Cable #24
I think tomorrow may be the day when I hope aboard the X-Train again. I haven’t been following those kooky batch of freaks for a while now. The X-Verse has become so convoluted and expensive to follow that instead of trying to keep up with it, I just imagine days when Wolverine used to drink beer in Australia and get crucified, and everyone was hopping through the Siege Perilous. The good ole days!

Cable this week is the beginning of the X-Event that hath been dubbed Second Coming, and if I had to say of what, I’d guess: Jean Grey. It’s not the most complicated guess, given that Cable has been escorting around a super-special mutant with red hair and green eyes for the past couple of years. Also, last year at New York Comic-Con, when Matt Fraction was asked who Hope was, he was like “Uh, she’s got red hair and green eyes” and then he laughed.

Seriously.

So shit be poppin’ off with Jean Grey and Cable, having finally returned from the timestream, or an alternate reality, or wherever the fuck they were. And so I figure it’s worth checking out because the whole Hope and Cable storyline is an example of why comic books are both absurd, and great. Let’s deconstruct what’s going on here.

Cable is protecting Hope. Who is Cable? Cable is the son of Cyclops and Jean Grey’s clone, Madelyne Pryor. Alright it’s pretty fantastical. So then, Cable is shot into the future and shit because of some techno-0rganic virus that couldn’t be treated in the present day. This was just an excuse to make him look XTREME back in the 1990’s, but whatever. Then Cable comes back from the future, and is older than his Dad.

Sweet.

Then there’s Hope. This chick was the only  mutant born after the Scarlet Witch went all bonkers and willed the mutants out of existence. And oh, she happens to have red hair and green eyes. Then she jumps into the future with Cable. Dude cannot, simply, will not get enough of the future. He fucking loves it. As an aside, when is the “future” for Cable? If he grew up fifty-zillion years in the future, is present day the past? Whatever.

So there’s Cable, Cyclops’ son. And he’s protecting the reincarnated manifestation of the chick his Mom was cloned from. It’s pretty fucking fantastic, and this is the sort of shit that could only happen in comic books. As I mentioned, the X-Books and myself have not been BFFs for a long time, but the whole culmination of Jean Grey returning has got my attention.

There’s nothing really else I’m checking out in the Marvel Universe this week, though there’s the usual Spider-Men and Deadpools afoot. Does anyone check out any of the fourteen Deadpool titles? I’m intrigued, and I figure there has to be one worth reading.

(more…)

First Wave #1
Rejoice, my legion of fellow fanboys and girls. This week we’re getting Brian Azzarello and Rags Morales’ love child First Wave. This shit has been on my radar since last year, when they first announced it. Azzarello and Morales are rocking out in their own DC Universe filled with pulp goodness. There ain’t no Superman, there ain’t no super powers. But there’s Batman carrying a shitload of guns, the Spirit, and Doc Savage. Who according to Azzarello via CBR “is top of the food chain. He’s the Superman.”

Sold.

I’m a total whore for Elseworld titles, and noir schlock, so I’m sold. I’m always down with the concept of Elseworld titles, since the author gets to pretty much do whatever the fuck he wants. They aren’t bound by the typical editorial constraints, “God dammit, you need to have Hal Jordan fighting some Black Lantern..uh..Black Lantern Pa Kent or some shit in this title, or your tits are mine!” Just a couple of dudes getting to flesh out their own universe. Maybe it’ll suck, maybe it’ll be enjoyable, maybe it’ll be a certain shade of gray.

But I gotta get behind it. I spend so much time grousing about the idea that all stories these days are hindered by editorial-driven Super Events, I’d be a total douchebag to not support something veering off in a different direction.

Green Hornet #1
You can almost feel the Earth shuddering as all the Kevin Smith fanboys shuffle out of their houses and do their master’s bidding as they go and buy this pile of shit. Back in 1999, I would have been beyond pumped for this title. I was sixteen, and I thought Kevin Smith was the greatest thing ever. I also jerked off to pictures of Pamela Anderson’s face photoshopped onto porn stars that I downloaded from AOL chat rooms. Things have changed.

Back then, Smith was ripping it up on Daredevil for the newly-created Marvel Knights line. Dude was teamed up with some guy named Joe Quesada. Back then he was just a great penciller, or the guy who created Ash. And it was a hell of a run, and something that sold me on Daredevil. Listen, I was too young to experience Frank Miller, and I’ve gone back and read it. Chill out. But it was Silent Bob’s tale that got me into the character in the first place.

These days?

