Octopus Pie: That sounds disgusting

Elsewhere: I reviewed the graphic novel A God Somewhere over at IndiePulp.  It's not bad, but don't go in expecting the next Watchmen.  It's more like a decent human story with a really violent superhero thing wedged in the middle.  Worth a read though.

Octopus Pie: There Are No Stars in Brooklyn
By Meredith Gran

Webcomics come in all shapes and flavors these days, from short gag strips, to serialized storylines (comic and serious), to full-on graphic novels posted a page at a time, to experiments pushing the limits of the medium.  There's a ton of content out there to be found, but one can rest assured that the quality material is going to rise to the top and gain deserved recognition, considering the vast numbers of readers, fans, and commentators paying attention to what's available.  That seems to be the case with Meredith Gran and Octopus Pie, her slice-of-life strip (which fits into the "serialized story, with each page functioning as a stand-alone strip" format) about two roommates living in Brooklyn and having wacky adventures.  The series is available to read in its entirety online, but the first two years have now been collected in this volume, an oddly square-shaped affair that adds blank space above and below each rectangular strip and prints the originally black-and-white art in a sickly green ink.  It's a weird presentation, but it's still an enjoyable read, although it takes a little bit to really get going. At first, it's a fairly standard gag-a-day strip, following uptight twentysomething Eve, who begins the book looking for a roommate and gets set up with a childhood friend by her mom.  The friend, Hannah, in a wild and crazy twist, is a pot-smoking nutjob, always causing trouble and making a big ruckus, like those lovable stoners are prone to do.  And so the story goes for a while, ambling along with goofy plots and slowly introducing a supporting cast (Hannah's boyfriend, an always-cheerful hippie whose eyes are never visible; the angry, squiggly-nosed manager at the organic food store where Eve works; Hannah's dealer, who ends up being Eve's sometimes boyfriend).  It seems like a learning period, with humor that often seems forced, and art that, despite a strong grasp of character design and lively movement from the start, sees some odd, distracting quirks pop up here and there, like Gran's style of drawing Hannah with her eyes open and closed at the same time (no, she doesn't wear glasses):

The pacing is a bit choppy at this point as well; one storyline sees Eve trying to come up with a "viral" marketing campaign for the store where she works, but she bombs out and ends up just submitting a crude drawing of a dog  and a word balloon stating "The fukken shit".  As one would predict, the ad (which was printed in The New York Times, which seems like an odd place to start a viral campaign) becomes a big hit, and Eve gets celebrated as a star, leading to the expected acting like a jerk to her friends and realization of what is really important.  It's pretty standard stuff, but the strange thing is how fast and jerky the plot moves, as if most of these events are happening off-panel and we're only treated to the necessary moments.  It's only a matter of a few pages between the ad getting huge and the status quo resuming, which might be why it seems so obvious; there's only space for the expected plot points.  Not every chapter is like this, but it's a definite example of the roughness of the first third of the book or so.

And then, a little less than halfway through (which means the strip had been running almost a year at this point), there's a moment in which Octopus Pie suddenly realizes its potential, in a story in which Hannah drags Eve along to go ice skating, leading to this gorgeous panel:

For whatever reason, this elegant bit of physical movement marks the exact point at which the humor suddenly stops feeling forced, but now flows from the characters and how they relate to each other and their surroundings.  The stories now seem less about the wacky things that happen to the characters and more about them living their lives and experiencing the glorious unpredictability of early-twenties existence, along with a bit of anxiety about where it's all going to lead.  Characters seem to enjoy spending time together, and friendships and relationships make sense, instead of seeming like types forced together for comedy's sake.  Gran explores some of the strange aspects of life, such as why we strive for acceptance from people we don't even like (in a story in which Eve gets an in with the local hipster crowd when she nurses an injured bird back to health and starts carrying it around on her shoulder) or how we're sometimes hesitant to have one group of our friends interact with another (in a chapter which sees Eve's nerd pals and Hannah's stoner buds clash and end up facing off in an epic laser tag battle).  It's an impressive maturity, even if it does bring along a few somewhat tiresome scenes in which Eve gets in a conversation with some character or another about her anxieties regarding herself and the world and her future and whatnot.

