I always did prefer Veronica to Betty

Veronica presents Kevin Keller #1.  Why is this?  Come on, Betty, get with the 21st century.  Actually, Archie Comic Publications has managed to become relevant again.  I mean, assuming their books ever were in the first place.  Archie has always changed with the times-- going from clean-cut teen in a bow-tie and a v-necked sweater vest in the 1950s to a clean-cut teen in a wide collar and bell-bottoms in the 1970s.  Then they did those "Archie gets married" stunts and the "Archie New Look" stories, but despite the character's history spanning the years of the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, free love, Watergate, energy crises, disco, punk, New Wave, Reaganomics, hip-hop, grunge, nu-metal, the Internet, the War on Terror and the current recession, his creators and fans haven't exactly been on the forefront of social change before now.

On the other hand, there's always been something comforting knowing that as superheroes went all ironic and self-loathing on us, visiting characters with rape and other forms of ultra-violence complete with lovingly-rendered gore while constantly tearing down their universes only to restart them again in a weird cycle of diminished returns, Archie remained slung chastely between Betty and Veronica, that classic Riverdale dichotomy-- sweet girl next door, somewhat scheming and vain yet generally nice rich girl.  Reggie's still preening, Jughead's still eating and eating and eating.  Midge and Moose are still madly in love.  Mr. Weatherbee continues to sport his pince-nez.  And Kevin Keller is a welcome part of the gang.

I was quite the Archie aficionado when I was a kid.  Those Archie digest books-- especially Archie's Double Digest-- you could buy in the check-out lane at the grocery store packed a lot of reading fun for their cover price.  When I had my tonsils out, the youth minister at my church brought me some of those Spire Christian Comics starring Archie which confused me on one hand but made me feel validated in my comic book reading as well as my spirituality on the other.  As I grew up, I grew out of Archie and into things like... well, real literature.  And the occasional Watchmen type book.  The affection remained, though.

This is a big leap for them, and yet they're doing it in the same ol' gentle Archie way, lightly, humorously and with respect for the characters and readers.  That's what continues to comfort about the Archie books.  They're taking some hits because of the perception they're staid and representative of an America past.  Fluffly kid stuff.  And they are that.  Which is why I like this so much.

So I want to take a moment to give the Archie folk a little praise.  Because while other companies have seemingly gone out of their way to disappoint me in the last few years, during that same time frame Archie Comic Publications hired Misako Rocks-- I'm a big fan-- to write some stories for them, and now this.  It makes me feel once again I didn't waste precious play time reading about Riverdale when I was a kid.

Happy National Comic Book Day!

It's finally here!  National Comic Book Day!  The turkey is roasting in the oven, the cranberries are doing whatever it is cranberries do, Wonder Girl is dancing around with her headphones on while Robin, Speedy and Kid Flash glower unappreciatively from along the far wall.  I didn't get you anything.  Sorry.  I've just been so busy reading old Teen Titans and back issues of Batgirl while pretending the DC reboot doesn't exist.  Also, my hours have been severely cut at work-- I'm a bad employee, I'm rude to everyone and my attitude stinks-- so I don't really have the money to buy new comics for deconstruction/review/mockery/gifts for my reader.  Tightening the belt, loosening the shoes, selling my toupees.

But I do have some great stuff coming up.  There's yet another entry about Cassandra Cain, some Planet of the Apes nonsense, possibly a visit with Mars's top teen and so forth.  More importantly, October will be our 2nd Annual Spookey Month here at When Comic Books Ruled the Earth as well as my Super-Gaijin '76 blog.  We'll be celebrating some gruesome horror comics along with that wonderful punk combo from Hamamatsu, Japan, Spookey.  In the meantime, in honor of Gnarrk, please enjoy this NBC promo featuring Phil Hartman as the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer:

Gnarrk: Smartest of the Teen Titans

We've pretty much established the original Teen Titans are no brain trust. No think tank. Even by the standards of typical teenage behavior, the Titans are a pretty dim-witted bunch. With the addition of Gnarrk, a Cro-Magnon ("Early Modern Human" or "Anatomically Modern Human" in today's terminology) teen from 20,000 years ago, their collective intelligence quotient took a mega-leap upward. Unfortunately, as we see in this page from Teen Titans # 39 (1972), the other male members of the Titans find Gnarrk's vocabulary troubling.  From his pose and facial expression, Robin takes it particularly hard.  See, growing up in a circus family and then becoming the ward and partner of Batman left him with little time for things like education and self-esteem, or developing and expressing ideas that aren't simple re-wordings of things he's just heard.