These days, Kevin Smith is getting kicked off of airplanes, directing shit like Cop Out, and writing shit slop Zack and Miri Make A Porno, which should have been titled, “I Want to Be Judd Apatow.” Quesada? Quesada is the Marvel Czar.

It really doesn’t matter how good this title is, it’s going to sell. Smith has legions of followers who would buy used pairs of his underwear if they were for sale, or tattoo Snoochie Boochies to their dumb foreheads if commanded. I ain’t totally hating, the guy has penned some of my favorite movies ever. It’s just that he hasn’t done anything since I graduated from high school back in 2001 that I dug the fuck out of, but whatever.

(more…)

Here’s me and Casey Jones hanging out at the New York Comic Con last February.  I’d recently had a dream where he and I were camped out searching for the Shredder in a rich guy’s giant backyard.  It was one of the best dreams I ever had and running into the guy who out-crazies Raphael can make February seem like summer.

I love comics too much.  My dad had a similar relationship to them as I did, relying on them to supply happiness.  I spent my childhood running away from the boredom of school and the pain of dealing with other people through  comic books, videogames, candy, day dreaming and running away.  There were no casual interests, everything became an obsession.  I’m surprised that drugs and alcohol haven’t caused me more trouble than they have.  Comics were the most important of all my obsessions, and I spent all the money I could find on attaining them.  I wanted to own them all and at one point I practically did before realizing that owning all the comics in the world wasn’t going to make me happy.  You can’t buy happiness but you can buy beautiful things and that’s something.

Mikhail insists that I number these lists in countdown form.  I don’t like it.  It might mislead readers into thinking that these lists are intended to be in a definitive order, which they are not.  These aren’t my top ten comics in book form in order of my love for them.  These are ten books that own, like and I hope aren’t overly familiar to the reader.

—–

10) Mad For Keeps (1958)

You’ve probably seen crumbling copies of those digest sized paperback reprints of Mad that printed decades ago.  Mad For Keeps is one of three large hardcover anthologies that Mad put out and it’s a lot less crumbled if you can find a copy.  This cover, an edited version of the cover art for Mad Magazine #30 is possibly the most iconic and frequently used image of Alfred E. Neuman.  It was painted by Norman Mingo, a master of watercolors who did most of the great Mad covers.  This volume collects some of the best stuff from the first few years of Mad, both as a comic and magazine.  There’s a funny little introduction by Ernie Kovacs even.  It opens with a parody of stamps, makes fun of Ed Sullivan and then there’s a letter from Alfred E. Neuman, published before it was determined that the name belonged to the “What-Me-Worry?” Kid.

—–

9) Lobo’s Greatest Hits (1992)

Lobo scared me when i was little because he lived in a world with no hope but now I think he’s pretty funny.  This book shows Lobo riding on his space motorcycle through space when a spacey VW Rabbit cuts him off and he follows it through a blackhole.   Lobo is then lost within some maze where he wanders into doorways that force him to relive past moments of his life, a pretty cool device to use to reprint old material.  At some point it turns into a choose your own adventure thing.  We get to see Lobo in his original pink and orange skintight outfit and his unexplained change to his biker look.  I don’t know if they explained why his facial make up (tattoos? Scars? Alien skin patterns?) went from looking beetle-ish to being all angular.  I guess that when Simon Bisley got to draw the character he did his best to make Lobo look like him.  Also, check out Simon Bisley’s death metal band.

—–

8) The Comic Strip Art of Lyonel Feininger (1994)

This is a great collection of the comics drawn by Lyonel Feininger for newspapers back in 1906 and 1907.  The Kin-Der-Kids was a newspaper strip drawn in a beautiful German expressionist style.  The kids get lost at see in the Kin-Der family bathtub and a whole bunch wacky shenanigans take place.  There’s a character named Mysterious Pete who flies around on a cloud with a sign sticking out of it that reads “Private Cloud, Keep Off!”  There’s Piemouth who won’t stop eating and also “Japansky, the Clockwork Waterbaby.”  Also there’s a dog named Sherlock Bones.

—–

7) A Raw One Shot #1, Jimbo by Gary Panter (1982)

This big giant newsprint comic is bound in corugated cardboard and I think that’s neat.  It collects some of the Jimbo comics from Slash Magazine and it’s black, white and red.  Gary Panter’s a super genius and Jimbo is an awesome comic.  Jimbo’s a punk, runnin’ around in a scarier version of LA in the early eighties.  Everything’s crazy and drawn well.  I love it too much.  Oh, oh, oh.

