The Best Graphic Novels of 2008...

PW Comics Week just released their third annual critics' poll. Here are their picks for the best of 2008:

Bottomless Belly Button Dash Shaw (Fantagraphics) I haven't read this, but now I'm intrigued.

Disappearance Diary Hideo Azuma (Fanfare Ponent Mon) The title alone makes me think of Murakami Haruki. It just has that "feel."

The Education of Hopey Glass Jaime Hernandez (Fantagraphics) Oh hell yes! I did read this and thoroughly enjoyed its Hopey-centric storyline. It's an especially important work now that Love & Rockets' format has changed and it's going to be a few years of Jaime's charming but perhaps self-indulgent superhero stuff before we get back to Maggie, Hopey and Ray. Sorry, Jaime-- I like the new storyline but I LOVE this one.

The Great Outdoor Fight Chris Onstad: (Dark Horse)

Omega the Unknown Jonathan Lethem and Farel Dalrymple (Marvel) Usually I avoid superhero stuff, but PW Comics Week's description of this has me rethinking my initial rejection of it on those grounds. Not very fair of me.

What It Is Lynda Barry (Drawn & Quarterly) When I first saw this title, I was hoping it was a comic adaptation of the --- film What Is It?

Zot! Complete Black and White Stories 1987-1991 Scott McCloud (Harper Collins) Weird that a 2008 best graphic novel would be reprint stuff from 20 years ago. But I've read and enjoyed McCloud's book about comics, so perhaps I should pick this up sometime in 2009.

Acme Novelty Library #19 F.C. Ware (Drawn & Quarterly)

Alan's War Emmanuel Guibert (First Second) I've been meaning to pick this up (it's been in my Amazon.co.jp shopping cart for quite a while now), but in the meantime I've been reading non-graphic novel WWII memoirs and personal accounts. Those are also interesting. I would love to see a sort of anti-Sgt. Rock ultra-realistic take on the Good War, though. Not that I'm dissing Rock and Easy Company; it's just that no one in their right mind would walk all the way across Europe with the same .30 caliber bullets over his shoulders.

Aria Kozue Amano (Tokyopop) The art looks inviting!

Aya of Yop City Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie (D & Q)

Black Jack Osamu Tezuka (Vertical) More ultra-old school stuff. I guess reprints on this list are even more excusable when it's only recently been made available to U.S. markets.

Cat Eyed Boy Kazuo Umezu (Viz)

Essential Dykes to Watch Out For Alison Bechdel (Houghton)

Kramer's Ergot #7 Edited by Sammy Harkham (Buenaventura Press) The title is off-putting for me. I keep thinking it's something to do with Seinfeld.

Local Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly (Oni)

Red Colored Elegy Seiichi Hayashi (D & Q)

Skim Mariko and Jillian Tamaki (Groundwood Books) I bought this as soon as it was released and I've been trumpeting it ever since. A truly remarkable little story, insightfully and movingly written, gorgeously illustrated. Finding it on PW's list really makes my day.

Tamara Drewe Posy Simonds (Houghton)

Three Shadows Cyril Pedrosa (First Second)

Travel Yokoyama Yuichi (Picturebox)

The "Honorable Mentions" include such books as Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon and John Cassady (one of my few superhero indulgences and worth it), Astro City: The Dark Age, Book 1 by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson (probably worth it as well, although it's fallen off my "must have" list over the years as my tastes have changed), Joker by Brian Azarello and Lee Bermejo (probably fine but what I've seen of it hasn't really impressed me and the Joker has long since worn out his welcome and supposed "menace"), Love and Rockets New Stories No. 1 by Los Bros Hernandez (I thought it was good, especially the Duke and Sammy story by Gilbert, but it didn't grab me the way some of their other works have) and Nana by Ai Yazawa. Plus a lot more.

I'd put Nana near the top of any "Best of" list. Nana, Nana, Nana. If you don't like Nana... den to hell wid you, Crom!

The Tokyo Comics Report 2009: Now More Then Ever!