What Gnarrk should have said in the second panel is, "Donna's hip to my scene, Lilith, baby.  I wasn't making like some crazy Sir Lancelot on a Camelot trip.  My bag is taking it easy with the muscle stuff and using my noggin, dig?"

I tried Dark Horse Digital the other day and I didn't die!

That's right.  I've entered the digital age of comic book consumption.  No more glossy covers and the ever-present danger of receiving a paper cut so severe I have to go to the emergency room and risk contracting that nasty flesh-eating bacteria strain our local hospitals are rife with.  The only reflections interfering with the pure joy of reading a comic book are the ones on the monitor glass, instead of on the shiny, coated paper.  But I'm only reading Dark Horse's free digital offerings because I'm broke.  No money.  Zilch.

My first digital comic?  The first issue of Gilberto Hernandez's Speak of the Devil, which begins as the mysterious story of a young gymnast who dons a smiling devil mask and black clothes to spy on her neighbors.  Why is she doing this?  Who are all these people?  At first it seems Hernandez has simply created an intriguing little world, kind of insular and suburban with a lot of those bizarre touches he brings to his Love and Rockets stories-- the ones with all the nude sex with naked people having sex with other naked people without any clothes on.

Obviously, there's a lot more to Gilberto Hernandez than just nekkid getting-it-onness.  His Palomar stories form a multi-generational epic with dozens of richly developed characters spread out over time and place.  Speak of the Devil eventually turns into a story about an ultraviolent crime spree.  I know this because I read one other issue of this in print form several years ago.  I bought it relatively cheap during the Free Comic Day sale at Blister when it was in Harajuku, something I'd completely forgotten until researching a little more about Speak of the Devil for this blog post and coming across a very negative review.  Somehow I'd blocked it out of my mind.

Ordinarily, ultra-violent killings stick with you.

Lesson learned?  When you're reading the works of a writer-artist who created as one of his early signature characters a stigmatic punk, did some X-rated work during the early 90s porn comic boom and recently sent a couple of low-rent Martin and Lewis imitators to an alien world, you have to expect dark twists and turns from time to time.  Hernandez has never been one to shy away from depicting the lows of human behavior along with the highs.  I've never known him to wimp out on a story.  Also, along with his more calculated work, he has this kind of experimental, stream-of-consciousness mode where he follows characters all through the various shock corridors down which they care to traipse.  I get the idea the stories are telling themselves and Hernandez is only recording them with his brush.  And I, for one, love stream-of-consciousness and surrealism.

Speak of the Devil is as twisted as any of the other more experimental stories he's written, those surreal tales of decadence and violence that would make David Lynch go, "Whoa, careful there, buddy" and tug uncomfortably at his collar?  The first issue reminds me of Blue Velvet and its small town with so many secret bedroom worlds of drugs and violence uncovered by a protagonist with a strong voyeuristic streak.  The other issue was more like Natural Born Killers, with more killing added.

This is particularly fitting because it's also a metatextual tale, the "true story" behind a movie in which one of his characters-- Fritz from High Soft Lisp and other stories-- stars.  In his poem "The Two," W.H. Auden writes of a green field coming off like a lid, "revealing what was much better hid," but Gilberto Hernandez has no problem showing us these things in startling clarity with his clean, direct artwork.

But yeah, digital comics.  What about those?

It took me a few minutes of clicking back and forth to figure out the interface.  This isn't a flaw in the design; it's the product of my technical incompetence.  At first I was frustrated with these dark bars covering some of the dialogue at the top of the page.  Eventually, I learned these go away when you move the cursor to certain spots on the screen.  The drawbacks are eye strain from staring at a computer screen and the intense isolation of each panel which detracts a bit from context and storytelling.  When you read a printed comic book, you're still aware of the relationship of the panel you're currently reading to the others around it, and its size and shape within that relationship affects the "cinematic" feel of a page-- that the events are unfolding as actions, rather than as a grouping of related but frozen tableaux.  With the Dark Horse interface, this effect is almost-- but not quite-- eliminated, creating a stronger focus on the panel.  You end up absorbing more information from it, at the cost of most of what you'd get from the whole page. 