And the rest of the volume continues in that direction, seeing some very enjoyable writing and plenty of really nice cartooning from Gran.  She has an impressively expressive, cartoony style, with each character remaining distinct in their body shape, posture, movement, and expressions.  Eve sports a perpetual frown and glare, usually withdrawn and aware of anybody watching, while Hannah is exuberantly loose-limbed and huge-eyed, always grinning or shouting:

But as simplified as the art might seem, there's plenty of detail there to ground things in some semblance of reality, like the realistically-styled skirts, pants, and sweaters that the girls wear, the changing hairstyles they sport, or the sights and activities of the city around them.  It's also nice to see Gran experiment with her art style; she uses what appears to be a pen in one chapter to limit the lines to a uniform, thin width:

Then follows that with a chapter full of lushly-brushed ink lines:

That's the definite pleasure in this volume: seeing an already-formidable talent grow and develop further.  It helps that the characters are fun to spend time with, and their antics are often quite funny.  It's also nice to see a creator unafraid of profanity or the frank depiction and discussion of sex, both of which are certainly present at this time in one's life.  One can only expect that the upward trajectory continues; Meredith Gran will soon be quite the artistic force to be reckoned with.  Now when does the next book come out?

Six Ditkovian motifs (other than the obvious ones) learned from The Art of Ditko

The Art of Ditko
By Steve Ditko
Edited by Craig Yoe

When it comes to artistic traits that Steve Ditko was known for, the onest that probably first spring to mind are expressive hands and crazy, psychedelic mindscapes, and like any halfway-decent collection of his work, this book is full of those.  But there's more to what he did, and Craig Yoe, in this collection that draws from the various stories Ditko illustrated for Charlton in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, demonstrates several additional aspects of his artistic personality, showing that there was a lot more to him than Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, and Objectivism.  Here are a few that I noticed:

1.  Jumbled montage panels

Ditko was never a slouch at depicting action, but when it came to depicting a flurry of activity in a small space, he often used a neat technique in which several images were jumbled together within the same panel, making for an effective feel of wild, frenetic movement:

He could also use this to show a bunch of activity all at once, like a character searching for something in different locations, and it works remarkably well, making things clear and understandable, even with so many images packed together and overlapping each other.  It's certainly something that's harder than it looks.

2.  Bulging eyes

The hands get all the attention, but Ditko managed to use eyes really well too, especially when demonstrating fear or obsession.  He uses a goofy technique here and there in which disembodied eyes overlap other action occurring in a panel, and it's hella creepy:

There's something about the inclusion of the lids rather than just the eyeballs, or the blank space between the eyes, that seems unnatural, and it's just offputting enough to lend an extra bit of weirdness to stories, which, judging by the selections here, could certainly use some spicing up.

3.  Shapely women

In fact, many of these stories were pretty terribly derivative, full of cheesy "horror", predictable twists, and lame dialogue.  But Ditko managed to make them sing, classing up the place with all the neat visual hooks, and even adding some sex appeal, which was something he wasn't really known for.  It's a shame though, because he could deliver, whether showing off mystical temptresses:

Sci-fi femmes fatale:

Beach babes:



Or just barfly eye candy:





I especially like that last one; the classic Ditko spiderweb design on her shirt kind of makes her the ultimate Ditko babe.


4.  Goofy "host" characters

Since Tales from the Crypt and other such comics established the wisecracking emcee character, it seems like every horror series had to have them, and the ones in these Charlton books are kind of lame.  But Ditko still managed to give them each their own personalities, which is saying something.  Dr. Graves, of The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves, is a smoking-jacket-wearing professional, warning readers of the dangers of bad living.  Dr. Haunt, of This Magazine is Haunted, is more of a silent observer, lurking in the shadows (or between panels) and watching events unfold:

The Mysterious Traveler, of Tales of the Mysterious Traveler, is even more dispassionate, just blank-facedly peeping on his stories:

And Mr. Dedd, of Ghostly Tales, is the wisecracking jokester, making terrible puns and observing the goings-on of his characters with a smirk at all the bad stuff that happens:

The whole "host" idea is a goofy device, but like the rest of the silliness that abounds in these stories, Ditko makes it work.