I just got back from Tokyo and boy are my thighs tired. There's no joke there; my thighs are aching from all the walking around I did. I managed to buy comics in Tokyo on my first night while in Harajuku to hit H&M for some happenin' new threads so all the chicks will dig me.

As far as I know, there's only one place in Tokyo to buy monthly comics. And that's what I bought, monthly comics. I know I swore I wouldn't but the monkey was on my back and he started gnawing my neck dangerously close to the jugular and I had to go to the hospital for some stitches and a tetanus shot. But before I went to have my artery sutured by expert surgeons, I performed my own emergency monkeydectomy at Tokyo's only American comic source worth a damn, Blister.

Here's what I bought along with mini-reviews based on my first readings:

Batgirl #6: I only bought this to complete the set and so I could rag on it later. Adam Beechen takes Batgirl down the "Redemption Road," but it's more like he takes her down a sewer pipe even with the sappy feel-good ending. Wait, was that a spoiler? Can you spoil something that's already rotten? Also, J. Calafiore draws the pointiest people. Or else Jack Purcell inks them pointy. Whoever is to blame for these razor-edged figures, don't brush up against anyone in this book because you might get your skin abrased, as if you'd rubbed a shark's hide the wrong way.

BPRD #5: Mike Mignola, John Arcudi and Guy Davis are doing something but I don't know what it is because I missed the first four issues of this story. It's cool, though and I could look at Davis' loose and lively renderings all day. And I frequently do.

Hellboy: The Wild Hunt #1: Finally, I buy a Hellboy book at the story's beginning; that's something I hadn't accomplished in years. Hellboy goes to jolly ol' England to join a bunch of noblemen in their giant hunt. Giant hunt, as in hunting giants. Duncan Fregedo turns in some Mignola-esque artwork with a lot of jagged shadows and geometrical figures. You know why this works, whereas Calafiore's doesn't? Well, partially because he actually has a story worth illustrating, and he knows how to pace a page. And also because he can draw stuff other than grimacing steroid-junkies punching each other in a generic cityscape. Sorry... that was more ragging on Batgirl #6.

Poor Batgirl. She certainly deserves better. But holy shit, that miniseries stinks. Did I say that already? The Wild Hunt is about a billion times fresher and more interesting.

Gen13 #24: Why the hell did I buy this? Maybe nostalgia. Why did they print this? For that, I have no answer.

Will Eisner's The Spirit #23: Too bad about Frank Miller's evidently shitty movie version. This comes much closer to the true... er... Eisnerian spirit. It's by Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier, two people I believe hung the comic book moon. I haven't even read it yet but Aluir Amancio's art looks neat-o. At first glance, it appears clean and inviting, with clear storytelling and some Eisner-style clothing wrinkles.

And it's got a Joe Kubert cover!

Will Eisner's The Spirit #24: I bought this because of the Aragones and Evanier names on the cover. No Kubert this time, though. I haven't read it yet but I'm willing to bet you anything it's better than Batgirl #6.

Hell, I blew my nose this morning and it was... Sorry!

Chad Hardin and Wayne Faucher do the art this time and it's more clean, cartoony adventure stuff a la Will Eisner. I don't think I would ever want to draw a comic based on an Eisner character. How can you ever hope to measure up? Hat's off to the artists who give it their best, though.

Madman #11 and #12: Note to DC/Wildstorm's Gen13 crew-- I've missed a ton of issues in this series and yet I picked up #11 and pretty quickly got up to speed. Read this and learn how Mike Allred does it. Mike's art is gorgeous and Laura's coloring may be the best there is in comics right now. In #11, Madman confronts a spirit in a haunted house, and in #12 he runs back to the laboratory to see if Dr. Flem has actually succeeded in something for a change. Then a crazed bald, blue psycho attacks. Cool!