You can look at the entire page, but it appears very small and the text is unreadable.  I can see this eventually affecting storytelling in much the same way the increasing popularity of trade collections caused writers to telescope their stories into arcs and pace them so the story beats fall with certain financially-desirable page counts.  With the best writers and really compelling story arcs, you're not losing a whole lot.  With hacks, you're actually getting ripped off if you bother with the monthly magazines because they're padding; you're getting less storytelling for your three bucks.  But then again, they're hacks so their stories by definition can be no better than mediocre and therefore aren't worth reading in any format.

When writing print comics that companies will also publish digitally, writers and artists might choose proportional rectangular panels of various sizes for different effect, and asymmetrical or odd-shaped panels-- or in our best-case scenario, even the current lazy-ass "widescreen" pages with lots of squished horizontals-- could become a thing of the past-- who wants to put just a section of a panel on a page?  Or two out of an action sequence of four?  That would severely inhibit e-readability!  But with planning, the skilled creators could still get various pacing and impact effects on the printed page and intensify them for e-version, which would result in something closer to the weird hybrid of literature and movies the best comics usually are.   Even now it feels like a failure of imagination to make web comics and constrain yourself with the pretense that you're making a printed page.  Although I may do that one day myself.

But how will these new comics that work both in print and digitally come about?  Don't look at me!  When someone gifted beyond my kindergarten-level artistic skill and thought process decides to pull an Orson Welles and gifts us with the Citizen Kane of digital comics, then we'll all know.

Actually, do look at me!  'Cuz I can dance!  Check it!  Woo hoo!

Congratulations, DC! I knew you could do it!

In the olden days, the people who made your comics were all middle-aged and wore ties, except for Denny O'Neil, who wore a turtleneck.  He's thinking, "Hurry up and draw me.  I've got stories to write.  But first let me take off my glasses for a slightly casual, candid look."  I'm going to steal that pose for my author's portrait, only I'm going to hold a pipe.  Why a pipe instead of glasses?  Why not?  Why so glum, Neal Adams?  Is it because in order to fit the copy in your panel, you weren't able to draw the back of your own head?  Someone just said, "Hey, Dick!  Have you finished that job for Detective?"  Bob Oksner looks cool; kind of a Doc Brown vibe, but snappy and not disheveled.  I'd like to think his hair was really that startlingly white in real life.  Henry Scarpelli later added his actor son, Glenn, to the Archie universe.  Jack Adler started working at DC in 1946 and retired in 1981.

PS:  Blogger wouldn't allow me to add "Denny O'Neil" to my tags.  Guess I'll never write about his work again.

Adventure Comics #412: Supergirl's Jumpsuit Space Adventure

I'm kind of on an Art Saaf kick lately.  When I was a kid or a punk teen, I wouldn't have appreciated his work, because I was into people who rendered the heck out of everything, or put a lot of flash on the page.  Sure, I had taste-- I was into Joe Kubert, Gene Colan and Al Williamson, after all.  But as I've matured, I've come to love these journeyman old dudes who may not have blown readers away, but could draw anything the writer asked for.  Despite Mark Evanier's opinion that "No one drew the female figure in action better than Artie Saaf," Saaf's art is most definitely not spectacular; he wasn't a Neal Adams, a Nestor Redondo, a Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, or a Nick Cardy.  He was a guy who started working when comics were young and put in his time at the drawing board doing everything from capes to war to romance.  It's just solid, believable work with well-rendered anatomy and storytelling clarity of a kind mainstream-- superhero-- comics have largely abandoned.

There's not a line present that isn't justified, zero visual noise.  The vehicles might be faked and the space costumes a bit on the goofy side, but it's got a warmth and appeal to it a lot of today's superficial, super-slick digitally-finished art doesn't with all its photo-real bells and whistles.  Saaf's art has become timelessly retro in a way I'm not sure our current crop of superhero scribblers ever will.  But that's for tomorrow's nostalgics to decide.