5.  Cool formal tricks

And here's where it gets really cool.  Working for cheap for Charlton must have given Ditko the opportunity to experiment, try out new ideas, and see what he could do with the comics format, and he came up with some great stuff here, really pushing the limits of the way stories could be told with panels on paper.  One story which sees Dr. Graves supposedly searching through his files for information regarding the tale he's telling turns every panel border into the shape of a file folder, starting out with fairly standard layouts, but as the story goes on and becomes more frantic and fast-paced, eventually seeing panels/folders angled and tilted every which way, in all three dimensions:

In at least one story, Dr. Haunt lives up to his magazine's title, appearing as a ghost peering out from holes within the pages themselves, even tearing them open to get a better view of the proceedings:

And there was always the trusty standbys, like having a narrator manipulate the page directly:

It's pretty amazing to see what Ditko came up with nearly half a century ago.  Modern cartoonists could do well to study these ideas and put them to use in stories that deserve them.

6.  Other great visual ideas


The great visuals didn't stop with the formalism either.  Ditko was doing some exciting stuff, coming up with ways to show action and emotion, depict supernatural effects that can't really be shown literally, or convey mood through innovative designs and layouts.  And every so often, he came up with some incredible visuals, with the foremost (judging by Yoe's effusive praise and placement of it just after the book's title page) being a depiction of time travel that gives the page a 3-D effect and perfectly demonstrates the idea of hurling backward into the past:

Stuff like this makes this book worth reading, just to get a glimpse of one of the masters of the medium at work.  Sure, his Marvel stuff is fine, and he came up with some enjoyably weird concepts later, but there's nothing like seeing a talented artist at the top of his game trying out idea after idea and livening up what would be unreadable dreck in anybody else's hands.  Let's hope more people check this book out and learn from it.

The Signifiers: They signify my confusion

Elsewhere: I wrote about Iron Man 2 for The Factual Opinion, and in the first of what will hopefully be a bunch of regular pieces for Indie Pulp, I reviewed the first volume of Sweet Tooth, which I think I liked less than most.

Links: Kevin Church continues to expand his webcomics empire, starting a new series called FIGHT!, which is illustrated by Tracie Mauk.  Looks like fun.

I haven't read this one yet, but it looks neat: a prequel comic to the movie Inception, by Udon.

The Signifiers #1
By Michael Neno
Buy it on the official site

Jack Kirby imitators are a dime a dozen, and have been for a good forty years, but every so often, somebody manages to get it right, using stylistic techniques and the forward-looking sensibility that actually fits the King's legacy, rather than slavishly imitating his visual tics or marching out his characters to reenact yet another cosmic dust-up.  Michael Neno is definitely trying for something more substantial than brightly-colored guys punching each other here, and even if he's not fully successful, he's managed to take something familiar and recognizable and make it unique and strange all over again, which is not easy to do.

This 48-page self-published black and white pamphlet is actually broken up into three separate stories, although they may all take place in the same "universe".  The first one, which shares the series' title, is probably the strangest, and also the hardest to follow, starting off with a splash page of a woman's screaming face, then revealing that her head sits on the body of a dog, and she's being tortured by three guys in weird costumes.  She gets rescued by a band of outsiders in a Big Daddy Roth hot rod, then the scene abruptly shifts to five years later, with the rest of the story following those outsiders as they live in a sort of walled-off slum on the edge of a wasteland.  There are some attacks by more weird people, hushed conversations about an impending danger, a boy who apparently has some sort of destiny as a leader, and discussions of a strange force known as The Voyst, and while little of it makes much sense, it's pretty arresting stuff, a weird world that Neno drops readers into and expects them to keep up.  Maybe more will be explained in future issues, but even this small portion is enough to bring a vital, breathing world to life, one that merits further exploring.  The crazy designs and odd dialogue rhythms really stand out, and there are at least a couple bravura sequences, like a scene in which one of the trio of aforementioned torturers turns out to be an amnesiac who stole his equipment and is interrogated by benign-seeming agents of the government (?), making for a nice escalation of danger and a sense of paranoia. There's also a single page sequence that follows a missile being fired as it races toward its target, accompanied by captions bearing the lyrics of a rap song about a girl named Maria, which is a cool, surreal touch.