Astonishing X-Men #27: Cyclops says the f-dash-dash-dash word while helping the Old Man change the tire... I've enjoyed Warren Ellis' work and he's entertaining me here but I'm getting really tired of all these X-people joking about their sex lives in front of their friends and all the post-ironic smart-assery. But mostly I'm worn out by the smarmy sex jokes. They were cute when Joss Whedon used them to mock the Scott Summers and Emma Frost coupling, but now that the Beast and that green haired S.W.O.R.D. person are screwing each other and everyone is giggling about it to their faces (and ours), this vein of humor has been thoroughly mined. Strip-mined.

Get it? Strip as in "to strip," meaning to remove one's clothes and... with the... sex and then... Oh to hell with it. Lots of heady concepts here. Almost too many what with the spaceship graveyards and the oh-no-more-alternate-universes stuff. But the smirking characterizations undermine the sci-fi and the urgency.

Conan the Cimmerian #6: I'm not a Frank Cho fan by any means but the man can draw and his covers for this series have been the best stuff I've seen from him. This one is a static pose that's a little boring but he rendered the bejeezus out of it. I haven't read this yet, either, but Tomas Giorello is already one of my favorite post-Marvel Conan artists. As an extra bonus, you get some Richard Corben! Evidently, there's just one more issue of this snowy Cimmerian wasteland stuff and then maybe we'll get some high adventure in some decadent Hyborian urban landscape.

Showcase Presents: Batman and the Outsiders 1: I got this because I love Jim Aparo's art. Also I enjoy the succinct, sincere but somewhat silly storytelling. I also love alliteration.

Not really. I loathe alliteration. These are mid-80s/post-Uncanny X-Men comics so you get Batman putting together a team of international misfits. His reasoning for this is suspect and so are many of the plot points. But it's still better than Batgirl #6!

Also, this is a book I found at Tower Records in Shibuya on New Year's Day. Blister was closed. Tower has a good selection of Fantagraphics, by the way. Lots of Love and Rockets and Dan Clowes stuff, plus much much more.

Astonishing X-Men: Unstoppable: Joss Whedon and John Cassaday wind up their X-run with an outer space epic. Usually I hate outer space epics, but this one is gorgeous to behold and the pay-off is truly huge in scope yet imbued with human tragedy. The last couple of pages are blistering. It's only missing end credits and a symphonic score.

Nana 12 and 13: I haven't read these yet but I'm confident these are the best two comics I bought this time out. It's Nana! f you're not reading Nana... den to hell wid you, Crom!

I bought Astonishing X-Men and Nana at Kinokuniya, behind Takashimaya Times Square in Shinjuku because I only had about 30 minutes to shop before heading back to my hotel to pick up my suitcase. I saw the Emperor's New Year's greeting and that killed my entire morning schedule; culture trumps comics.

Kinokuniya has every volume of the Fantagraphics The Complete Peanuts series. I almost bought the first one, but then I'd become a junkie and those babies ain't cheap!

Hey... Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is coming on one of my movie channels. Finally, something that makes Batgirl #6 look good! Time to pop in that David Fincher Zodiac DVD I bought for 1350 yen...

And a Merry Christmas to you from all of us here at When Comic Books Ruled the Earth!

Happy Holidays to the one or two people who still occasionally check this moribund comic book blog. This year's festivities included a lively school party with a lot of fine folks and a one-day stint as Santa Claus for 80-plus energetic kids. I hope everyone is looking back on a successful and enjoyable 2008 and looking forward to an even better 2009!

Happy Thanksgiving from the NBC Saturday Morning Cartoon Superstars!

NBC’s Saturday Morning Thanksgiving Holiday Feast!

Join us this Saturday at 8am (EST) on your local NBC channel for a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings, featuring all of your favorite NBC Saturday Morning stars!

The Smurfs (8:00am EST/7:00am CT)- When that dastardly Gargamel destroys the smurfberry bushes, can Papa Smurf find the magic spell to set things right in time for the Smurfberry Harvest Feast? And what happens when the Smurflings help Brainy mis-use Mother Nature’s Horn of Plenty? Guest-starring Johan and Peewit!

It’s Punky Brewster (9:00am EST/8:00am CT)- When Glomer goofs up again, it’s up to Punky, Margaux, Cherie, and Allen to fix the holiday turkey before Henry gets home! Will Punky and pals learn a Thanksgiving Day lesson in caring and sharing?