—–

6) Goodman Beaver by Harvey Kurzman and Will Elder (1983)

Goodman Beaver is naive and well meaning character who gets into odd situations, kinda like Spongebob.  He hangs out with Tarzan in one story and in another he’s trying to convince an apathetic Superman to not give up on humanity.  In another he becomes a policeman and the local young folks and although he thinks they’re being nice to him because of his Marlon Brando impersonation it’s really because they think his gun is cool.  Eventually Goodman was changed into a sexy lady character and became Little Annie Fanny which ran in Playboy for a real long time.

—–

5) The Short Life and Happy Times of the Shmoo by Al Capp (2003)

This collects the first and only major Shmoo storyline from the Lil Abner comic.  Most people don’t seem to know about the Shmoo now but when the Shmoo was introduced it turned it was an international sensation. There were songs and dances based on the Shmoo.  Prominent political figures would reference the Shmoo casually.  People started saying “Happy Shmoo Year!”  It was huge.  It rivaled Mickey Mouse.  You read this thing and you can see why.

Lil Abner accidentally winds up in the Valley of the Shmoon where the Shmoo dwell.  The Shmoo are the ultimate natural resource.  The reproduce lickety-split, have no bones and if you want to eat them they die on the spot from joy.  They produce milk, eggs and butter and they’re eyes make  ”the best suspernder buttons.”  Lil Abner brings the Shmoo back to the town he’s in and everybody’s lives are improved except for the crooked local business owners and eventually the world’s captains of industry.  The Shmoos crash the world’s economy and so the government send out “shmooicide squads” to exterminate all of the shmoos.  Two shmoos survive and reproduce and they return to the Valley of the Shmoon from whence they came.

Despite being a giant craze it also pissed off a lot of people.  Capitalists and Marxists both felt it was directed at them and didn’t appreciate it.

—–

4) Invasion De Los Elvis Zombies by Gary Panter

This is the Spanish version of Gary Panter’s Invasion of the Elvis Zombies.  I have no idea what it’s about beyond aliens that look like Elvis.  It is based on how Panter always thought that Elvis seemed more like he was from outer space than a human being.  It even comes with a flexi-disc that I think he recorded.  The art’s pretty.

—–

3) Madman: Two Trilogies by Mike Allred (1995)

I would stare at this advertised in the back of Madman Comics and wish I had fifty dollars to buy it with.  Later on I was able to get it for half of that on Ebay.  This is a signed hardcover book that collects the first two Madman comic series, Madman and Madman Adventures.  In the first one we’re introduced to Frank Einstein, a guy with amnesia running around in this costume who’s trying to figure out what’s going on.  The second series shows him going on adventures through time and adventuring with space aliens and is a lot more adventuresome.  Dan Clowes inked the first series or drew the backgrounds or something.  I forget because he’s not really credited.  Madman never got a movie like it’s peers, Hellboy and Sin City did but Mike Allred was a huge point of obsession.  For me his highpoint was Madman Adventires #3 and Madman Comics #1.  I liked when his inking was still a little scratchy.

—–

2) Sudor Sudaca by Jose Munoz and Carlos Sampayo (1986)

Jose Munoz is an Argentinian artist whose super inky, high contrast drawings have heavily invluenced Frank Miller, Dave McKean and other people who are better known to English readers.  His drawings are somewhere between Mike Mignola and Raymond Pettibon.  There’s a great mix of little lines, fields of blacck and giant sloppy but purposeful brushwork.  I have no idea what this comic is about but I love staring at it.

—

1) The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer (1965)

I don’t have the dust jacket for this so it’s just a red rectangle but this is still an important book.  Jules Feiffer, the super famous cartoonist and illustrator wrote some great stuff about the meaning and importance of comics.  His writing was accompanies by reprinted origin stories of many of the major super heroes of the day.  This might be the first notable collection of super hero comics into a book and certainly the first time that someone respectable said, “Hey, this isn’t garbage.  This deserves your attention and respect.”  Thanks Jules Feiffer.

You may need to install a Veoh player plugin into your browser to view this and other Veoh videos!

P.S. I think the poor tracking and audio syncing of this rip somehow just add to the viewing experience of Akira. It makes me feel like I’m 12 again and I just got some 4th generation dubbed copy from a friend of a friend.

I don’t really fully fathom how the Toilet Cobra convinced Ryan Keely to let him film her while she burned comics, but he did and here it is for you to enjoy. I hope for Ryan’s sake there was no Creepy Touching involved… you never know where he’s been.

