Winter Soldier #1
Art by Butch Guice & Bettie Breitweiser
Written by Ed Brubaker
Published by Marvel Comics

I'm actually going to talk about the art in this one first. That's weird for me, right? Maybe, but I don't think I have much of a choice: it's quite striking. There's something about this art that has me thinking I'm reading an "old school" comic book that's also totally new at the same time, in the same panels. The people, are drawn "normally", by which I mean realistic. Body parts are generally in proportion, facial features have naturalistic details. But there's an overall manner to the characters, a vibe that has me flashing back to 1960's & 70's era James Bond movies, with a bit of a Rockford Files vibe here and there as well. I love that the general palette is a washed out red, white and blue--it's very subtle, but very clever. You don't necessarily notice it while reading, but upon flipping back through the comic, it's evident throughout.  

It's funny to me that I like the art, because the old 60's & 70's comic book style could probably be blamed in large part for turning me away from comic books. It's not that the style is bad, I hope that's clear. It's just the sort of thing that I saw in comic books when I was younger, and I think I associate that art style and comics with something that I didn't read or like that much. It's a sort of learned rejection, not always tied into actual evidence. But in this case, I was drawn in. Some of the things that drew me were the way the frames were played with - on the first page, our main characters are are in these great catalog poses, with The Black Widow depicted too large for the frame in which she's drawn (love that!), and there's a lot of fun being had with frame size, shape, insert and overlap, teasing out things that draw the eye in. It just made me want to find the flow of the page and see what else was going on. And, of course, I loved the romantic scenes between Bucky and Natasha. They're really intimate and sensual, and yet there's nothing X-rated (not even R-rated) about those drawings. I think that takes real artistic talent to be able to draw intimacy with such restraint.

So, anyhow, that's the art! And now, onto the story. Although it's clearly a storyline that's grown out of another story that must have been going on for a while, it's not at all difficult to catch up with. Everyone thinks Bucky is dead, but he is actually trying to save the world. He's teamed up with Natasha, the Black Widow, and they are trying to find and "catch" (I'm pretty sure they're just going to kill whoever they find) some sleeper agents (who are actually sleeping - Cold War agents of destruction who've been put to sleep in sleeper tube-things and kinda forgotten about after the Cold War ended and it looked like they weren't going to be needed) before the other side finds them and actually uses them in some kind of destructive way. There seems to be a couple of problems when they find the tubes, because they are empty. The big surprise of the issue is who shows up at the end. He's a gorilla warrior.  No, I didn't spell it wrong. He's not a guerrilla warrior, he's an actual gorilla. And he's a gorilla that screams in Russian at that! Neato!

The only funny little problems I had with these parts of the comic were when some of the fight scenes occurred. I couldn't always follow the action. That might be on me, but half the time I saw all the bullets and legs flailing about, I kinda gave up trying to follow it. Instead, I skipped to the end of the scene to figure out what happened by looking at the end results. Then I went back and tried to map out what I was supposed to be seeing. I suppose if it were a little clearer, I'd look at it more. I can't figure out what I really need changed though, because the problems I had with the fight scenes seem to stem from the same experimentation that I liked so much in the more intimate, talky scenes.

The other thing that seemed kinda, um, unrealistic sandwiched within the realistic art is that neither Natasha or Bucky ever seem to get hit. I finally asked my husband if they had some kind of unspoken magical powers or something, because...seriously. Is there something I don't know? Because Natasha seems to just back flip over every bullet that ever comes her way, and Bucky never seems to get hit either. They seem to be completely invincible. Is that the case?

Apparently, its not true. I'm told that she doesn't age normally, and maybe that's what keeps her so agile, and I've read (and extensively analyzed) about Bucky's robotic arm before. But they are not magic.  

All that aside? I found Winter Soldier to be an entertaining and somewhat thrilling read. It's got one heck of a cliffhanger, too! A maniacal machine gun toting Russian Gorilla screaming "DEATH TO AMERICA!!!" It definitely makes one wonder, "What happens next?"