Alvin and the Chipmunks (9:30 EST/8:30 CT)- Alvin, Simon and Theodore compete with the Chipettes for a spot on a Spacy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float. Will Alvin’s dirty tricks ruin Thanksgiving for everyone, or will he learn the true meaning of friendship and giving thanks?

Mister T (10:00 am EST/9:00 am CT)- Mr. T and his daring yet caring gymnastics team volunteer at an inner city youth center on Thanksgiving Day. When a gang of mean punks try some rough stuff, it’s a cranberry bet that Mr. T and the kids will show them the error of their ways in time for pumpkin pie!

Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (10:30am EST/9:30am CT)- Spidey, Iceman and Firestar fight the Juggernaut. Guest-starring those uncanny mutants, the X-Men!

"Dog Eaters" is Now My Friend... and a Rumination on "Style"

Today, I got a surprise Myspace friend-request from a graphic novel. Now there's a sentence that would've been completely impossible to think of, much less type, when I first started reading comics at the tender age of 4. That was 1972, before anyone had ever considered using terminology like "Myspace" or "graphic novel" or "today."

Dog Eaters is a post-apocalyptic story from Dabel Brothers Publishing, adapted by Sean J. Jordan and Guillermo A. Angel from Malcolm Wong's original screenplay. I can't really comment on the story because I haven't read it yet, but Angel's manga-infused art is colorful and inviting.

And now I'm a-gunna tell ya exactly why, pilgrim.

I'm basically old school but I tend not to judge things based on their cultural influences. Either you can draw or you can't (although I find that dichotomy way too reductive... I personally can semi-draw) and if you have the basics down, "style" will follow.

Style, as the concept is generally understood, is vastly overrated. What many of us think of as style are merely the most superficial elements of drawing. Speedlines, cross-hatching, manga-esque eyes, slightly cartooned figures, heavy shadows, scratchy lines, almost geometric figures, "realism." These are the most visual aspects that hit your eye with immediacy, and we use them to describe what certain comic book artists' works look like. We call this his or her "style."

Judging artwork solely based on these elements is like choosing our friends based only on the clothes they wear. Sure, we get a few clues about who they really are from how people dress, but that doesn't tell us if they're good people or not. Doesn't give us the deep-down identity or selfhood that raises them from mere acquaintances to lifelong friends or even lovers, those things that make the relationship more than just pleasant but a necessity for our continuing happiness. Just as personality, compatibility and our personal concept of "goodness" are deeper criteria when choosing friends, so to is the underlying structure of drawing- the bones and musculature- more important than "style."

These basics show you whether or not a person can really draw, has a clue as to what drawing is all about. Anatomy, proportion, weight distribution, line of action, hierarchy of form, perspective, appeal, storytelling. One an artist masters this stuff, style takes care of itself. Too many comic book artists have this totally backwards. They also get confused because some of the true masters- people like Joe Kubert, Kojima Goseki, Takahashi Rumiko, Jack Kirby, Frank Frazetta- tend to distort or stylize the human form to suit their needs.

And even "realists" like Neal Adams tend to use heroic proportions. Classical guy non-realist John Buscema's heroes look like the leapt out of a Renaissance sketchbook (rather than off one of the porno stills some popular "photorealists" trace from these days... photorealism is not a be-all/end-all unto it self and again falls under the category "style" as superficiality).

Even Michaelangelo began stretching the human form towards the end of his career.

I'm not comparing Guillermo A. Angel to any of these. I'm just explaining to you why I might bitch about people using manga style elements to cover up bad drawing one day, then tell you Angel's manga-esque art looks attractive to me another. I don't do the knee-jerk rejection of manga-esque art; in fact, I think that's foolishness indeed and speaks volumes of the rejecter's personal prejudices and ignorance.