Hip hop is definitely not dead, so take that image with a grain of salt, but a lot of the trappings associated with its proliferation are passing. Yesterday I downloaded the newish Adult Swim Mixtape, ATL RMX and it is pretty, pretty, pretty good (you have to read that part Larry David style). The idea of the project is nothing new, but it’s worth thinking about briefly. The concept is simple: a big corporation pays some artists to take popular songs by other artists and remix the songs. My intrigue began because these are not typical combinations, and the final product is a total success. While El-P has been making great beats for ages, I doubt Jeezy has ever hit him up. While bloglin readers are probably well familiar with Memory Tapes I doubt Killer Mike has any Memory Tapes music on his iPod, yet here he is rapping on a dope Memory Tapes beat. The divisiveness here is not a measure of quality, but one of demographics, and surprisingly it’s being breached by a television network dedicated to animation.

In 2000, there is no way that El-P would have been remixing a Nelly song, so what happened between then and now? How is it that one of the Dukes of underground hip hop is remixing one of the Earls of world famous crack rap? Back in 2000—unbeknown to us—the divide between the underground and the mainstream, which had been building since the inception of the music industry, was beginning to crumble. The disappearance of this divide was largely due to 2 things: the proliferation of relatively inexpensive high-quality studio equipment, and the burgeoning P2P networks. Before that divide disappeared underground music and mainstream music were different in very real ways. If you made underground music you were most likely using cheaper equipment than people making mainstream music. These days, someone on your block probably has a setup comparable to Drumma Boy’s. And, you can download the newest Cam’Ron mixtape from the same megaupload server that hosts your coworkers band’s current album. Previously you’d probably have to go to 2 separate stores to buy El-P or Jeezy’s music.

(more…)

Daredevil #505
Daredevil’s my favorite book dropping right now, and it has been for a while. It doesn’t have the sensational bullshit of everything that interconnects with Siege, or Dark Reign, or Dark Siege, or Reigning Blood or whatever the epic event of the moment is called. And no, it doesn’t even have Jennifer Garner, or Ben Affleck in it. So what the fuck, I know. It’s a title brimming with nothing! Not even a Deadpool appearance! But the shit is excellent, and you should be reading it. Matt fucking Murdock is straight-up running The Hand these days. And if they weren’t a bunch of bad-ass assassins before, they look even more ballin’ with devil horns affixed to their ninja masks of awesomeness these days.

But the real reason that I enjoy Daredevil so much is that it doesn’t resort to status-quo restorations every nine months. Shit has been swirling around the toilet for years now in the life of Matty. He’s gone from an outlaw, to on trial, to a prisoner, to watching his wife go insane. Maybe I should be glad that Daredevil doesn’t pump any insane numbers in the sales department, or they would be way more careful with the title. Even the appearances by H.A.M.M.E.R or Norman Osborn feel less forced, and more in sync with the actual universe.

Our boy Murdock takes to Japan this month to solidify his grasp on The Hand through one of their international branches. Though, I suppose calling Japan the international branch of a league of ninjas probably doesn’t make that much sense. I’m waiting for the whole trying to run a league of assassins thing to go south for the ole’ Devil. It seems like a magnificently shitty idea to think he can run a squad of undead ninja-guy-things, especially since he doesn’t have the heart of coal it requires. Emo Kid Peter Parker should check out Murdock’s life next time he thinks he has it rough, he’d be in the corner listening to Taking Back Sunday and cutting himself if he had to deal with half the bullshit Murdock did.

Other shit coming out in the Marvel Universe? Uhhh. There’s Deadpool: Merc With A Mouth, which is one of the seven-thousand Deadpool titles at the moment. Then there’s a new issue of Uncanny X-Men, the events of which I have no idea about, and cannot understand. They need a jumping on point for that title, because every time I try to buy an issue I feel like I walked into some bizarre world where nothing makes sense, Magneto is back from the dead again, and Emma Frost is a bad guy/good guy/bad guy/good guy for reasons unknown.

Zombies Of Mass Destruction #6
There’s a comic book called Zombies of Mass Destruction. Either you’re sold, or you’re not. I’m not, but I can imagine a lot of people do cartwheels over anything zombie. Are they played out, yet? I mean, are they even scary anymore? I wonder if when the eventual and unpreventable Zombie Apocalypse occurs, we’ll all be so blase about the walking dead, and that will be our undoing.

Oh it’s just a zombie.

And we’ll forget that the zombie is intent on eating our soul and munching on our brains, and that’s how they’ll take us down. Yes, the zombies will finish us off the same way everything else does in life; they will take advantage of our apathy. We’ll be trying to watch Monster Truckers Crush Skulls or something on Spike TV when they just walk into our houses as we stare at the idiot box and eat us.

I called it here first.

