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.

Geeking Out.

Okay, so we're gonna talk about something else here. If you came to immerse yourselves in the Current Adventures of Miss Pirate Queen Ghost Princess as she rails against the evils of bees in her garden and vegetables in her pasta, well, you're just gonna have to wait until she does something adorably impossibly cute, which'll probably be tomorrow morning during breakfast, because that's just how she rolls, yo, but anyway, today, like I said, we're talking about something else, something that's near and dear to my shrivelled little lump-of-coal heart.


See, I read a lot of comics.


And when I say a lot of comics, I mean A LOT. It's kind of an addiction. In fact, if one were to ask hypothetically if my house were on fire, which would I probably pay more attention to, my comics or my daughter, one might be disturbed by my answer. (Listen, she's SMART. She knows how to get out of the house on her own. In fact, she's usually leaving the house on her own every day before I have the chance to get any underwear on her, so I think she knows what she's doing, okay? Get off my back.)


Don't get me wrong: I may have a lot of comics, and I may try to keep them in good shape, but it's not because I'm hoping to cash them in for a nice retirement fund one day (that's what my limited edition Pokemon are for). It's because I like to read them, and I like to let other people read them, because when it comes down to it, some of the most challenging and provocative literature around these days is being presented in comic book form, and the more people who know about it, the better.


Plus: geeking out over comics with fellow geeks is pretty goddamned fun.


Which is why, four days out of five, I'm bringing stacks of reading material into work to lend to so-and-so or whatsername or whosit and generally making a nuisance of myself by turning well-adjusted, law-abiding, normal people into weird anti-social fanboys; and of course it was during one of these moments (when I'm pretty sure I was expounding on how a certain run of Legion Of Superheroes during the 80's was not just high-adventure space-opera fun, but was also a subtle commentary on the comic industry's refusal to entertain any sort of narrative growth or evolution, or at least woud've been if a) the editorial department hadn't thrown a wrench in the works by constantly changing which characters the writers and artists were allowed to work with, and b) the main writer would've finished his goddamned scripts...) that Kali suggested that I should possibly write a column about comics. 


Which, y'know, stroked my ego for a bit, and I think I spent the rest of that day aswoon in my own imagined glory as Comic Book Afficionado Extraordinaire, before realizing that basically that title translates into BIG GIANT NERD WITH TOO MUCH TIME ON HIS HANDS AND FAR TOO MANY OPINIONS. Still: at any given moment, close to a third of my collection is not on my shelves, due to everyone and their dog voraciously devouring any old rag I show them, and yet (and here's the thing) there are still more people than not who look at me blankly when I mention names like Grant Morrison or Warren Ellis, or titles like Scalped or Criminal or OHMIGOD HOW MANY OF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE INVISIBLES YET???


Well, damn. Obviously, y'all need to be educated. And, seeing as I've been reading these stupid things since, well, for as long as I can remember, obviously I've gotta be the one to educate y'all on whatchy'all should be reading and (also as important) what you should be avoiding, and maybe even a little bit about comic stores and the strange creatures that dwell within (and if any of you mention anything about The Big Bang Theory, I'll pimp-slap you, are we clear?). 


So, for the next few days, I'm gonna talk about comics. Feel free to ignore it. Or, hey, maybe you're an even bigger fanboy than me, and you might recognize that I need to be schooled in my arrogance; well, then, feel free to do so (unless, of course, you're talking about Stan Lee, in which case: you're wrong, he's a whore, shut up). 


Now I must go watch kung-fu. Be good, or I'll bend the covers on all of your first issues.

Walking WIth Hazel: The Princess Gets Her Hands Dirty. Kinda.

So, yesterday, The Little Miss came over a little earlier than usual, which meant that Dad had to get up a little earlier than usual, which meant that there was a lot of coffee to be had, because Dad doesn't do well with mornings. Like AT ALL. Still he was up, and had some time to kill before The Little Miss arrived, so he decided to stop being a disrespectful neighbour or whatever it is that homeowners call each other and rake up the carpet of leaves that'd gathered over the last week on his lawn.

Which was actually kinda fun, as most yardwork tends to be, its just that Dad does so little of it that he tends to forget the fact. And wouldn't ya know it, The Little Miss arrived just as Dad had made the last pile, so we decided it was time to go inside and have more coffee so that Hazel could show off her new castle to her Mom; and lemme tell ya, it's a castle worth showing off. It's got three towers, and a drawbridge with an alligator underneath it, and one of the towers has a catapult, and another one has a trapdoor that leads to a dungeon, and there are steps on the outside so that invaders can kinda climb up, but it's also got a portion of the wall that collapses into a sort-of deck for fightin' on, as well it's got a cauldron on top right over the drawbridge, which at first Dad thought was for dumping boiling oil on the invaders, which seemed both awesome if a little gruesome when you think about the fact that this was designed for, what, 4-year-olds? But it turned out to be a cannon, actually, which was just as awesome, and it came with 5 knights: two black, two red, and one that was black and red, and, well, if that ain't ridiculously cool then I don't know what is.


So Mom and I attacked the castle with giant stuffed mice, and Hazel defended the castle, and then coffee was done, and it was time to get back to the yardwork, so we waved goodbye to Mom and then went to clean up the leaves.