Some people like Adam Warren, and apparently Guillermo A. Angel, can do the colorful, fun manga look and even use non-traditional anatomy (check out how long the legs are, how small the heads, how thin the torso is on Angel's female characters) and still show they have a solid grasp on the underpinnings. That's what I pick up on, not necessarily superficial elements like "big eyes" or "overly long legs" (these aren't automatically negatives) or my least favorite of all "details."

Also sometimes mistakenly referred to as "shading," as in, "Manga artists don't know how to do shading!"

In comic book terms "details" frequently means meaningless cross-hatched lines everywhere even though they're neither building tone or modeling shadow on the figure or creating texture and space in the backgrounds. I don't want to raise a shitstorm by giving specific examples. I could- some of them would be quite popular and successful comic book artists beloved by many, and one is almost universally reviled these days (but I don't want to dogpile the guy.) Just check out almost every secondary Image artist of the 90s to see what I'm talking about. Visual noise.

In fact, one of the Big Guns of Image once said in an instructional (destructional would be more accurate, though) video that you should throw in a lot of that kind of stuff in place of actual drawing. He said it with a kind of "those stupid kids won't know the difference and they'll think you put actual effort into your schlock" wink that made me instantly turn off the video and give up on his work entirely.

Visual noise does not detail make. Real detail consists only of what's necessary to make the image work. That's why I appreciate people like Takahashi Rumiko, Jaime and Gilberto Hernandez, Alex Toth and Mike Allred (one day I want to write an entry about Allredrian anatomy... it fascinates me). They put down exactly what's necessary and little more. They have superficial differences, of course, but the basics are there, totally internalized and they don't need to truck in false detail. Al Williamson once inked an old Jack Kirby drawing for TwoMorrows' Jack Kirby Collector (I love that magazine) and crosshatched among the famous Kirby dots in the background. His reasoning? "It needed it." And he is right- it's not exactly pure Kirby but it definitely made the foreground figures pop by making them no longer in competition with the background.

Anyway, Angel's art looks pretty cool. It works. His figures are dynamic, his art is detailed to the correct level and in the right way, and he actually draws vehicles that look like they could work. They commented on my Myspace page with a friendly, art-filled message with some action packed stuff. Cool blood effects, bodies tumbling through the air, machine guns blazing. The more I see, the more I dig it. I wish I could comment more on the story, but I couldn't read the PDF preview. I'll try again later.

Based on what I have seen and just looking at the art, I'd like to check out a few more preview pages. I'm not a big sci-fi/fantasy person. I tend to stop and start at Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut. But Dog Eaters seems to do that Mad Max punkish-motor-tribes-in-a-desert-wasteland thang I love, and it it's also another thing I tend to like- a finite story. One with a beginning, middle and end. Which hopefully means character development going from point A and coming to its logical conclusion at point Wherever without extending the story past its natural stopping point into absurdity and continuity insanity, a la most serialized comic book monthlies. Some of Malcolm Wong's political and social concerns are also my own, so I give him some credit for developing the book from those, too.

According to MySpace, besides his Dog Eaters screenplay, Malcolm Wong has directed music videos here in Japan... and he and his wife are also responsible for the rebirth of the fashion doll, Blythe. That's also pretty cool. Actually, taken altogether, that's some high-powered cool.

And the final cool thing about this? Thanks to Dog Eaters' friendship, I was able to friend Diablo Cody, kick-ass screenwriter of Juno, one of my favorite movies. In fact, in a year overrun with good superhero action movies I definitely enjoyed, Juno remains healthily ensconced on top of my list as Best Movie Released in Japan in 2008.

Thanks, Dog Eaters!

PS- One day I'll re-explain why I generally reject using the term manga as jargon specifically referring to Japanese comics or Western comics drawn in similar styles. I just use it here as shorthand and out of laziness.

Shut Your Creeping Face, Uncle Creepy: "Creepy Archives" Vol. 1 Review!

Creepy Archives Vol. 1
Publisher: Dark Horse
Stories: Archie Goodwin, Larry Ivie, Otto Binder and more
Artists: Frank Frazetta, Reed Crandall, Al Williamson and more

Capsule review: Collecting the first five issues of that old Warren Publishing horror mag Creepy, this book isn’t likely to scare you (unless you’re a pretty timid soul) but it is going to dazzle you with full-color reproductions of Frank Frazetta’s painted covers and the gorgeous black-and-white work of the greatest artist line-ups in American comic book history.

