange, leering faces, looking like inbred freaks with protruding teeth and heavy brows; it's hard to empathize with the plights of any of these subhuman goofballs.  The only place this has much of any effect at all is in the aforementioned story about the miner; he sports a rictus-like grimace throughout, as if he's in constant pain, which befits an apparent unhappy life slaving away in darkness.  Another fairly effective use of Brodowski's stiff figures appears in the closest thing the book has to a framing sequence, a series of one-page strips bearing the title "Cus Mommy Said So", which see Jason, of the Friday the 13th film series, wandering aimlessly around the forest near the summer camp where he died.  As with the rest of the book, the continuing story has a non-ending, perhaps meant to be a sort of prologue to his first appearance as the villain of the films, but the blankness of his hockey-masked expression makes for a sort of pathos, as if he doesn't understand what to do now that he has been resurrected.

Perhaps I'm making this sound like an awful slog of a read, but that might just be my reaction to its unexplained strangeness.  For readers who enjoy stream-of-consciousness surreality, this is probably the perfect comic.  If that's you, more power to you, but I do prefer to be able to understand what I'm reading rather than just hoping it made sense in the creator's head.  Perhaps Brodowski will deliver something like that someday, but for now I'm calling his work a miss.

Young Lions: If I said I hated it, I'd be lyin'

Elsewhere: I wrote about the first part of the Fringe season finale over at The Factual Opinion.  Part two, coming up next.

Webcomics links: I thought the latest installment of Gabrielle Bell's Lucky was especially good. I particularly liked this panel,with its dripping shadows of anxiety:

I also thought this strip by Daryl Cunningham about Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the guy behind the anti-vaccination scam of recent years.  His non-fiction, medical-themed comics are always good.

And in a somewhat webcomic-related link, here's the site for Regular People, an animated short film that Colleen Frakes (Woman King, Tragic Relief, etc.) worked on, which you can donate to and receive fabulous rewards, if you like.

Young Lions
By Blaise Larmee

I'm not sure what to make of this book, but I do find it kind of fascinating, and interesting to try to figure out what creator Blaise Larmee is going for.  He seems to be an emerging comics talent, having been awarded the Xeric Grant for this book and maintaining a presence online, but his style is like nothing I've ever seen before, a sort of dreamlike, minimalistic look that doesn't seem to have much of a plot, seeming instead to be an attempt to capture a certain youthful feeling of ennui, a sense of being ready to take over the world, but not knowing what to do with that energy.  It's strange and unintuitive, but certainly pretty to look at.

What plot there is in the book follows a trio of kids who are members of a "conceptual art group", although what this means is never really explained.  One of them idolizes Yoko Ono, and another seems to be the leader, performing seance-like rituals at parties, but they don't seem to be out to accomplish much of anything or gain any recognition.  In fact, the main portion of the book sees them hook up with a fourth "member" and travel with her to spend time in a remote house in a secluded forest, and much of the time they just sit around, wandering through the trees and swimming in a lake.  And that's about all there is to it, with little in the way of development or conflict, but a sense of boredom and uncertainty about the future pervading.

So if plot isn't the draw, it must be the art, right?  That does seem to be the case, although Larmee has a non-showy style that seems to be trying to appear amateurish and half-finished.  It's a deliberately lo-fi approach, with every page looking like it has been photocopied multiple times, erased lines often visible, and the actual linework seeming like incomplete pencil drawings from a sketchbook:

Backgrounds are often nonexistent, leaving the characters stranded in an empty white void, and word balloons, which sometimes indicate a speaker but usually just hang in the air unattributed, fill with hand-lettered words that often flow in strange rhythms that don't always sync up from panel to panel, or just feature the lyrics of music that the characters are listening to/singing along with.  It all seems like a purposeful attempt to look unfinished, reflecting the characters' state of mind, but there's more to it than a bunch of scrawled sketches; the moments of beauty that come through are all the more powerful because of this approach.

That's what's really impressive here; Larmee fills pages with little more than characters lounging around contemplating life, and while most of these images aren't fully rendered, the occasional moment in which a true-to-life gesture or a wisp of tossed hair seems captured from life is breathtaking:

As is the rare panel in which background details get filled in, making for an eye-catching contrast to the minimalistic blankness of the rest of the book:

The characters themselves even seem to be the embodiments of this approach; Larmee stylizes them to an extent, giving them heads a bit too large for their bodies, making them look like children even younger than they actually are supposed to be, even drawing "blush" circles on one boy's cheeks like he's a Taiyo Matsumoto character, possibly intending to emphasize the fragility of youth, or maybe just ensuring readers see the characters as younger than themselves, no matter their age.  They don't quite seem real, except for when they suddenly do, making those moments all the more affecting.

