Geeking Out: I Like Superheroes. No, Really.

So, okay: I sent y'all off with some recommendations on What Funnybooks The Cool Kids Are Reading These Days (Or At Least Me), thinking that it'd be an easy trip down to the local Komick Shoppe where you could find what you were looking for safely and without much commotion, and if you did have any trouble, bright-eyed and kindly assistants would be at your beck and call to help you locate said graphic literature, and who knows, they might even wrap your purchase up in butcher's paper and twine (to protect from the elements, natch) and send you on your merry way with a gentle but eager wave.


Then I realized that y'all might actually talk to the people who work there, which means that at least one, if not all, of you would suffer through this little horrific exchange:


You: "I'm kinda new at this whole comic thing; anything you'd recommend?"


Kindly Assistant: "Oh, man, you gotta check out the new Green Lantern books! They're awesome, they've got a Lantern Corp for each colour now, and the Red Lanterns puke blood!"

I know this is gonna happen, because I've already experienced a similar exchange, and lemme tell you right now, the only reason that guy thinks the new Green Lantern title is cool is because he gets to read it for free. 


There is no such thing as good Green Lantern comic; never has been, never will be, no matter what Bryn Evans tells you. (Okay, Willworld was actually pretty decent, and that whole Mosaic thing during the nineties featuring schizophrenic John Stewart was certainly interesting, but still...). You wanna know why that Ryan Reynolds movie sucked? It was because the comic it was based on pretty much sucked. It's a comic about a guy with a magic wishing ring, which you'd think would lend itself to some interesting visual narrative and storytelling, but more often than not, you get giant green boxing gloves and aliens who vomit rage-I-mean-blood. In space, mind you, so I guess that makes it okay.


Don't get me wrong: I love me my superheroes. I love the heroes and the villains and the sidekicks and butlers and crazy uncles and love-children and alien pets and pan-dimensional alternates and everyone else in between. But the only reason I have this colossal knowledge of past and present spandex-clad bruisers is because, back in the day, in the long long ago, when the Wee Book Inn actually taught me that I could describe myself as a 'bookseller' instead of a 'cashier/stockboy' on my resume, I worked at a place that had a backstock of, I swear to god, THOUSANDS of comics. And this was just in one location.


Lemme tell ya, I read every one of 'em, and the only reason I did so was because I was able to do it for free. Because while I loved reading the Spider-Man Clone Saga or those weird Tales of The Dark Knight issues, or the 'Five Years Later...' Legion of Super-Heroes reboot, I could recognize that as much as I loved them, they weren't amazing, and that I'd probably hate myself if I'd actually spent money on them.


This happens to be the case with most superhero comics, and I hate to kinda dump on 'em, because there are some very good writers and artists working their asses off on these things, and yes, some of them will be worth your hard-earned $4.99 (go out and buy All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely RIGHT NOW. I mean it. Do it, or I'll punch your mom) but the fact remains that the majority of superhero comics are only printed to be disposable; they're big violent angst-ridden soap-operas, designed, like anything else mass-produced, to appeal to the lowest common denominator, in this case, teenage boys (although there currently is a debate going on as to whether comic-dom's biggest slice of the readership pie might indeed belong instead to those 30-40 year-olds who can't stand to see any change whatsoever in their underwear champions, i.e., Green Lantern HAS to be Hal Jordan, The Flash HAS to be Barry Allen, etc, but see, now I've opened up a can of worms that you don't really want  to have anything to do with because ultimately IT DOESN'T MATTER WHO WEARS THE COWL IF YOU'RE STILL LIVING WITH YOUR MOM.).


(Okay, sorry, that was harsh. But, really...).


Long story short: it's a rare superhero comic that warrants critical attention. They're out there, to be sure, and if you've got the time, the inclination, and the money to sort through the veritable ocean of crap in order to find Jonathan Hickman's run on Fantastic Four, or Morrison's run on New X-Men (Stebner, you're wrong, it's effing brilliant, and I'll fight you if you say otherwise), well, then, more power to you. I hope you find what you're looking for, which is probably gonna be, y'know, Green Lanterns puking blood, or Strangely Alluring Female Wolverine That I Can Have Weird Feelings About, or Rough Trade Superboy.

(I'd just like to say at this point that I have no problem with Rough Trade Superboy; my problem is that I don't think any of the creators involved with Superboy are even aware of the phrase 'rough trade', otherwise Superboy would've had a VERY different costume over the course of the last ten years.)


(I, for, one think it'd be kinda awesome if DC went out on a limb and wrote Superboy as a gay character in their current AMAZING MULTIVERSE REBOOT CRISIS that they're foisting on us right now, instead of giving the LGBTQ community this as their token of diversity. But I digress.)


(What was my point again? Ah, yes...)