When I was a kid, we bought comic books from convenience stores. And we tried to get the most comic bang for our comic buck.

Which meant we only sneaked peeks at those pricey b&w titles from some company called Warren Publishing. The ones over on the magazine rack beneath Hot Rod and Field & Stream, sometimes Playboy and Penthouse. Eerie. Creepy. The Rook. Vampirella. They had lurid painted covers with lovingly rendered semi-naked women or fanged werewolves bristling with hair.

And their title logos looked like oozing blood.

To my innocent suburban eyes, the Warren magazines seemed sordid compared to the four-color DC and Marvel books. Maybe it was their location within the magazine display, inches from the pornography, down near the scuffed floor. Maybe it was the degenerate hosts. Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie looked decadent, decayed. Vaguely inbred. Like they’d invite you into their crumbling mansions, feed you poisoned gingerbread, then read you dirty limericks as you died.

Even on a bright summer day, south Georgia humid, with afternoon thunderstorms rolling in from the west charged with the molten July heat, school still over a month away, a surreptitious glance at a Creepy or an Eerie story gave me a Halloween night chill… frequently without my having read it thoroughly. But I was an overly imaginative boy who lived near a cemetery.

Wow, I didn't know what I was missing!

Alex Toth, Al Williamson, Alden McWilliams, Jack Davis, Roy Krenkel, Joe Orlando, Gray Morrow, Frank Frazetta, Angelo Torres and Reed Crandall contributed to Warren’s horror magazines at one time or another, and all are represented in this reprint of the first five issues of Creepy, complete with Frazetta’s moody, expressionistic covers and all the original ads for things like an LP of Boris Karloff reading "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," a miniature Germanium radio, an 8mm projector or a giant plastic fly…

I don't know what someone might've need a giant plastic fly for but I'm a "whatever floats your boat" kinda person.

And yes, the artwork is beautifully reproduced here in a large, crisp format so you can study all the nuances of Williamson’s lithe figures, Frank Frazetta’s never-equaled inking and Gray Morrow’s creamy ink washes. I can’t imagine the original printed stories looked as good as they do on these pages. I can’t imagine any other comics of any other era looking as good as these. Reading this book is like taking an autumn holiday away from today’s tired hacks who seem content to steal stylistic elements from manga to cover poor draftsmanship, or else trace stills from porn videos of Maxim magazine to mimic “photo-realism.”

There’s a mix of old school horror and sci-fi stuff, with each artist well-chosen. Al Williamson and Roy Krenkel visualize an undersea kingdom, the kind of thing they excelled at, and Williamson later playfully and self-deprecatingly casts himself in “The Success Story” as murderous hack cartoonist Baldo Smudge (who gets a zombie-fied comeuppance), but the revelation here is Reed Crandall. He’d done solid work at EC, but in Creepy his art looks like 19th century etchings, fine-lined and sharply delineated, the perfect match for some of the antiquated settings.

As gorgeous as Crandall’s work is, the single most strikingly illustrated story has to be Morrow’s “Incident in the Beyond.” Modeled in lush levels of black and gray wash, it anticipates Richard Corben’s airbrush work during Warren’s latter days.

Worthy of special note as well is Frazetta’s final comic book story, “Werewolf!” Writer Larry Ivie atypically sets it in Africa rather than Transylvania or the Scottish moors, and Frazetta gives brutish “white hunter” Demmon a hulking, almost simian appearance to match his bullying personality. Demmon’s werewolf quarry is little more than a scratchy blob of black brushstrokes with eerie white triangles for eyes and fangs. I can see where Mark Schultz got some of his drybrush techniques.

Alex Toth’s “Grave Undertaking“ rounds out the volume; Toth’s use of inky silhouette and flat fields of gray-tone is almost abstract, making his work here feel experimental compared to the more classical approach of Crandall, Williamson, Morrow and others.