The second story is a short one called "Nellie of Cosmic Brook Farm or: Cosmic House on the Prairie", and it is presented on every page as five tiers of two small panels that see an alien attacking a farm and the titular Nellie donning some Kirbytech equipment to fly up into the sky and fight it.  It's weird and goofy, with the small panels making everything claustrophobic, yet bursting out of the space that confines it.  Who knows if this is just a one-off story or if it will be followed up on, but it works great for a sort of breather in the middle of the issue, something that's plenty strange and exciting, but not as confounding as everything else.

Finally, we get to spend time with "Landlark, the Heat-Seeking Dwarf", an odd story about the polka-dotted short fellow being imprisoned by some mean guys, then escaping, falling in with some free-spirited hippies, and playing music with them on the street.  As with everything else in the comic, it's somewhat inexplicable, but there's a feeling of art and emotion being used to escape oppression, with Landlark's repeated catch phrase of "I came here to love!" and the happiness he seems to find with people who don't disdain him or seek to use him for unpleasant ends.  As with the other stories, it should be interesting to see if or how Neno follows this up.

This might not be for everybody, but for those who like to see a bit of pushing the limits of expression, Neno has put together something pretty fascinating here.  He's using familiar Kirby motifs, from the crazy technology, to the stilted dialogue, to recognizable artistic flourishes, but he's not slavishly copying from his inspiration, but using it as a starting point for something new.  It should be fascinating to see what else he can come up with as the series continues.
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You can buy the comic from Neno's website (where it is also being serialized), and while you're there, be sure to check out his other ongoing bit of goofiness, a webcomic called The Mesh.

Miniature Comickal Entertainments

Don't worry, I'm not dead, and hopefully I'll be able to avoid that state of perpetual slowdown that happens to blogs when they peter out and die.  I just need to try to keep some momentum going.  Let's see if this helps...

Various Silber minicomics
Written by Brian John Mitchell
Art by Melissa Spence Gardner, Johnny Hoang, Jeremy Johnson, Brian John Mitchell, Eric Shonborn, Kimberlee Traub, Andrew White, and Jason Young
Buy them from Silber's website

Brian John Mitchell certainly has a very specific method when writing his minicomics (which take the "mini" part of the word especially literally, measuring about three square inches); being limited to one small panel and a caption per page, he usually sticks to first person narration describing whatever plot is occurring, but manages to branch into several surprising directions from there, covering genres from Western, to sci-fi, to horror, to drama, to annoying pontification (I reviewed several of them here).  The best taste of they style can probably be found in Silber Mini-Comics Sampler #1, which serves as an introduction to several of the series, although rather than excerpting any of them, it provides a short story from each, the equivalent of one-page strips in a regular-size book.  They all work pretty well as samples, although Western series Just a Man fares best, with Mitchell and artist Andrew White even going so far as to use two panels per page, an innovation which could stand to spread to other titles, given its effectiveness here.

The regular Just a Man series continues as well, with the fourth issue seeing our hero, an Eastwood-esque no-longer-retired gunfighter continue his mission of vengeance against, well, everyone, taking time to rescue a prostitute and track down an evil rich man.  It works, with the same grittiness that was present in the first issue, although this installment seems to be one of those middle chapters that ties up some plot threads and sets up more for future issues.  And although it's probably the least offensive along these lines, there are a couple moments in which the narration describes exactly what is happening on-panel (a gunshot paired with a caption reading "I fire." is the worst offender), rather than using the limited page space to let the art do the work.  Overall, though, this is probably the best of the bunch.

XO is another decent series, with the sixth issue seeing its teenage murderer taking a road trip to drop off a dead body with somebody who takes care of that sort of thing.  Most of the story sees him ruminating on his future, as teenagers are wont to do, with the dark joke of the purpose of his journey underscoring the mundanity of his thoughts.  Melissa Spence Gardner's art serves its purpose well (when the captions aren't compressing it into to a sliver of an already tiny page), giving the character and those around him a bland, unemotional feeling as they commit terrible deeds.  As a whole, this series might end up being a striking darkly comic crime story; it's certainly another of the better series here.