In the end, I'm still not sure about this book, but I'll admit that it is a fascinating one, taking an unusual approach to storytelling (if you can call it that) and art, ending up being something that, if one is in the right frame of mind, can wash over you and leave a certain emotional stamp, a dredged up memory of a feeling of a moment that might or might not have actually taken place.  It's an ethereal experience, but one that doesn't immediately dissipate.  Larmee definitely has something to him, so hopefully this is just the beginning of what he has to offer.

Today's letter is apparently M

One link: I really like this short Wolverine story by Faith Erin Hicks.  It seems funny because of Wolverine complaining about people eating his eggs, but I like the way it demonstrates the small annoyances of living in a house with a bunch of young, obnoxious kids, along with having to fight ninjas everywhere he goes.  I just hope this isn't the story in this week's Girl Comics.  Not because it isn't fit for print, but because that would mean I only get one Hicks story this week instead of two.

Here's some (hopefully) shorter looks at stuff I read recently:

Market Day
By James Sturm



There's a profound sadness to this story of an old-world Jewish rug-maker who is in the process of getting forced out of his artisanal dedication to excellence by the encroaching modernity of mass production and increased trade.  One could read all sorts of commentary on current economics (or those of the past few centuries, probably), but I think it works really well as a character piece, a look at a religious man trying to express himself through his work and being dealt a harsh blow through no fault of his own.  While James Sturm's writing is wonderful, full of realistic interior narration that seems to change its mood along with the coming and going of the light throughout the course of the day the comprises the story, the art is what really works, keeping the characters relatably simplistic but fleshing out their world with lots of background detail.  The colors are especially exquisite, giving a dusty texture to the market and a green placidity to the fields, and the respectively hopeful and gloomy shadows of dawn and dusk lending weight and resonance to the character's plight.  This is a very good comic, if not one that will have readers celebrating the joy of life afterward.

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Mesmo Delivery
By Rafael Grampa

I've described Rafael Grampa as a cross between Geof Darrow and Frank Quitely before, but that's not telling the whole story.  He does have Darrow's exhaustive detail and Quitely's fluid motion, but there's also a bit of Paul Pope's expressively squiggly (yet completely controlled) linework, Anders Nilsen's stippled textures, and probably plenty of other influences.  Grampa has internalized this mixture of styles, however, and made it his own particular brand of comics awesomeness; he's not just aping what seems cool, but instead taking the learned techniques and creating something new and vibrant with them, making for a violent, action-packed story that's seems to transfer the specificity of his vision to the page.  He gets to add some of his own ideas to the fray as well, like the way the lyrics of Elvis' "A Little Less Conversation" swirl and weave their way through a character's dramatic entrance:



The story? It's about a dumb bruiser of a truck driver and his aging Elvis-impersonator partner stopping at a dive along their journey and getting in a fight with the locals, with some twists and turns along the way, but that all seems beside the point; the book is really about Grampa showing off his chops, crafting memorable depictions of the characters and filling pages with created imagery, from the signs and knick-knacks in the background of the diner to the dusty, deserted landscape surrounding it.  And that action!  Holy moley, one can spend inordinate amounts of time examining the frozen motions of bloody knuckles and flashing knives, the flying bodies and expressions of pain or panic on faces, the blood spurting everywhere.  It's glorious, beautiful stuff, like nothing ever seen before, but hopefully the type of thing we'll be able to witness a great deal more to come.
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Mysterius the Unfathomable
Written by Jeff Parker
Art by Tom Fowler

As good a writer of superheroes as Jeff Parker is, it's nice to see him branching out from the mainstream, spandex-clad corner of the comics world and doing something wholly original and creator-owned.  Teamed with Mad artist Tom Fowler, he's come up with something special here, following the adventures of a stage magician who is actually a powerful, immortal sorceror as he deals with a variety of supernatural threats, both to himself and the world at large.  That's a decent enough concept on its own, but Parker doesn't just have him meet a couple ghosts or solve a simple mystery; instead, he comes up with some killer ideas for him to battle, including a druidic cult leader with intentions toward godhood via some analogues to notorious real-life events, and a Dr. Seuss-ian children's book author whose rhymes are actually used to summon demonic creatures.  Those are both pretty great concepts, and Parker uses them to full effect, interweaving the threats as Mysterius and his assistant Delfi, the Dr. Who-style companion who acts as the requisite audience stand-in and sounding board for exposition, bounce between crazier and crazier events, pausing only to manage some character development that only seems slightly tacked on.  Mysterius is a self-centered bastard, but his jerkiness is mostly underplayed, making a somewhat melodramatic confrontation between the two leads at the climax seem a bit out of place, but it's not a dealbreaker in any way, only a slight hiccup on a wonderfully scenic trip.