-Nina Stone, 2012

Blazing Combat #3

This is excellent, of course. These issues (as well as others) were collected by Fantagraphics a few years ago, but there's something to be said for cracking open the yellowing pages behind Frank Frazetta's somber illustration of an American soldier standing knee deep in a pile of dead Vietnamese soldiers, the faint sky blue smoke rising from his rifle. Anti-war war comics are tough work--you're basically saying that you're planning to be entertaining, but this is the kind of entertainment that should leave you stroking your chin and looking off into the middle distance--and it would be impossible for all of those attempts to stick the landing. But if you take a second look at the line-up of talent this one bears, it's no surprise that so much of it does work. Severin's story is a nasty piece of EC style "surprise, asshole!", delightfully stocked with the same kinds of expression heavy faces you'd find in a Maguire Justice League. Toth's is pure post-apocalyptic lechery, with a climax that will appear doubly insane to modern readers. For my money though, the best thing in this package is Reed Crandall's "Foragers". A classic slice of that war comics staple--fragging the lunatic in charge--blessed with the sort of caricature style art that nowadays only shows up in movie parodies, if it shows up at all, and its reliance on brevity only ups the savagery with which it delivers that most classic of messages: Don't Be a Fucking Asshole.

Animal Man #6
Art by John Paul Leon, Travel Foreman, Jeff Huet, Lovern Kindzierski
Written by Jeff Lemire
Published by DC Comics

This issue of Animal Man is taken up with a comic length presentation of a super-serious film version of Mark Millar's Kick-Ass by way of Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, (in the comic it is credited to "Ryan Daranovsky" which is just adorgahhh), which, in the DC Universe, features the Buddy Baker character in the starring role. As this is a standard super-hero comic in 2012, there's only enough room to show what would probably be the first 8 minutes of a movie, and the best thing one can say about it is that it's an incredibly accurate depiction of how fucking mealy mouthed and boring a super-serious film version of Kick-Ass would be; that is also, unsurprisingly, the worst thing one could say about it. The comic drones on for a while in this fashion, and whether you think it's being pretentious by choice (as a way to comment on the disgusting immaturity of a man who chooses ego validation over doing things like "pay child support") or not will be determined by whether or not you actually read the comic in question. Theoretically, there's probably an argument to be made here, but when you put the whole thing under the lens of working human eyes, it becomes rapidly apparent that "being a super-hero" is something that non-pieces of shit stop doing the second some girl barfs their kid out of her vagina.

The Punisher #8
Art by Marco Checchetto & Matt Hollingsworth
Written by Greg Rucka
Published by Marvel Comics

Although this leans so heavily on film tricks that half the reading experience consists of pages of Checchetto drawing zoom effects on dead bodies and plugging up the page with "establishing" shots, it's actually a pretty engaging comic, almost like it's being so in spite of the way everyone involved would apparently be happier storyboarding David Fincher movies. Rucka's take on the Punisher is still an unwelcome return to the stories that get told whenever the character is being written by people who can't shut the fuck up about their own personal disagreements with Frank's horrible (and yet still fictional) worldview--and in this case, it's the old "make the surrounding situational ethics unassailably in Frank's favor, and then spend as much of the comic's page count as possible amongst other characters"--but the comic is still so deeply immersed in that professionals-only landscape that Rucka tends to do best in, and it all sort of works. As long as they keep the Spider-Man types and wistful grandmothers at arm's length, this book has actually gotten pretty decent.

Justice League International #6
Art by Marco Castiello, Dan Jurgens, Vincenzo Acunzo, Hi-Fi
Written by Dan Jurgens
Published by DC Comics

This is probably the purest mediocrity that DC has, a comic so boring that its ideal audience would be found in a locked room containing a Rubbermaid tub of semen with a Tupperware container of ova floating in it, as that way you'd be at an absolute Ground Zero, surrounded on all sides by something that has never had the opportunity to know any better. Even trying to find something in the story to point to as evidence deserving of cruelty is a pain in the ass, this comic, such a slippery eel of banality. Near the end, there's an exciting tease of a moment when a woman in the UN's "Security Group" is depicted wearing a dress seemingly cut from the exact same design that one sees on the United Nations flag, but then there's a close-up drawing and you see that it's just a bunch of little white palm trees (?) on a blue background--still without class, but not as hilarious as one could have hoped for. That sequence also features the funniest part of the comic's script, although it isn't legendary or anything--just a bunch of mid-grade super-heroes making excuses and playing victim for multiple pages. It brings up one of those intermittent questions that arise following the reading of too many super-hero comics: don't regular civilians despise these fucking clowns? Wouldn't they despise them further, to see them whining and passing the buck? Comics or real world, it's the same old song, the reason that girls don't like "nice guys": because desperation and pleading are the ugliest things on the planet, and we've been bred, correctly, to treat weakness with the virulent contempt it very much deserves. Failure is nothing more than that, its failure, and you better hurry up and get married if you want anybody to care that you have a cold and cry sometimes, Booster Gold. Because if there's one thing we've got plenty of, it's another clown with a self-esteem problem and a bunch of fucking gadgets.