Beyond their art, the tentative, fairly tame stories don’t quite live up to the promise in Frazetta’s covers- especially his issue 4 phantasmagoria, which has to be one of the most delightfully dark and iconographic werewolf images ever. A big orange full moon looming over a castle, fluttering vampire bats, and an oversized wolf-creature eyeing some hapless goober with slicked-back hair, wearing a Sherlock Holmes cloak. A neat touch is the skull and vertebrae lying in the foreground, foreshadowing our friend’s fate.

Most of these eight pagers are cliched (some readers thought so even back then, if the letter pages are to be believed... oh, and look out for at least one name familiar to horror comics fans for his work on a certain swampy thing in the early 1970s), not the least bit frightening and not particularly gory despite the lack of Comics Code Authority oversight.

With heavy usage of Eastern European vampire and werewolf motifs, these initial issues of Creepy come across as quaint. Some tales seem oddly like adaptations of lesser known Universal or Hammer Studios films; lots of 19th century police inspectors and bobbies discovering bloodless corpses, torch-bearing mobs and the like. The settings often look like the same Hammer backlots (assuming they had some) Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee stalked, shot day-for-night on the cheap but in gruesome color. And some, like “Bewitched,” don’t really make a whole lot of sense and hinge on ridiculous chains of events, or conclude unsatisfyingly with clumsy exposition.

You can almost imagine Count Floyd showing up at the end instead of Uncle Creepy, dripping flop sweat and desperately trying to inject some energy into the disappointment: “Wasn’t that some… scary exposition, kids? I don’t know about you, but I find… er… explanations reeeaaalllly scary! Information… it’s… it’s frightening, I… um… tell you… ARRROOOOOOOOO!!!!”

While they (fortunately) don’t feature the sexual imagery common in the Creepy’s from my era, they also lack the visceral impact of those latterday stories. I mean, Bruce Jones’ repellently effective “Jenifer” still makes me feel sick more than 20 years after I first read it, but there’s nothing approaching that level of revulsion here. You could give this volume to an monster art-loving older kid without any worries.

And you should. But don't give that kid anything reprinting "Jenifer" before his or her 21st birthday. Yikes!

This is what horror was before people like Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson and Stephen King updated it to take place in the 20th century, in suburbs with supermarkets and liquor stores.

Best are the tales written by none other than the legendary Archie Goodwin. His plots are tight and well-constructed for this short format and invariably feature an effective little EC twist at the end.

Even his adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tale-Tell Heart” isn’t satisfied with the gruesome spectacle of a man cutting out another’s heart and going mad from guilt. Nope, Goodwin audaciously appends a further O. Henry-like element. “Monster Rally,” featuring the surprise birth of Uncle Creepy (and some of Angelo Torres’ finest work), reads like an homage to the similarly-themed Haunt of Fear tale “A Little Stranger,” the origin of the Old Witch. Goodwin seems to have internalized the EC formula, and his shock endings rarely have to be explained through dialogue because he runs out of pages. No wonder he maintains such a monumental reputation in the decade after his passing.

This is a huge, heavy hardcover that takes its archival mission seriously. It’s expensive (although compared to some of the recent books from DC and Marvel, it’s more than reasonable), but if you’re a fan of classic comic book art from the days when artists could actually draw and seemed intent on blowing readers away with their skills, this one is a must. I’m not sure how many more volumes this series will run before they get to the sex and gore, but until then just enjoy these relics of a more cheerfully horrific time.

Fortunately, now that I'm independently wealthy, I have plenty of yen to throw away on Creepy. Well done, Dark Horse.

Fair was Helly Glover: "Hellboy: The Crooked Man" 1 Review

Hellboy: The Crooked Man #1 (of 3)
Publisher: Dark Horse
Story: Mike Mignola
Art: Richard Corben
Colors: Dave Stewart

Capsule review: Mike Mignola and Richard Corben take Hellboy deep into the misty Appalachian mountains where he finds himself battling a twisted (but sharply dressed) evil for the souls of a wandering hillbilly and his childhood friend. Rustic witchcraft lore and a unique setting make for one of Hellboy’s most atmospheric and affecting tales.