Another series that has potential is Cops & Crooks, which takes the interesting approach of splitting its story into two halves, presented as a flip-book and illustrated by two different artists, Jason Young and Eric Shonborn.  The idea here seems to be to present two equal-and-opposite protagonists who follow their respective fathers into careers of crime-fighting and cop-killing, destined to meet at some point in the future.  This first issue is dedicated entirely to setup, and reading the two halves back to back seems a bit repetitive, since they are designed to mirror each other, but this could certainly turn into something interesting, depending on how intricate Mitchell is planning to get with his structure.

And then there are the other series, those which don't really make the grade.  Worms, which seemed like a creepy, psychedelic bit of horror in a previous issue, seems like more crude imagery (courtesy of Kimberlee Traub) and nonsense about psychic powers or something in its sixth issue.  Marked, a series about a guy who gets possessed by a demon in order to kill other demons, could be halfway decent, but it is ruined by Jeremy Johnson's ugly, Rob Liefeld-like art.  And Mecha, which appears to be Mitchell's attempt at a sci-fi epic if only because of its "large" size (a whole 2"x2"!), rolls out every cliche in the book, from alien invasion, forced gladiatorial combat, and rugged freedom fighters to an abandoned giant robot that just might be the savior of humanity.  It could get better, but this first issue is pretty dire, with an attempt at detailed art by Johnny Hoang that isn't done any favors by the small size and a hard-to-read script font for the captions.

However, any way you swing it, Mitchell and company have a neat little (ha ha) enterprise going here, throwing comic after comic at the wall and seeing what sticks.  Not everything works, but the comics are unique and continue to make good use of their format.  When it comes to minicomics, that's not bad at all.
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Veggie Dog Saturn #4
By Jason Young
Buy it from Buyer Beware Comics

Jason Young, one of the artists of the aforementioned Cops & Crooks, also has this minicomic series, which is more along the lines of the standard minicomics model, telling autobiographical stories of his childhood at a more readable size, but while the format is familiar, the comics are quite entertaining and well-made.  Young varies his approach, telling stories of different lengths and using different styles of telling the story, from presenting them as a standard anecdote, to having his adult self relate the tales directly to readers, to narrating via caption.  And the anecdotes themselves are interesting and entertaining, whether a simple memory of receiving a head wound, a story about Young and his brother constructing an elaborate monetary/barter system using plastic figurines before they discovered real money, or the proud moment when Young discovered the tantalizing world of bikini magazines.  He's got a good sense of pacing and can sell the humorous moments well, although a strip about discovering the effects of racism also serves to demonstrate his more serious side too.  Overall, it's a nice example of the genre, if minicomics can be said to have one.  If I saw this on a convention table, I would be happy to lay down a few bucks for it.

It Was the War of the Trenches: War is hell, etc.

Elsewhere: I wrote about The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus at The Factual Opinion.  I liked that one.

Links: A new Abhay Khosla comic!  I guess he did this as a minicomic to sell at a local convention, but he also posted it online, and it's as hilarious as you would expect.

Here's a pretty amusing webcomic: God Hates Astronauts.  Be sure to read from the beginning; it's a superhero parody, but while it starts out as a "ha ha, this is lame" sort of thing, with dumb names and powers and bears and such nonsense, it quickly changes into something weirder and funnier.  You'll see what I mean.

It Was the War of the Trenches
By Jacques Tardi

It has been said that it is impossible to make an anti-war movie, since the depiction of war onscreen necessarily conveys such an excitement and intensity that even death can seem entertaining.  That notion is debatable, but the same statement can be disproven for the medium of comics on the basis of one piece of evidence: Jacques Tardi's World War I graphic novel It Was the War of the Trenches.  By focusing on the sense of ever-present death and complete inability to survive through any means other than sheer luck, Tardi completely dispels any sense that war is heroic, or even a worthwhile endeavor.  It's a harsh, ugly look at the depths to which man can sink, with little in the way of redemption throughout.  It's persuasive enough that it renders most any other argument against war unnecessary.