-Tucker Stone, 2012

Over at Flavorwire, you'll find a list of upcoming comic releases that seemed worthy of spotlight. Most of what's on here won't be a surprise to anyone who ends up on this blog in the first place, so let me just stress two items: Joost Swarte's Is That All There Is and Derf Backderf's My Friend Dahmer are two of the best comics that are going to come out this (or any) year. Don't let them pass you by.

Here at TFO, we've had the regular bubbles of activity--Comics of the Weak continues its sojourn in the deserts of the weird, Nina read the only issue of The Walking Dead she ever will, and then there's some clearing of the throat regarding some books n' such.

In the extended family edition, you can find Joe McCulloch with an excellent essay on Soderbergh's Haywire over at MUBI: don't pass it up, even if (like me), you've yet to see the film. He's that good, that Jog! Meanwhile, fellow trench warfare combatant Matt Seneca took up the Herriman challenge and succeeded brilliantly.

In my other, day job identity, I've been happily piloting this little tumblr for Bergen Street Comics. It's still in the figuring-out-what-we're-doing-with-it stage, but for now, we're pretty happy with it.

In other Bergen Street news, Benjamin Marra has unleashed the details for his upcoming art show, including the poster, which (of course) is totally awesome.

You neglect the badge at your peril, brother.

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My father's uncle lived across the hall from Ben Gazzara for many years, and my dad has a few solid stories about the guy. I wish I could remember a single one of them.

I uploaded some footage of me being a racist and getting slapped by Halle Berry in a television mini-series. It's a torturously shit thing to watch, but hey, I was able to afford a Chevrolet Blazer with the money I got paid, and I remember that being pretty fucking cool.

This flick, on the other hand, looks great. The way its shot brings up memories of White Ribbon, but I imagine using such a hardcore strain of religion will result in a far different film.

Like everybody else, I've been a Longreads addict for a while now, to the point where I've started buying magazines off the newsstand for the first time in years, just to keep up with all the great writers they've introduced me too. "The Story of a Suicide" is only the most recent example of the sort of well researched, well written articles that they're plugging. It's really telling how tempted I am to try to and summarize the article's key points into some catchy couple of sentences, as the problems inherent in that sort of of summary (and the internet's love of trafficking in that sort of writing) are one of the many great takeaways to be found. The subject matter (the suicide of a young gay man, and his roommates ensuing legal battles) isn't the most palatable, but that will only be a barrier to the very few.

"I haven’t been on the Internet since the ’90s. Whatever people think is their business, and they can blog, they can be trolls, they can do whatever. That’s their business. That’s their privilege, as they sit alone at 4 o’clock in the morning. That’s their privilege to do whatever they want. I choose not to engage in it. I find it very unhealthy, that environment."- Lucy Lawless, interestingly enough.

I'm sure I'll come up with some boring, shitty jokes about Watchmen soon enough, but right now I just think the whole thing is obnoxious and sad all around. The only non-Twitter reactions I've honestly read about this whole thing are the ones from Abhay Khosla and this one by David Brothers, and while I'm positive that Chris Mautner and many other people will deliver intelligent and/or funny responses on the subject, I think I'll tap out this time around. I'll be hearing what people think about the subject plenty at the shop, and that'll be where I do my penance.

Comics are clearly heading in a direction away from where I would like them to be headed, and that will have to be okay. If this is what people want--and I have come to believe that the industry as it currently stands is exactly what the people want, and I believe websites like The Beat, Newsarama and Comic Book Resources provide plenty of evidence of that fact--then they should have it. I am happy to leave it to them.

The Third Reich

It's essentially a warm-up book, in that the best bits (like the weird rhythms of male friendships that can ultimately make the "bad times" indistinguishable from the "good times") all eventually made it into Bolano's later, better books. It's totally understandable that the Bolano translation squad want this older, less polished material out there, but good God, it really is unnecessary stuff if you aren't a grad student. Featuring an obnoxious, role-playing-game obsessive as he goes through a coming-of-age experience way too late in life, Third Reich's only local claim to fame is that it provided this reader as a graphic, painful reminder of how incredibly irritating it is when self-righteous prigs yammer incessantly about their geeky hobbies. Udo Berger--the jackass at the heart of this novel--never stops telling people about the dice and paper war game he's so awesome at, and he never stops believing that the only thing preventing people from caring is an all-encompassing "they just don't get it" If you ever wanted to experience the serious literature version of cringe comedy (without any comedy to lessen the sting), then this one's for you. Otherwise, just knuckle down and start 2666 all over again.