Which Hazel had decided that she wanted to help with, so we found her a pair of workgloves that she could wear so that she wouldn't have to touch any slugs or gross stuff, but those gloves were too big, so she decided that she needed new ones: her ball-glove and her oven mitt. 

Which worked FANTASTICALLY.

Of course, she was wearing her fairy wings and princess tiara and carrying her magic wand, so she was obviously well-suited for this kinda work, as she proved by grabbing the rake and spreading the piles Dad had already made all over the yard. 

Sigh. 


Still, we made good time, filling about four big garbage bags full of leaves, during which time Hazel taught Dad how to speak in chicken-language, which he's unable to translate here, but rest assured she was just as fluent in it as she was the previous week when she claimed she could speak in Spanish, which leads Dad to say, good try, kid, you'll get it one day, and then we talked about butterflies, and Hazel was asking why they have curled antennae, and Dad explained that they use them to sense things, kinda like ears and noses and tongues rolled into one, which led us to conclude that butterflies run around all day with their tongues hanging out like puppy dogs.


Then Hazel showed Dad her impression of a puppy dog, which he tried taking pictures of, but they came out all blurry so you'll just have to use your imagination.


Then we looked at the birdhouse, and decided that we'd clean it out NEXT week, because we didn't feel like getting the ladder out, and then it was time for lunch.


And that was our morning. Other stuff happened later on in the day, but Dad's gotta go make pancakes now, so you'll just have to be happy with what you got.

Walking WIth Hazel: August 28th 2011

First what happened was that the Little Miss woke up at 6:00, and tried to wake Dad up as well, which prompted Dad to say, "NO." And so we went back to sleep.

Then the Little Miss woke up at 7:00, which Dad felt was a much more reasonable time to get up, and besides he kinda shoulda known that the Little Miss was gonna get up this early, because that's what she does, so maybe he shouldn't have stayed up all night playing video games, so really his tiredness is his own fault, so we got up and had breakfast.

Then we watched Rango for the twentieth time, because a) Hazel loves it and b) it is awesome. Or maybe we should say that we just had it on in the background, because during this time, we worked on a Powerpuff Girl stickerbook, which meant Dad had to explain what sound effects were, because half of the stickers were explosions that said things like POW! BIFF! KABLOOM! Which also meant that Dad had to explain that sometimes when one thing hits another thing, the collision sometimes creates a big fireball with words in it, especially on television, and then the Little Miss shot me with her sparking ray gun, which meant that we had to have a sparking ray gun fight.

Then the guy from Shaw came by to give us free cable. Again. While he was here, Hazel decided to ask him if he'd seen Rango, to which he replied, "No."

"Have you seen Superman?" "No."

"Have you seen Batman?" "No."

"Have you seen Toy Story?" "No."

"Have you seen Clifford The Big Red Dog?" "No."

This went on until Hazel had asked him whether or not he'd seen almost all of her movies, and then she asked if he wanted to help with the Powerpuff Girl stickers. And that's when he left, and so we had cable, but we we really didn't want to watch anything, so we turned it off.

Then Dad has to sheepishly admit that he probably fell back asleep on the couch for a little bit, and when he woke up, he found that Hazel had made a nest on the living room chair out of all of her clothes. Because she's a bird now.

Sigh.

So Dad folded up all the clothes while the Little Miss systematically separated a cheese bun into several parts that she then sequestered in various parts of the kitchen, which prompted Dad to say that now was probably the best time to go for a drive. So we went for a drive! Which was good because Dad needed to pick up stuff at Staples, so we went to Staples, or as Hazel apparently calls it, Adventure Hide & Seek Land, because the moment we walked in the door Hazel decided it was time to run as fast as she could down the aisles and hide, periodically poking her head out from behind printer stands, office furniture and Crayola displays to yell "Boo!" at people passing by. And then Dad decide that, hey, she wasn't hurting anyone, so he went and bought a scanner and THEN tracked the Little Miss down.

Sorry, Staples employees. I am a Bad Father.

Then we went to Dad's work and said hi to everyone except Jeffrey Storey, because Hazel's really shy around Mr. Storey (and who WOULDN'T be?), and we got a cookie and some lemonade, and then Tiff and Sarah let Hazel colour in their sketchbooks, and then we ate our cookie and came home.

Then we had dinner, and then we watched episodes of Justice League before bedtime, during which Hazel used her Cowgirl Princess gun (which is obviously different than a sparking ray gun, because apparently I have let our home become a clubhouse for the Junior NRA) to shoot all of the bad guys that were on the television, like Lex Luthor and Gorilla Grodd. 

Then we fought over how many toys Hazel could actually cuddle with in her bed, because apparently toy cars and plastic strollers and sparkly tiaras need to have bedtime cuddles, too, and now Dad's trying to get this stoopid scanner to work, so he's gonna cut this short by saying: be good, because now we is armed.

Walking With Hazel: What You've Been Missing.

...aaaaand, we're back.

* Supergirl design by Les McClaine as seen through Project Rooftop, but maybe you should also check out Jonny Crossbones, which is kinda like Tintin if Tintin listened to Social D circa Somewhere Between Heaven & Hell.

'Maura Lulvey' is the best name in the world.

Sorry, Harold. I TOTALLY forgot your birthday.

More posts soon. I promise. Really, this time.