The book collects a series of stories that were published in French magazines over the course of most of the 1980s and early 90s, making for a series of unconnected vignettes following the cannon fodder soldiers who dwelt in the trenches on the front lines of the war between France and Germany.  Tardi pulls no punches here, showing their grim, ugly existence, as they dwell in the mud and rain, subsisting on stale rations before periodically leaving their only relatively protected shelters for ventures into the barbed-wire-and-bullet-filled "No Man's Land", often dying horribly.  Each tale only lasts a few pages, as Tardi follows one soldier or another until their story, more often than not, reaches a bitter end, but he makes good use of the space each man gets, allowing them to narrate about themselves via captions or dialogue, making each individual seem fully realized and human, and all the more tragic when they are inevitably slaughtered.

This might seem like an endurance test, a litany of death upon death, but Tardi does vary his approach enough that each new tale is unique, presenting a fairly encompassing view of soldiers' experiences, although never venturing above the lower-most link on the chain of command.  Some men get a chance to leave the front lines and glimpse a life of normalcy before being sent back into the meat grinder; others get stranded in the crater-pocked wilderness and try to survive on their own; still others find themselves in bombed-out towns searching for food and safety.  We might get to see somebody's personal history or flash to their loved ones before the worst happens, usually quickly.  Or, somebody might get wounded and end up suffering horribly as they slowly die, alone in a muddy pile of fellow corpses.  The stories are fiction, but they are based in heavily-researched fact, and that much is obvious in every nasty detail that Tardi includes on the page.

No, reading this book is not an especially enjoyable experience, but it is a necessary one, an attempt to convey the way war cheapens human life, turning men into disposable objects, bullets to be fired at the enemy with no regard for their own right to existence.  There's a certain contempt on display for those who are in power and treat their men with such disregard, a disgust that the reader shares when the French officers order their artillery to fire on their own lines in order to force the men out of the trenches to attack the German lines, or, in a sequence lifted from the Stanley Kubrick film Paths of Glory, soldiers get sentenced to death for retreating from an impossible assault when ordered to take a German position.  One can't help but be horrified at the ugliness to which men will sink, whether they are fighting for their lives in the mud or giving orders from well behind the lines.

The book ends with a character giving a lengthy monologue that acknowledges all the various factions and nations involved in the war, displaying a sort of sorrow for all the people dragged into a pointless conflict, yet still containing a bit of dark humor at the circumstances that brought them all together.  He also rattles off some staggering statistics about the number of people killed and maimed, the amount of land and resources destroyed, giving a full picture of the damage that war can do.  It's a change from the intimacy of the rest of the book, a chance to zoom out and see the full effect beyond what is experienced by individuals, and it makes for a great bit of punctuation to end this slog through the depths of human ugliness.

Yes, this is an unpleasant book (even extending to the art, which does its job as well as everything else in making the war look ugly, muddy, dirty, and bloody; defining each character well but making sure to show the awfulness of their circumstances), but one that everyone should read, not only for a sense of history, but to see the horror of death and the suffering of those forced to partake in it.  The idea that people would be less likely to engage in war if they witness its effects is something of a pipe dream, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to open people's eyes to it.

Dong Xoai, Vietnam 1965: If that's pronounced "Zowie!", I'll agree

Elsewhere: I don't think I've linked to this yet: I reacted with revulsion to the season premiere of True Beauty, which means I might or might not keep watching. That's summer TV for you.

Links:  Ed Piskor is posting the entirety of his Wizzywig series of graphic novels webcomic-style, with a page every few days.  I've been wanting to read this one.

This series of autobiographical 3-D comic strips (sort of) by Warren Craghead looks really cool.  I see another "look what Matt made!" post in the future.

Dong Xoai, Vietnam 1965
By Joe Kubert

Since Joe Kubert has been making comics longer than most of his readers have probably been alive, he gets a bit of leeway when considering the quality of his work.  Not to say that outright badness is excused, but some general clunkiness can go ignored, especially when there are so many frankly incredible examples of excellent artwork and storytelling on display.  The fact that he's working at all in his mid-eighties is already astonishing, and the level of craft in his art and dedication he shows in continuing to crank it out regularly is pretty amazing.