Zone One
By Colson Whitehead, 2011

I came to this one with the expectation level set a bit too high, and that's not fair to Whitehead. However, I still found this book was ultimately a failure, as it's attempts to toss some "ideas" at zombie fiction ended up being no different from the type of commercialism critique that George Romero pulled off in Dawn of the Dead, and Whitehead's seemingly bottomless disdain for action sequences became impossible to stomach. It's totally fine, and maybe even laudable to throw a forearm up in the face of genre's continued advance, but doing so within the confines of a zombie novel? It's absurd, and yet that's exactly what Whitehead does, over and over again, with nearly every scene featuring a battle strip mined of anything approaching excitement or human feeling, with the absolute worst portion being the sequence near the end where its happening to one of the only two characters that Whitehead has built up enough for us to care about. As with almost any genre story, one is so starved for endings that it's hard not to finish reading the thing, but that's more the luck of the field than it is any skill on Whitehead's part. At this point, an Intuitionist sequel no longer seems too much to ask. Please?

Cain
By Jose Saramago, 2011

On paper, Cain sounds like it would be a stunt book, an insubstantial trick--the Old Testament, retold from the point of view of what 2012 calls "snark merchant" and what Adam called Son. But with Saramago at the helm, the experiment takes on heft, and all that serial under-casing stands without a whiff of pretension. More than anything else, it's just funny--not on every page, but consistently enough so that the narrative never flags. Short, but excellent.

Do The Work
By Steven Pressfield, 2011

Complete nonsense, but pleasant nonsense. This is not really a book, it's a hardcover collection of a guy poking you to finish projects and follow your bliss, but in a masochistic, manly way that will appeal to people skeeved out by A Course In Miracles and The Artist's Way. The most interesting thing about is pure speculation of the Faked Moon Landing variety, and that's this: the book is published by something called the Domino Project, which is some sort of Amazon funded enterprise, and if there's one place that would love for more people to churn out nonsense that other hopeful nonsense-churners will buy cheap eBook editions of, it's Amazon. I couldn't prove it (and won't be trying, because that would ruin the fun) but I would be that the primary consumer of shitty first-draft e-published novels by wanna-bes is, hands down, other shitty first-draft novel producing wanna-bes. At least, that better be true. My future children's health insurance is depending on it.

Nobody's Perfect
By Anthony Lane, 2002

Second time all the way through this brick, which consists mostly of Anthony Lane's movie reviews. Tom Spurgeon has tried to convince me that Lane isn't all that great due to the man's feelings toward the Speed films: my apologies, but it'll never work. Nobody writes as sublimely as Lane, with the only exception to that "nobody" being the wonderful Joe McCulloch, who could probably teach me to love I Am Curious Yellow, which would be no mean feat. Alongside Ignatiy Vishnevtsky, Lane is the writer who I most fervently wish I could someday become, if only because theirs are the tastes I find myself most closely sharing, to say nothing of how much more passionately I find their writing.

This time around, I was able to look past the stylistic twists and specificity of the various value judgments a bit and see that one of Lane's most laudable habits is his total unwillingness to permit the personal failings of the artist or author to derail his feelings toward the work itself. It's a challenge that seems to have become far, far too prevalent in discussion today, with critics and artists scanning twitter and facebook constantly to confirm that neither side is getting too out there with their political or social commenting. Lane dispenses with it constantly in this collection, essay after essay, displaying patent refusal to allow the likes of Evelyn Waugh's shitty personal behavior to ruin the sentences he created, and Lane''s able to do it (and this is the hard part, I think) without letting each instance turn into a treatise on why you have to do that. (To be specific, he never even tries: he just tells you he doesn't care, and then he continues forward.) It's a tough act to pull off, to tell us you aren't going to care without forcing us to decide whether we care too, and then lead us back to the work that matters in the first place. The best example is his essay on Harold Bloom; coincidentally, there's no better example of a man whose longtime critical work has been stuck on the rocks of responding to his critics (while criticizing other critics at the same time, like a caged animal laying waste to those who are only trying to help free him) instead of focusing on the work that got him there in the first place.

It's a difficult path to follow, what Lane's doing. He's here to talk about the books, and yet he's got to address the problem that the author faces--in Bloom's case, it's how impossible he finds it to ignore the cries of sexism, amongst others, that land upon his back--without the entire essay becoming a study in those conversations. It's a tough trick, as sexism is like super-hero comics or "least favorite tv shows", in that its a subject that tends to dominate the conversation the second it enters the room, with everyone striving to have the last word. Lane manages it with grace, but I'd be goddamned if I could tell you how he does it. The only thing I can confirm is that it's a trick he's mastered, as he pulls it off everytime he needs to.