Adventure #412 features Supergirl starring in "The Battle for Survival," with Saaf's pencils inked by Bob Oksner-- who contributed the dramatic and somewhat suggestive cover.  It came out in 1971and features a cheerful, positive-minded Supergirl living in San Francisco.  As Linda Danvers, Supergirl works for a TV station where her immediate superior, Geoff, is a red-haired guy with the ultra-hip sartorial style and mustache of a low-rent Ron Burgundy-- and who gently sexually harasses her at every opportunity.  Supergirl shrugs it off as "corny" humor.  I suppose you can't expect more from a guy who wears a polka-dotted ascot.

The story, written by John Albano, is nutty in its conception.  Someone disguised as Supergirl is committing crimes, and it turns out it's all a mad scheme to find out if Supergirl really is all she's cracked up to be.  This is important, because there's a planet with one of the stupidest ways yet conceived of choosing a ruler-- single combat between champions chosen by the various political contenders.

So Glynix, who wants to keep her throne, comes to Earth and causes all sorts of trouble to test Supergirl and blackmail her into fighting as her champion against a blue-skinned giant in orange armor.  Why Glynix-- who claims to be in a great hurry-- couldn't have simply asked Supergirl to help her rather than waste a lot of time wreaking havoc isn't addressed.  I imagine it has a lot to do with the necessity for DC comics of that era to have a story hook of some kind, and a lot of action.  A reasonable request just wouldn't cut it.

And we wouldn't get to see Saaf's drawings of Supergirl snuffing explosive capsules with her hands.  Whether or not Saaf was the best at depicting women in action is debatable, but he certainly makes a case for himself here.  Even the opening splash page with ordinary human being Nasthalthia Luthor (I have to love her because she's only doing this job for her own evil purposes but she works hard at it; there's a character we're going to have to talk about later) tells us this is an artist well within his comfort zone drawing the female body moving, turning, running.  Punching space giants and single-handedly defeating armies armed with laser rifles, which are two wonderful things Supergirl does later, before flying all the way back to Earth under her own power, then declaring to herself, "Home at last!  And am I bushed!"  There aren't any Escher Girls here.

Glynix and her people can make capsule explosives powerful enough to flatten cities and laser cannons, but still resort to fighting with the knives they wear on their belts.  And the main villain has a pointy goatee and a sun symbol on his tunic, both of which seem to be de rigueur for would-be space tyrants.

As you can see, Supergirl wears a modest bodysuit throughout.  Glynix, disguised as Supergirl, wears a 1960s Mod minidress, but the real thing goes about covered completely from neck to feet, her Super-logo reduced to a mere belt buckle.  It's a boring costume.  The one she's wearing in her latest title is more visually appealing.  It's not perfect-- I'm not sold on the wrap collar, red diaper-panel or the knee cut-outs in her thigh-high boots, but at least she's not flying around looking like a Britney Spears clone anymore.

The only thing I'm not too keen on is the feminine version of Superman's spit curl Saaf sticks Supergirl with.  The rest of her hair is in a kind of contemporary flip (kind of like Mary Tyler Moore's at the time, which is fitting given Supergirl's civilian job), but the bangs curl around like a cream horn, making it look like she's wearing a pastry for a toupee.

Thirty Years of Hopey Glass, Super Punk Badass!

With a new issue of the Harvey Award-winning series Love and Rockets: New Stories poised to hit the streets, it's time to look at some of Hopey Glass's moments of punk badassery. I had to limit myself to the first twenty or so issues of Love and Rockets, volume one. Otherwise, this blog post would be almost as long as the series itself. With a career dating way back in 1981 with Los Bros Hernandez's first self-published comic, Hopey's done too many memorable things.  Things that make you laugh, things that make your dog smile and your grandpa blush.  She's such an amazing character, practically any scene she's in becomes a medium-altering moment in comic book history.

Okay, I'm exaggerating a little.  Hopey's probably only the third or fourth most important character in American comics.  And it only took twenty-six years for Fantagraphics to publish a book with her name in the title.  But this poses a question-- just how did Jaime Hernandez pack so much awesome into such a teensy-tiny character? I don't think we'll ever know.  Perhaps she sprang from some real-life source, some proto-Hopey raising punk hell, throwing bottles, spray-painting walls, blowing the boys and girls away with her spiked hair and mean eyebrows.  Perhaps it's a mystery best left unsolved. However, I do know I would never cross Hopey no matter how petite she may be.