My list of top horror comic artists is pretty short these days. Sure, there are the old masters, the guys who did stuff for EC and Warren back in the olden days before I was born. But among today’s active artists? Not including a few from Japan, I’d put only Mike Mignola, Richard Corben and Bernie Wrightson at the top. And what a disparate trio. While I’d love to see Wrightson illustrate a Mignola strip, I think Corben is the perfect match for Mignola’s Hellboy.

Strangely enough for two artists who work together so well, Corben’s and Mignola’s art couldn’t be more different. Sure, neither adheres to classical ideas of body proportion, and they both work a kind of moody magic on the page. But Mignola’s figures are abstractly geometric, almost flat, while Corben’s are weirdly textured and more three-dimensional. You can even spot some odd Jack Kirby or P. Craig Russell flourishes in Mignola’s blocky monsters.

Corben, though?

Richard Corben is unique. I can’t think of anyone else whose art his resembles. Oddly stretched or squashed figures, shadows with a crumbly edge that make his figures pop, but also gives them strange fungoid textures. Creepy and nauseating, but in a good way. I mean, we’re talking about horror comics here.

Mignola writes to Corben’s strengths by setting The Crooked Man in the Appalachians of Virginia and peopling the hills with melancholy backwoods types. Corben can distort their bodies almost to the point of caricature and bathe them in pale light and inky shadow. Stick them in haunted dells, thickly wooded and mossy, heavy with portents of evil. Depict in full, sickly detail women who leave their rubbery, cast-off skins lying around on beds in wooden shacks, temptresses who ride on desiccated horses. And a hideously misshapen figure in a top hat who plays both ends against the middle as he does Satan’s work on earth. Or is he, himself, Satan?

Despite the weirdness of it all, Corben gives the most visually ludicrous figure, Hellboy himself, a solid muscularity that makes him almost plausible with his sawed-off horns, red skin and wrinkled trench coat.

After wreaking havoc through Lovecraftian pastiches, Celtic adventures and stock Eastern European set-tos, Hellboy plunges into the folklore of his adopted home country. It’s a more than welcome change and really invigorates this installment. There are only so many times Hellboy can bop undead Nazis or tangle with worms and tentacles from beyond space before it all blurs together. Mignola’s plot and dialogue are heavy on the southern gothic, with down-home characters solemnly intoning lines like, “So one day I found me a squashed black cat… An while my ma was out, I boiled it till it went all to pieces… Then I took that mess down to the creek to wash out the bones.”

These are superstitious earth-folk, and they have good reason to be. Their mountains are haunted places where Satan’s agent shambles through the woods and offers deals too good to be true, and none too safe for the immortal soul. These mountain people seem to approach living half in a nightmare with a tired fatalistic acceptance, and not even the sight of a muscle-bound demon wearing clothes and toting a big pistol throws them off their stride. Hellboy fits right in from the start.

It reminds me of “Jess-Belle” one of the most inventive and original Twilight Zone episodes, penned by Earl Hamner, Jr., who later went on to create The Waltons. Like Crooked Man, “Jess-Belle” is set in the Appalachians (the Blue Ridge Mountains, to be exact) and deals with witchcraft and its consequences. In it, James Best plays a young hillbilly bewitched away from his fiancee by the darkly beautiful and ultimately doomed Jess-Belle, played by Anne Francis. Between that TV story and Hellboy’s, I guess it proves cain’t nobody walk the paths of the fallen without payin’ a heavy toll. We all know whatever Faustian bargains Hellboy’s new pal Tom Ferrell made in his past will come at a similarly heavy price for both him and his childhood friend, Cora Fisher.

I’m not sure what John-Boy would make of Hellboy, but this is as close as we’re likely to come to that particular crossover. Unless Mignola and Corben are building towards a climactic scene where Hellboy bids goodnight to an almost endless stream of hard-working and good-hearted farm people with their various genders appended to their given names.