And yes, the scenery is to die for; Tom Fowler's caricture-style art is expressive and fun, full of characters in motion and panel layouts that get all curvy and crooked when things turn weird, scenes filled out in a way that makes sense spatially even if everything is more cartoony and exaggerated than in the real world.  The characters are beautifully defined, all rounded bodies atop spindly legs, bulging potbellies on the men and big, shapely rear ends on the women.  But the monsters are where he really excels, coming up with some freakishly weird and gross creatures that really do seem like twisted, malevolent versions of the goons that show up in kids' books, if not specifically those of Dr. Seuss.  The coloring, by Dave McCaig, really helps to sell this, giving their hellish dimension a bright, unearthly hue, while also choosing the perfect shade of washed-out grey for a different, more barren circle of hell, and some murderous reds and oranges for the final battle.  It's a really nice-looking book; when Parker is paired with the right artist, he really makes the best of the collaboration, with the two of them bringing out the best in each other.  This is a fun, scary, exciting, ambitious book, and hopefully it's only the first volume in a continuing series, since while one volume is fun, more of these characters and these sorts of stories from Parker and Fowler would be quite welcome.

Wilson: No wonder he was so grumpy at Dennis

Wilson
By Daniel Clowes

Interestingly, in this latest graphic novel from Daniel Clowes, he seems to be attempting to explore the "Clowes character" archetype, or at least present it in an unfiltered manner, without softening it with any sort of lovability.  No, the titular fellow is a pure bastard, opinionated, cantankerous, and ready to offer his opinion on everything he sees, while ignoring any faults of his own.  He's a middle-aged fellow, divorced, jobless, with apparently his only friend in the world (aside from an unnamed person he occasionally talks to on the phone) being his dog.  In the first panel of the book, he claims to love people, but almost immediately yells at somebody for talking too much.  He then goes on to profess interest in his fellow man, the city he lives in, and his parents and their history, only to turn around and complain about something else.  He looks down on everyone he meets, always finding something to ridicule, whether it's working on a laptop at a coffee shop, using abbreviations like "I.T.", or simply not making a fuss over the cuteness of his dog.  It's almost ridiculous how much Clowes paints him as a pathetic asshole, as if he's trying to see if it's possible to craft a completely unlikeable character and still see if he can get readers on his side.

The misanthropy of his main character is only one of the barriers that Clowes sets up for himself; he adds another by making each page of the book its own standalone strip, a moment in Wilson's life that is more often than not punctuated by a punchline.  The pacing of strips is quite regular in its Charles Schulz-like rhythm, only instead of ending strips with Snoopy saying "Bleah!", we get Wilson shouting obscenities at someone.  And to make things more interesting, each strip is presented in a different art style, cycling through Clowes' various techniques, including ugly, pimple-faced "realism"; noir-ish shadows; big-nose cartooniness; minimalistic, Ivan Brunetti-like figures, monochromatic simplicity; brightly-colored cutesiness; and so on.  It's kind of fascinating to see what comes next on each page, but it's not arbitrary; the styles match the tone of each individual moment, using newspaper-strip-like repeated imagery for scenes in which Wilson stays in one spot delivering a hateful monologue, then switching to a more colorful, fluid look for a strip requiring movement, or close-up images of awkward faces for an emotional scene.  It's a good way to keep the story interesting when following a mostly unchanging character.

That's not to say that Clowes doesn't give Wilson anything to do; instead, we see him go through something of a mid-life crisis, as he flies cross-country for his father's funeral, decides to seek out his ex-wife, and ends up finding out he has a daughter he never knew about (Spoiler? The back-cover blurb describes him as a father, so it's not that big of a surprise).  Through all this, he stays the same, or at least maintains the same outward appearance, always finding something to complain about and refusing to budge when his beliefs are challenged.  Clowes still manages to convey some inner development though, which is especially impressive given the irregular art.  By the end of the book, Wilson is an old man, and while he's still a cranky bastard, he seems to have softened somehow, if only in the desperation for some sort of human connection that comes through in his eyes.

Is this all simply an exercise for Clowes, a way to set up interesting artistic hurdles and see if he can clear them? Perhaps, but it still ends up being an interesting character exploration, a challenging way to look at somebody who is so external and see if it is possible to gain some insight into his thoughts and emotions and make people empathize with him.  And the amazing thing is, he accomplishes just that, giving a simplistic misanthrope a rich life and making readers care about what happens to him, or at least want to go along for the ride.  As with so many of Clowes' characters, we might not want to meet them in real life, but we can't tear our eyes away from their on-page adventures, and we feel like we've met somebody real afterward, no matter how ridiculous and unlikeable they might seem at the outset.  It's a strange alchemy that Clowes wields, but he's honed it to perfection over the years, so we'd best just let him work his magic and come away satisfied.