(more…)

Choker #1
The first issue of Choker is coming out this week, and I’m jazzed because I’m a huge glutton for Ben Templesmith’s work. You may know him as the artist and co-creator of 30 Days of Night, or the co-creator of the barely-ever-released but no less awesome Fell. There’s something about his artwork that I can really get into, and so when I heard that he was putting this out with writer Ben McCool I was stoked. And if that wasn’t enough, McCool’s explanation of what the title was about sounded as though it came from the rotting canals of my own brain:

I guess I’d better lay down the disclaimers, then: language used is dastardly goings-on are repellent, and the characters are so lewd you’ll feel like only an industrial-strength jet wash will be able to rinse your tarnished conscience clean. Put simply, we’re hoping to give Bill O’Reilly a Rush Limbaugh-resembling hernia.

It’s a rotting, filthy noir fable. How the fuck can you not get amped for that? Wait, you mean you’re not a glutton for perversity and depravity? I can’t relate to that.

Batman and Robin #8
It really saddens me that Batman and Robin, a title that was created for Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne couldn’t go twelve or so issues before delving back into the monotonous resurrection of Bruce Wayne. And if that isn’t enough, consider the fact that we know the actual return is coming in a stand alone title, Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne. So what the fuck is going on in the pages of Batman and Robin? Why, they’re trying to bring Bruce back to life! It all just screams of redundancy and lack of progress.

Who the fuck knows, I could be wrong.

It is upsetting to me that an interesting storyline involving Grayson trying to wear the cloak and embrace the burden of filling his pseudo-father’s shoes has been canned so quickly into its run. Whether or not the timeline was intentional or not, I am the unhappy because everything is switching so quickly back to the Bruce Wayne type thang. There’s some speculation that Bruce could return and not be Batman, or even that the dude’s displaced spirit is going to be caged in the body of Damian and, and, and…I don’t fucking know, I don’t care.

So this week we find the emaciated, laser-blasted corpse of Bruce rising from the Lazarus Pit. I don’t need ingenuity or textual analysis to figure out that it isn’t going to work, I only need to look at the list of DC events this year to figure out that this attempt is going to be a steaming failure pile, making way for his return later in the year.

(more…)

Every few weeks I send out a self promotional email to all my friends. Most people tell me that they like them. Michael Cohn (AKA Shark) doesn’t like them, but I can’t tell if that guy has a personality or not. My guess is that he sleeps in a closet, standing up, his eyes wide open.

Another guy who hates my emails is cartoonist, Johnny Ryan. He usually just responds with words like “Yughhh” but this time he rewrote my entire email with his trademark Johnny R. humor. He even referred to Mikhail Bortnik as “Diksmell Fartdik.” which I encourage everyone to embrace as Mikhail’s new name.

This is a long post so check for my original email and Johnny Ryan’s version after the break.

(more…)

Man, I ain’t read shit in two weeks. There’s comic books piling up on my computer desk at an increasingly rapid rate. They sit there, begging to be read. I tell them, “Shh children, I will attend to thee soon”, and then I return to whatever activity I am currently caught-up in. All of this shit started when I began my grad school classes last week and I actually had to read real things.

The fucking pile continues to increase in enormity, and then it begins to intimidate me. I’m all “Holy fucking shit, I have ten comics I have to read”, and I say to myself that I don’t want to short change them, so I say “I’ll read them when I’m not exhausted and resentful of the written word.” Apparently, the time when that occurs is never. Sure, I could be logical and just read one at a time but that makes too much sense.

The entire thing runs tandem with a desire to actually comprehend the shit I’m reading. Earlier last year, I realized a several of things. First that I read comic books and things in general way too quickly. And because of this, two things happen, I retain very little of what I’ve read over the long term, and I analyze even less. I thought it was something just particular to me, but I asked around and some of my friends shared the same plight. They read a lot, but what happens and to whom slips their mind quickly.

Of course, it’s all compounded by the fact that you have to wait an entire month for the next installment, and you’re reading ten or twenty titles at a time. Everything begins to blur and blend and the next thing you know, you’re thinking of Daredevil fighting Cyclops while Batman jacks it in the corner. And as far as actually picking apart what was going on in the comic books? I really wasn’t.

So I decided to do what a college professor and mentor of mine recommended back in the day, “Read more, less.” Spend more time reading less material, and thereby ingesting that shit more thoroughly. But of course, that shit takes way more time than rushing through an issue, checking out the epic fights and the snappy dialogue. As well it requires a bit more of a higher brain function, and for anyone who reads this column regularly, it is apparent I struggle at composing sentences that are halfway intelligible, and don’t contain the word “cock” or “cunt” every other noun.

(more…)