Here's the thing: the guys that work at these places? They're allowed to be excited about Angry Stabbing Action Aquaman, it's part of the reason they work at comic shops: so that they can be around these things, which, when you don't have to shell out five bucks an issue, can be quite fun to read. So I'm not trying to shit on them, either. Most of them are lovely people who happen to be lucky enough to work in a place that sells their favourite things ever, and they're just excited to share those favourite things. What I'm trying to say is that their enthusiasm might not directly translate into your own, which might be common sense, you say, but, well, there's a reason why we were selling those comics at the Wee Book Inn for a quarter each, y'know? 


Besides: now you have me to steer you in the right direction. Right? Right. So, when you go to pick up the latest trade paperback of Criminal, and Kindly Assistant asks if you've read Brubaker's work on The Death of Captain America (guess what? He doesn't really die! NONE OF THEM DO!), you can tell him (or her) to go to hell.


But, y'know, nicely. Because, y'know, they're only doing their job.


(I should also point out: I didn't really love the Spider-Man Clone Saga. If I'm to be honest, it was atrocious, and should be stricken from human memory, just like most of the superhero comics coming out in the nineties. If anyone tells you different, punch 'em in the junk, because they're a no-good damned dirty liar.)

Geeking Out: 5 Current Titles You Should Be Reading Right Now.

So, yes: I said I was gonna school y'all on comix, and then disappeared. Well, that happens when a) everyone in your extended family comes down with various versions of The Clench, and b) Batman: Arkham City comes out. I mean, really, Hugo Strange ain't gonna just stop being an evil prison warden performing illegal psychological experiments on inmates by me just wishing, right? 


Right. So. At the moment, the Little Miss is no longer horking up gouts of phlegm (and is in fact practicing her Black Canary scream, which is equal parts annoying and awesome), and for the time being, Arkham City's been tamed, because I am, as Mr. Brown so eloquently put it, 'great at video games, awful at life', so here goes: what you should be reading and why.


1. The Walking Dead (Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore & Charlie Adlard)

Okay, this one's easy, mainly because if there's one thing people haven't gotten tired of yet, it's zombies. I'm not gonna get into why the idea of a zombie apocalypse appeals to so many people (we'll talk about that some other time), I'm just gonna say that Kirkman and Adlard have gone to great lengths making this one as realistic and as compelling as possible; anyone who's seen AMC's television series that the comic's inspired can tell you the same, as much as the zombies are the main attraction, it's the storytelling that keeps you around.


Kirkman stated, in an introduction to the first volume, that his frustration with zombie movies came about because he always wanted to see what happened next. We all know that the only good zombie movies are the ones that end with our heroes escaping one bad situation only to find themselves in a worse one, there's really no place for happy endings in the genre. Acceptable endings, maybe, but not happy ones. Kirkman's desire for more led to him creating The Walking Dead, which follows our hero Rick and his family (and a small plucky band of survivors, naturally) through crisis after crisis after crisis, and while a lot of familiar genre tropes pop up time and again, there's no point in the series that feels stale or contrived; in fact, Kirkman seems more than adept at controlling the tension in this story, giving the reader an almost perfect ebb and flow of introspection versus action, all the while underlining a few consistent points throughout: no one's really a hero, no one's truly a villain, the real danger always comes from those left alive as opposed to the shambling undead, and no one is safe. This is helped out in no small part by Adlard's black & white art, which depicts a credible world-left-to-its-own-devices backdrop filled with hordes of flesh-eating monsters that, while definitely gruesome, are unique enough in appearance to remind us that these were all at one point real people.


The series is up to issue 90 so far, which is an accomplishment in itself, and like I said, it never lets up, so if you need your zombie apocalypse itch scratched, you can't do any better than this.


2. The Unwritten (Mike Carey, Peter Gross & Ryan Kelly)

Tommy Taylor has a problem, and it's not the fact that he can't escape his late father's shadow, a man who used his son as a character in a series of highly-successful children's novels that have nothing at all to do with Harry Potter. At all. Nor is it related to the shadowy cabal of writers throughout history that he's just discovered his father was a part of, a group that now wants Tommy dead. Well, okay, those are both PART of the problem, but the bigger thing bothering him lately is that he can't actually figure out whether he's a real honest-to-godness person, or just a figment of his father's imagination come to life.


It should come as no surprise that Mike Carey's newest title is as engrossing as it is; this is the man who took one of Neil Gaiman's secondary characters from The Sandman, Lucifer, and churned out a monster of a series that not only rivalled Gaiman's epic, but also (no pun intended) literally gave the devil his due. Honestly. Go read that thing, it's insanely good. While you're at it, check out Carey's run on Hellblazer, too, which is also stupidly well-written. 