1) Hopey's gleefully violent imagination (Love and Rockets #3). When Maggie reluctantly tells a group of doubters about her brief career as a superhero's sidekick, Hopey takes a little mental revenge.

2) Hopey fights the law (LR #5).  An untagged wall drives Hopey to distraction and depression.  With the encouragement of her friends Maggie and Izzy, she sets out to do something about it, only to have her moment of triumph interrupted by Officer Sado, her personal nemesis-cop.  She ends up doing something about that, too.  Sado later made sergeant, no doubt due to his Javertian pursuit of La Hopita.

3)  Hopey hits her finger with a hammer (LR #7).  With Maggie away repairing spaceships, Hopey decides to go all Bob Villa and fix up their dumpy habitat.  Too bad she's not as skilled with tools as she is with spraycans of paint.

4) Hopey breaks the fourth wall (LR #10).  Hopey loves Maggie, but she's not one to suffer fools gladly, even fools she's sleeping with.  She has a request for the guy who created the two of them.

5) Hopey gets a haircut at an old school barber shop (LR #13).  Where else would Hopey get her hair cut?  This is one of my favorite comic book panels of all time.  I love how Hernandez has Hopey's toes barely touching the barber chair's foot rest base-plate.  When I was a kid, I got my hair cut in a similar place, with photos of gunfighters like Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid on the wall.  Ironically, my barber's ex-wife blew him away with a shotgun.  This drawing brings back memories of that so vivid and detailed, I can almost smell the baby powder and rubbing alcohol and feel the goosebumps I'd break out in when the barber buzzed the back of my neck with the electric shaver.

6)  Hopey wears a vintage-like dress while practicing bass in the backyard (LR #14).  She practices?  Even a vicious little punk chick like Hopey wants to feel like a princess every once in a while.  I love the way her butch hair and in-your-face personality clash with her demure girly-girl dress.  Notice also her bare feet.

7)  Hopey helps Izzy ruin Daffy's day (LR #15).  Poor Daffy.  I love her.  She's really just a sweet kid with a head full of mixed-up ideas that a bit too conventional and suburban for Hopey's tastes.  Looking like the long-lost sisters of Morticia Addams, Hopey and Izzy arrive on the beach pop the balloon made up of Daffy's romantic notions.

8)  Hopey practices street justice (LR #18).  Jaime Hernandez shows some of his humor comics influence in the second panel of this sequence where Hopey does what many of us have dreamed of doing.  Take that, you rich jerk!

9) Hopey's famous near-homophony (LR #18).  Or mondegreen, if you like.  Hopey rarely gives strangers a straight answer, but even she's stumped when it comes to the names of the songs her band performs.  She still hasn't lived this one down.

10) Hopey steals and reads Izzy's diary while Terry reminisces about beating up the hated Julie Wree (LR #19).  During a break from band practice, Hopey obsesses over Izzy's diary.  Terry Downe, her former lover-- and the person most interested in actually becoming a musician in the group-- takes a moment to flash back to to the good ol' days, when Hopey was hers-all-hers and they terrorized Julie Wree on a regular basis.  Man, all these years later and they still hate Julie Wree!

11)  Hopey stabs Terry in the back (LR #19).  Terry has a lot of bad memories about her brief relationship with Hopey.  She learns the hard way you can never get too comfortable with Hopey because she always has her own agenda.  Just when you think you're on the same side, she chooses another team.  Why?  We often learn Maggie's motivations, but Hopey's remain an enigma.  That's just Hopey being Hopey.

12)  Hopey makes the first move on Maggie (LR #20).  While they've both been with plenty of others in the decades since-- Hopey has a miscarriage as the result of a wild three-way and Maggie gets married and divorced-- one of the ongoing plot threads in the various "Locas" stories has always been their on-again/off-again love affair.  Strangely enough, it's always seemed to be more off than on.  Hernandez brought them together, then created long storylines that split them apart.  Delicious torture for the characters (including Daffy, who's as obsessed with the Maggie-Hopey pairing as many of the series' readers) and the fans.  Who knows what was really going on in Hopey's mind right here, but this is a flashback scene to their early days, showing how it started.