That said, this book is kind of an odd one, presenting a fictionalized account of an early battle in the Vietnam War that is nevertheless based closely on fact, which we know because a sort of reference dossier is included in the back of the book relating the real-life incidents as described by the men who experienced them.  But while Kubert changes names and probably fudges some details, he doesn't really make a great deal of effort to restructure things into a plot; instead, the whole story is little more than a series of events, described via narration and captioned dialogue.  The characters don't get reshaped into anything more than a series of interchangeable grunts either; they simply go through their paces like action figures, only slightly more momorable than the near-faceless hordes of Vietcong they end up battling.

But while that description sounds like a tedious exercise in fact-relation, the book is anything but, due to the fascinating things Kubert does with the art.  As mentioned, he foregoes the use of word balloons, relating everything via captions, which sets the art apart from the words, making for more of a free-flowing series of images, a feeling which is only bolstered by the lack of panel borders, which allows Kubert to spread the art organically across the page, one scene flowing into the next, the reader's eye swooping in elegant curves to match the lush greenery on display throughout.  One could conceivably ignore the captions altogether and manage to piece together the plot using only the images, and still end up pretty satisfied.

And to increase the difficulty level, Kubert's art is presented in "unfinished" form.  Actually, that's not completely true, since this is meant to be the final product, but the art remains uninked, raw pencils sitting naked and exposed, with "underdrawing" and guide marks still visible, allowing the viewer to see the process underlying the making of the images.  And yet, this doesn't seem amateurish or unfinished, but simply an expression that this is enough, no further embellishment is needed to get the idea across.  If anything, the elegant pencilwork communicates a down-to-earth roughness, befitting the dirty, bloody nature of the story's violent battle.  It's harsh and unforgiving, such that any mistakes would be even more obvious; luckily, Kubert doesn't make any.

No, he manages to take a bare-bones script and infuse it with life, making the jungle seem oppressive and full of secrets, giving characters emotion and expression, and filling action with motion and violence.  It's amazing, and it pulls the reader right into its struggle.  But while it might be difficult to do so, if one can take a step back and examine the art, it's like a miniature symposium on comics storytelling, full of near-invisible techniques for communicating information simply and succinctly, like the way depth can be shown by giving characters in the foreground more detail while simplifying them as they recede into the background:

Using contrast to guide the eye to the most important part of a scene:

Or the way looser shading can portray light, shadow, and definition, while denser scribbles of lines can represent smoke or darkness:

Of course, that sort of thing might seem obvious, but Kubert makes difficult-to-master techniques look easy, which is what comes from a lifetime of practice.  The fluid motion he manages to convey even in the midst of crowded scenes of rushing figures is something that seems a bit tougher to grasp:

As is his ease with facial expressions, which manages to differentiate characters excellently, while convincingly conveying a full range soldierly qualities like determination and righteous anger:

It's a master class in comics art, but one could be forgiven for not even noticing and just being pulled along by the velocity of the storytelling.  Kubert has put together a signature work here, one that should be studied for years to come.

If there's anything to wonder about, it's the lack of political comment, which here is mostly limited to American troops being limited to acting in an advisory capacity.  Perhaps enough time has elapsed that that pointless quagmire of an exercise can be another setting for tales of heroic derring-do, especially when placed at this early date, before things got really ugly.  No, the real complaint would probably be the glorification of war; while Kubert doesn't pull any punches when depicting death, the whole affair does have a heroic feel, with soldiers rescuing each other with exemplary marksmanship, or going out in a blaze of glory in defense of their fellow men.  It's kind of old fashioned in the way it seems uncritical of war itself, even while depicting its horrors.

But whatever your feelings about the book's ultimate message, you can't deny that it's a gorgeous piece of artwork, a great example of the talent that Kubert has honed over decades of work and now wields as an instrument of comics-making excellence.  He sets a hell of an example for the generations of artists that have followed him, and if there's anything right in the world, he will continue to do so for many more.