But: The Unwritten. What we have here is an adventure story that not only entertains better than most of the different works that it gives nod to (everything from the Harry Potter series to Moby freakin' Dick), but also examines the act of creating fiction, as well as our relationship as readers to the idea of fiction itself. There are only four volumes out so far, so it's not as daunting to start as some of the other recommendations you'll find here. So, um, get to it.


3. DMZ (Brian Wood & Riccardo Burchielli)

Brian Wood first came on the comic scene in the late 90's with a little thing called Channel Zero, a 5-issue experiment in stylistic narrative that dealt with dystopian paranoia, political activism and media manipulation. Since then he's worked on quite a few other topics, but it's these themes (and more) that show up in DMZ, a story about a second U.S. civil war in the near future, set in the bombed-out demilitarized zone (duh) of Manhattan, as told through the eyes of Matty Roth, a young photojournalist who at first becomes trapped in the DMZ, then later chooses to make it his home. Wood's storytelling is terse and pulls no punches, dissecting motives and causes on each side, revealing each to be as self-serving as they might be noble; and Burchielli's art is exceptional, infusing urban war-zones and their inhabitants with their own innate colour and life. 


Because that's the thing: it's obviously a BIG STORY ABOUT WAR, but more importantly, it's about the survivors of war, the people who have to live through having soldiers shooting guns at each other in their living rooms, and the courage they need to possess in order to greet each day. It's also a love letter to America, and before you roll your eyes at what you think is another glorification of unbridled patriotism that would fit right at home on CNN or Fox News, here's a fact we as non-Americans need to swallow: for all the jerks and assholes that we tend to lash out at, the majority of Americans are pretty damned awesome. One needs only look at the Occupy Wall Street and its subsequent spin-offs to see examples of this, and DMZ works because, at its heart, it's a big fuck-you aimed at those in power who would steamroll over the little people in order to get what they want. 


Plus it's nice to look at, so give it a chance.


4.  Casanova (Matt Fraction & Gabriel Ba)

OHMIGOD THIS COMIC IS SO FUGGIN COOL.

No, really: Casanova Quinn is a young Mick Jagger as James Bond, jumping through alternate realities as a pawn for both E.M.P.I.R.E. ("Extra-Military Police, Intelligence, Rescue & Espionage") and W.A.S.T.E. ("We're All So Terribly Excited", or maybe not...) as he meets, fights, fucks and/or kills the coolest cast of hyper-spy-fiction characters ever invented. Matt Fraction peppers his frenetic storyline with all manner of pop-culture references and cinematic one-liners, all the while maintaining a sharp narrative that's as tightly layered as it is cool; and that's the thing: Casanova is seriously all about the notion of cool, and how good-looking corpses get all the best action anyway, so fuck it, you might as well get your hands dirty.


But also: Casanova's about family dynamics, the idea of personal change, and how sometimes it's okay to be nice instead of cool. Matt Fraction is my hero, and Gabriel Ba just makes it all look so pretty.


5. Scalped (Jason Aaron & R.M. Guera)

...and here's the big one. I don't mind going out on a limb and saying that Scalped is probably the best comic currently being published, and as much as I know all good stories end, it breaks my heart to hear that Scalped will soon be publishing it's final issue, because the quality involved in this series is top-notch. 


Scalped is a modern noir story set on a fictional reservation in South Dakota, featuring Dashiell Bad Horse, as he returns home to his people after fifteen years of bouncing between jail and the military and jail again and so on; of course, he's not home to reminisce with old friends or anything like that - he's there as an undercover agent for the FBI in an effort to take down local crime boss Lincoln Red Crow, who's also President of the reservation's Tribal Council, as well as the head of the local Sheriff Dept. 


To tell any more would be spoiling the story, but trust me when I say that Aaron and Guera knock this one outta the park; as a crime story, it's sad, gritty, ugly and fraught with tension, its characters showing a multitude of shades of grey in their moral quandaries and choices, and it's almost impossibly well-researched, giving the story and its setting the proper respect and humanity it deserves. In fact, some of the best pieces of writing in the series are stand alone issues that deal less with the main plot and more with the Lakota people, the inhabitants of said reservation (issue 35, "Listening to the Earth Turn", being a prime example, focusing on an elderly couples' struggle to maintain their way of life on the outskirts of time, or issue 10, "Casino Boogie (5 of 6)" which features young Dino Poor Bear trying to decide if it's more courageous to leave the reservation (and his poverty) behind, or stay and try to endure for the sake of his family).  


It's been a fantastic read so far, and it's all leading to an end that promises to be satisfying, if not more than a little bloody. You can't go wrong with Scalped. 


Of course, there are other titles you should be checking out (Morning Glories, Criminal, Wasteland, just to name a few) but I figured I'd stop at five. Your wallet will thank me. 


Next up: 5 Completed Series You Should Have In Your Library. Now I must go tend a puking child.