Honestly, I thought I might grow out of this guy. Ten years later, I'm delighted to find out that will probably never be the case.

-Tucker Stone, 2012

The Walking Dead #93
Art by Charlie Adlard
Written by Robert Kirkman
Published by Image Comics

Hey hey, Party People. What’s going on? I’ll tell you what’s going on with me. I just had a new experience. I read The Walking Dead. Yeah...I don’t think I’ve ever read a single issue of it in these last 3 or 4 years of my comic book reading tenure. I did see some of the TV show, the one shot down in Georgia with all those British people pretending to be American. It kinda lost me after a bit. Not “lost” like I couldn’t keep up. No. It lost me because my mind wandered away, because although they set up a conflict, the story never moved faster than a snails pace. I think I'm remembering that correctly. I remember not being very grossed out by the show, which I thought was strange. It was pretty gruesome stuff, blood and gore all the time...but it was just kind of there on the screen. I felt like the violence on that show was an alarm going off, and then you'd hit the snooze button and the show would go back to sleep for ten minutes. (When I first wrote this paragraph, I actually thought the show wasn't on television anymore, but then I found out that it still is. Am I really that out of touch? I'm going to watch the wolves versus Liam Neeson movie this week. I still watch Justified and Parks and Recreation. Stupid zombie tv show. You make me feel old.)

Anyhow. I wasn’t sure what I was in for here. I was pleasantly surprised to find out the comic was black and white. Normally, I don’t know that I would like that, but for some reason it drew me in. As a matter of fact, the first page drew me right in. It's issue 93, does not start with any kind of recap, has no weird catch-up narration. It just jumps right in with Rick talking to this dude he just met, and the dude is telling him about this large community situation they have going on that he’d like Rick and his friends to be a part of. I don’t know if was somehow by design, and if it was it is GENIUS, but on the first page (!) I was saying to myself “Hmmm....I don’t know. I know I don’t really know anything about this situation, but I think this might be some sort of trap, Rick. You should tread carefully, as I believe this man may not have your best interests at heart.” And right there on the next page? Rick has a physical reaction that lets me know he was having the exact same thought I was having (by "physical reaction", I mean that Rick fakes a handshake and knocks the guy out). I found myself first thinking “see! I was right!” and quickly switching sides to “Wait! Aren’t you being a little hasty and paranoid?” I found that very entertaining. So much melodrama and conflict in just a few pages!

But I think there's a bad side to that as well.

Why? Look: it's good to get me so fully on board this comic's plot from the jump. I didn’t have to read a bit to find my way in. But the bad thing is that turned out be the only real conflict in the entire issue. By page 2, the whole thing is decided: some people are out there, and either this guy is lying about them or he's not. But by page two, Rick's already decided how he's going to handle that situation--he's going to go and be a badass--which means the next 20-some pages are just a bunch of place-setting type scenes--delegation of duties, game plans, declarations of love - and then the last few weird pages where Rick recaps his feelings on what it means to be a person who has to live with zombies all the time. Yes. Reflection on Life with Zombies. On who they’ve become. On how they respond. On maybe it being time to get outside of the walls and see A LARGER WORLD. (Which is...the title of the story.)

Yeah - it was kinda weird for me. It's about five pages of "stuff" dawning on him and him realizing that maybe the guy that he knocked out and has tied up in a chair “back at the ranch” might be honest and offering them the very thing that he just realized they needed. Cue violins. That’s where I suddenly realized that the the whole comic was just, like, this big set-up for the two page spread of the LARGER WORLD, and to introduce this new mini-series THE LARGER WORLD. And that maybe these characters need to get back to living life rather than fighting the dead.  Get beyond the little community they built and back to.....yes, THE LARGER WORLD. (Again: that's the title of the story.)

So, like, this comic went from feeling clever and fun to feeling like I was being spoon fed the writer’s pitch for this new series. It was a quick read, though, and I guess I enjoyed the art. It felt kinda easy on my eyes, in black and white, which I did not expect. But it seems like the comic book series might be similar to the TV show: it starts off with some engaging excitement and then digresses into a slow, meandering story. And then, on the last page, it promises to do something really important...at some later point. Perhaps? I don’t really know. What do you think?

-Nina Stone, 2012