Ten things I previously did not know about Wonder Woman

All taken from The Essential Wonder Woman Encyclopedia.

1.  Abu-Gita, an ape queen from Gorilla City, once tried to invade Themyscira, home of the Amazons, but Wonder Woman's use of the Lasso of Truth on her revealed that her faith in her gods was based on lies.

2.  Etta Candy, Wonder Woman's chubby sidekick, has a father named Hard , a mother named Sugar, and a sister named Mint.

3.  Wonder Woman once fought a group of flying shark-women who attacked Paradise Island after being mutated by a scientist named Gerta Von Gunther, who later saved the day by dousing their leader, Queen Sharkeeta, with "humanizing solution" that made her submit to being imprisoned on Reform Island.

4.  A villain named the Sinister Seer of Saturn once attacked Wonder Woman by sending a doll-sized replica of the heroine to Earth which then grew to gigantic size.  When Wonder Woman tried to stop it, it attached her to itself magnetically and blasted off back to Saturn, where the villain put her through challenges that involved her regressing in age to become Wonder Girl and Wonder Tot.

5.  Wonder Woman once kidnapped a boy and took him on a time-travel trip because he was bored in history class.  They ended up getting trapped as ghosts in Nero's Rome.

6.  A villain known as American Adolph tried to form a criminal empire and take over the United States, but was foiled when Wonder Woman was given a copy of his book, My War Against Society.

7.  A Leprechaun named Moon O'Day, who, despite being male, was a student at the Holliday College for Women, created a typewriter that could make anything typed on it come to pass.  This typewriter was acquired by a criminal known only as "The Boss", who used it to tell Wonder Woman to fly a kite around the moon.

8.  Wonder Woman once fought an alien robot named Princess No. 1003, whose disappearance from her home planet prompted an invasion of Earth by its other 2,785 robot princesses.

9.  There have been at least eleven different versions of Wonder Woman in all the various timelines and continuities of the past 70 years, including two different versions of the original World War II-era character, two different versions of Wonder Woman's mother Queen Hippolyta, at least two former Wonder Girls, two different characters named Artemis, and one of several versions of the villainess Circe.

10.  Wonder Woman once fought an evil wizard named Strogo, who lived on the Planet of Thought, which was populated by fairy tale characters.  He captured Wonder Woman as part of his scheme to obtain an element called "xium", which would power his black magic wand.  When Wonder Woman shattered the xium gem, everybody on the planet turned into a toddler.

That's a tiny sampling of the bizarreness on display throughout this massive tome.  If you want to be overwhelmed by decade upon decade of confusing, often tedious inanity, give it a read.

More proof that I am a nerd, of some sort or another

In yesterday's review of Super Spy: The Lost Dossiers, I mentioned a comic that required the reader to cut up the pages and rearrange the panels in order to be read, but I managed to cheat a bit, just to see what it looked like to actually do so.  I made copies of the relevant pages and cut those up, laying them out in the indicated pattern, with the following results:

There it is, all laid out on my basement carpet, and while it's not readable in this image, there are at least a few notable details, if you care to look.  It's fascinating to figure out which direction the story should be read in, with the action moving up, down, left, right, and diagonally, criss-crossing throughout the whole layout to make a grand whole.  It's a crazy, innovative use of space, with panels in the middle tracking cannonballs through their trajectories, stretching time out into tiny increments, while taking huge leaps through the years at the edges (note the family tree segueway in the far right column). The story involves a shipwreck, which, while taking place in the past, manages to lay a foundation for the short spy story that takes up the top row of the layout.  This makes for an interesting visual cue, with the history of the events lurking under the surface and forming a foundation for it.  Hell, even the layout itself vaguely resembles an upside-down ship.  It's an ambitious example of non-traditional comics storytelling, and while the story is pretty slight, it's as exciting for the possibilities it indicates as for the brief bits of action and violence it contains.  Let's hope Kindt continues to push the limits of comics storytelling in this manner, because it's tons of fun to experience.
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Bonus!

While I was scanning stuff and goofing around with imagery, I made this animated version of one of the 3-D images from the book.  Enjoy, and try not to get dizzy: