I want to say that the limited color palette anthology series for mainstream comics characters started with 1994 miniseries
, which also had the benefit of attracting extremely talented, high-profile creators (None more so than
creator Katsuhiro Otomo, who contributed a short story to the fourth and final issue).
As ever in mainstream comics, if something's worth doing, it's worth doing endlessly—or at least until people stop buying the books.
DC eventually expanded the concept to include other characters and color concepts:
Harley Quinn: Black + White + Red and its sequel
Black + White + Redder,
Superman: Red and Blue and
Wonder Woman: Black and Gold.
Marvel followed with "Black, White and Blood" comics featuring 20th Century Fox's Alien franchise, as well as Marvel characters Deadpool, Wolverine, Moon Knight, Elektra, Carnage and the Marvel Zombies. They also published Star Wars: Darth Vader—Black, White and Red and Star Wars: Darth Maul—Black, White and Red.
Even Dynamite's Red Sonja had a Black, White and Red anthology series. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you told me I'm missing a few, too.
Given the trend, it was perhaps only a matter of time before it came to IDW, current home publisher of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The limited color palette for their entry in the expanding sub-genre is black, white and—what else?— green.
The TMNT are no strangers to black-and-white comics, of course. Created during the so-called black-and-white boom of the 1980s (for which they were in large part responsible for), the characters only appeared in black-and-white comics for the longest time, including the 62 issues of their own comic, its short-lived spin-off Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and in various anthologies, specials and crossovers (Rare exceptions during those early years were the colorized First Publishing reprints).
In fact, it wasn't until Archie Comics launched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures in 1988 that the characters would begin regularly appearing in color comics. Finally, when Mirage Studios launched TMNT Volume Two under Jim Lawson in 1993 the "real" Turtles would also begin appearing regularly in full color.
So seeing the Turtles in black and white or a limited palette series like this isn't anywhere near as striking as seeing, say, Batman, who had, before his Black and White series, always and only been seen in color comics since his 1939 debut. Rather, it's something of a return to the Turtles' comics roots...visually, at least.
The miniseries, which launched in May and ran through the summer, kept the basic formula of the other such books, being an anthology consisting of short contributions from a wide variety of creators working in various styles and offering distinct takes, although it should perhaps be noted that IDW doesn't get artists quite as prominent as DC got for that first round of Batman comics (A murderers' row that included, in addition to Otomo, the likes of Alex Toth, Frank Miller, Jim Lee, Brian Bolland and so on).
They do get some unexpected participants though, including some better known for their work on Big Two super-comics, like Patrick Gleason, Jock, Javier Rodriguez, Riley Rossmo and Declan Shalvey. There's at least one artist whose work I recognize from other IDW TMNT comics (Gavin Smith), another who has drawn a few graphic novels I've read and reviewed for Good Comics for Kids, one of which I actually reviewed this month, as you'll see below (Paulina Ganucheau) and an artist whose work I'm eager to see more of, based on how different it is from everything else in here (Alexis Ziritt).
The stories are all rather short, and the focus seems to be on "evergreen" versions of the Turtles, with few if any really tied to a specific version of the Turtles.
Most feature the four traditional Turtles, dwelling in the sewers of New York City, and their core supporting cast of Master Splinter, Casey Joes and April O'Neil, the latter of whom is more often than not depicted as a reporter (and she's usually in a jumpsuit). Recurring villains are The Shredder and Baxter Stockman, the latter of whom appears both as a human scientist controlling Mouser robots in one story and as a mutant fly in another. Bebop and Rocksteady and the Foot Clan also appear.
While most of the stories involve a sort of synthesis of various versions of the TMNT into something that feels classic or, perhaps, default, writer Chris Condon and artist Carson Thorn's "Shredder Gets Caught on Things" delights in hopping from version to version, including a scene from the pages of the first issues of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1, reimaging the face-off with the Shredder so that he gets tangled up in clothes from a nearby clothesline. From there it hops to the original 1990 live-action movie, then to the original 1987 cartoon and finally the 2003 cartoon.
The story I enjoyed the most is probably the Carlos Giffoni-written one, which was drawn by the previously mentioned Ziritt. It features the Turtles on vacation in Miami, where Michelangelo goes looking for local delicacy "chicharron," which he is told is even better than pizza. He soon runs into a mutant crocodile with a machete for an arm holding up an old lady. The plot doesn't sound like much, but Zirritt's art is great.
I also particularly enjoyed the versions of the Turtles drawn by Shalvey, who gives us Turtles with prominent beaks and scaly skin (you can catch a glimpse of them on the cover, above); Ganucheau, whose rather cute designs evoked both those of the original cartoon and those of Matt Howarth, only a bit rounder and more three-dimensional; and those of Rodriguez, whose Turtles are particularly squat, round and soft looking, like a compromise between the original Mirage designs and those of the original cartoon.
Of all the 16 stories though, it is probably Dave Wielgosz and Riley Rossmo's "Sin Sewer" that points to the maybe the true pioneer and popularizer of the limited palette, black-and-white-and-another color comic, Frank Miller, whose Sin City comics from the early '90s made use of that style.
Wielgosz and Rossmo's story is the sort of film noir-inspired narrative that Miller used for his inspiration, here Turtle-ized: A green-haired femme fatale named Esmerelda employs the green-skinned Raphael, here wearing his hat and raincoat get-up from the original movie when he meets her, to help rescue her little sister Jade. He goes into action, only to discover he's being used as unwitting muscle. Rossmo makes striking use of falling water, both as rain and a waterfall in the sewer, in black and white, evoking some famous images of Miller's from his crime comics.
The color green is obviously used differently in each story. In some, it's the color of the Turtles' masks, as in Shalvey's story, which is interesting looking, as we're only used to seeing them in either all red, the individual four colors that the cartoon introduced or, on a few occasions, black.
In other stories, like Rossmo's, the green is used on the Turtles' skin. It might also be used in narration boxes, dialogue bubbles, sound effects, objects of particular significance or, in a few stories, as shading that washes over all of the art.
Following the last story there are an additional 24 pages, apparently devoted to collecting the various variant covers as pin-ups, and some behind-the-scenes process art. Much of these come courtesy of the artists who contributed stories to the anthology, but there are a few of note from favorite artists who I had never seen tackle my favorite comic book characters: One by James Stokoe depicting the four Turtles battling Bebop, Rocksteady and The Foot, and a portrait of a Turtle eating a piece of pizza by Paul Pope.
Man, I sure wouldn't have minded seeing one of them contribute a full story to the series.
Maybe next time.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: 40th Anniversary Comics Celebration—The Deluxe Edition (IDW) I just recently moved, which means I had occasion to take all of the graphic novels off the bookshelves in my apartment, pack them in boxes, drive them 40 miles away, unpack them from those same boxes and ultimately put them back on the bookshelves in my new place. So, quite coincidentally, I had just handled IDW's 2014
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 30th Anniversary Special, which I stopped to flip through at the time.
After having now read the 40th anniversary special, it's kind of interesting to compare and contrast the two.
The first one was a relatively slim volume, a 48-page special with an introductory section about the history of the comics, illustrated with some artifacts of the early years and then followed by short stories from four of the five "volumes" of the TMNT, and another devoted to Archie Comics' Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures, all by the creators most associated with those comics. There were also a handful of pin-ups, from Mirage Studio alum Steve Lavigne, inked by Peter Laird, and some fans and later creators. Many of these contributors, of both the comics and the pin-ups, would also appear in the 40th anniversary special. The whole package appeared under a main cover by TMNT creators Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman, collaborating for the first time in what must have seemed like forever.
This year's anniversary special is much broader and more expansive, not just because 10 more years means that many more comics and other adaptations of the franchise, but because this time they aren't just celebrating the comics, but also the cartoons, with short comics stories devoted to each of those as well.
One gets a sense of the breadth of the focus of this special simply by looking at the two-page table of contents. Thirteen stories are listed, their titles and credits appearing next to the logo of the specific iteration of the TMNT they are celebrating, be they comics or cartoons.
The original version of the 40th anniversary special shipped in the direct market in July. It ran 84 pages and included eight pin-ups after the story. I of course waited for this month's hardcover Deluxe Edition, which included 40 pages of pin-ups and additional art, with some of the entries in this gallery consisting of the variant covers for original, non-deluxe version of the comic.
How could I not? Did IDW really want to make me choose between a Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman cover, upon which the Turtles look like "themselves" in a way that they haven't for decades, and a Sophie Campbell cover featuring the all red masked, Mirage version of the Turtles...? (It's well worth the extra eight bucks or so for all the incredible art included, a great deal of which comes from Mirage Studios artists who I haven't seen new work from in years.)
Beneath the new Eastman/Laird cover, a second one produced specifically for this version of the book (the one they produced for the July release is included in the gallery, as are Laird's pencils for both), we get a nice prose introduction from Michael Dooney, a frequent contributor to Turtles comics of the Mirage Era, and one of the better artists to ever draw the characters (Dooney is responsible for pencilling TMNT #9, the Pre-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles issue, as well as creating issues #13, #27, #46 and #47 in their entirety for the original series. He also created a TMNT graphic novel in 1991's TMNT: Challenges, contributed shorts to various anthologies and drew some striking covers and promotional images).
Dooney paints a portrait of that bygone era of comics, where finding fellow comics fans and artists was a lot harder than simply going online, and notes what I consider the real magic of the Mirage Turtles, an aspect that none of the iterations to follow (and no other comics I can think of) have really replicated: The fact that Eastman and Laird would constantly trade pages of art back and forth between one another, inking spots here and there, so that their specific contributions (and those of the friends like Dooney who may have been helping them out) can't be strictly delineated. There was just something alchemical about the results, a pair (or, later, a studio, or, I guess I should say "studio") all functioning as something of a single, composite cartoonist.
Dooney's contribution to the book also includes some artwork. He offers a pair of pin-ups, one of what looks like the IDW Turtles leaping in action poses before floating busts of Splinter and Shredder, and another, cooler one featuring the Turtles hanging out on a rooftop. That second one especially demonstrates that not only is Dooney a good TMNT artist, not only is he one of the best, but he's only gotten better in the last few decades (Give the man a miniseries, IDW!)
After the introduction come the 13 short stories, each of which is either four or eight pages in length. I should note that none of them are particularly great stories, the two best both belonging to the IDW era: Paul Allor and Andy Khun's "Splinter's Day Off", which finds enough room to be quite funny, and Tom Waltz and Michael Dialynas' "Father's Day", which manages a great deal of character work for its iteration of the Turtles and their friends.
For the most part, the stories primarily function as reminders of particular iterations of the franchise, briefly noting and celebrating the many different takes, and the creators responsible for them. I'll discuss them each briefly below.
•Kevin Eastman provides the first of three shorts featuring the original "Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" logo. It's just four pages, each consisting of a large panel of one of the four Turtles with smaller, inset panels showing them silhouetted in poses in extreme longshots. He seems to be showing their evolution, as the first, Raphael, has the pointier, beak-like nose and gritted teeth of the Turtles in their first appearances, whereas the final one, Michelangelo, is drawn in his Last Ronin costume, holding all of his brothers' weapons. The art is shaded blue, giving the characters an interesting look (Raphael with a blue bandana?!). The only words provided are taken from an Edgar Allen Poe poem, and they honestly feel rather incongruous. It's basically a pin-up in the shape of a comic strip.
•Jim Lawson, the single artist who has drawn the most pages of TMNT art over these past 40 years (including a large chunk of Volume 1 and the entirety of Volumes 2 and 4), writes and draws a story entitled "Monsters", which his old Mirage studio mate Steve Lavigne colors (Lawson letters it himself, in his own off-kilter style). It features the "Monster" character he created for 1988's Tales of the TMNT #4, the madman who would evolve into the Rat King in the toys and cartoons. In it, the character menaces a small boy, who is equally frightened of those who come to save him, the Turtles themselves (Lawson, like Dooney, seems like an old hand IDW should give a mini-series or something; a few years back I read a fan comic he made featuring the Turtle characters, and the man obviously still has compelling stories to tell with them).
•The "Tales of the TMNT" story, the logo of which is taken from the second, 2004 versio of the titels, is by writer Tristan Jones and artist Paul Harmon. It's an odd and amorphous one, full of visual allusions to various Turtle stories from across eras and media and is here notable for featuring the most realistic art in the book. (There are also cameos by Eastman and Laird, and Eastman's original drawing of a ninja turtle in the background of one panel.)
•Dan Berger, probably best-known for his work on Archie's TMNT Adventures series, offers the last of the Mirage Studios era stories, a black-and-white story featuring the Turtles, now no longer teenagers but old men, reuniting after many years apart.
•The Volume Three Turtles, who appeared in the Image Comics-published series that IDW has since rebranded as "TMNT: Urban Legends", appear in a very short story by original creators Gary Carlson and Frank Fosco. I like the way Fosco draws them, their basic design echoing that of A.C. Farley, although Carlson and Fosco did a lot to try and differentiate them from one another in their series, including giving Raphael one of Casey's hockey masks to cover his scarred face and temporarily making Donatello a cyborg.
•Chris Allan writes and draws the TMNT Adventures short, in which the Archie Comics version of Raphael and April meet Casey Jones, who is here introduced into that continuity for the first time. I like Allan's art a lot, and while I wasn't a big fan of that series as it was originally being published—it seemed like kid's stuff to teenage Caleb, and a dumbed-down bastardization of the "real" Turtles—I'm much more interested in it now. Looks like IDW has a big, fat, $100 compendium of the first chunk of the series coming out early next year.
•The first story focused on one of the cartoon versions of the turtles uses the "TMNT Saturday Morning Adventures" branding that IDW has assigned a recent comics initiative based on the 1987-1996 cartoon's continuity. I watched the earlier seasons back then, so this was familiar enough to me, even if it wasn't as exciting as some of the other stories in the collection. It's by Erik Burnham and Sarah Myer.
•Ironically, the Saturday Morning story includes a panel in which Master Splinter talks about having once been a human being before mutating into an anthropomorphic rat. It's immediately followed by a story based on the somewhat more mature, closer-to-the-comics 2003 cartoon series, and features a panel where Splinter remembers being a rat before mutating into an anthropomorphic rat. I only saw a handful of episodes of this series, but the comic was easy enough to follow along, as the various characters are so in keeping with their characterizations elsewhere, and the story itself seems devoted to offering portraits of Splinter and the four Turtles (Although it was a little weird to see Splinter punching a Utrom/Krang alien out the back of a robot Shredder's torso in the final panels). This one's by Lloyd Goldfine and Khary Randolph.
•Next up is a strip by cartoonist Ciro Nieli devoted to the 2012 cartoon series, the one with CGI-rendered Turtles that looked more three-dimensional than the past animated versions. I watched...maybe the first 4/5ths or so of this series on DVD, and I appreciated the way it took inspiration from various versions of the comics and past cartoons and even, in one rare case, the role-playing game, to formulate a new, kid-friendly version that was nevertheless dramatic, fun, funny and appealing to a middle-aged fan. In this short story, the guys encounter a crew that wants to have a dance off; Mikey obliges, but then the crew all merge and reveal themselves to be a mutated Kraang alien...?
•The final cartoon-focused story is from Andy Suriano, and is set in the world of the 2022 Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a show of which I have never seen a single episode and know very little about, other than the fact that the Turtle characters were all radically redesigned, had different personalities than usual, and maybe even have some super-powers...? (I'm not complaining about how different it is from other iterations; I imagine that might actually be its appeal...?) In this one, set in the far future, Leonardo uses time-travel to go back in time to be present for the death of Splinter, who mentions before passing that they have another brother and also a sister (?!). I didn't recognize any of the other characters standing around in a few of the panels, as they were mostly too far away to even get a good look at.
•Back to the comics, for the first of three stories set in Volume Five, the IDW continuity. This first one is the previously mentioned one by Allor and Kuhn. In it, Splinter gets so annoyed by his sons hanging around their lair and goofing off that he kicks them out to go on patrol. With the place to himself, he sets about goofing off in the exact same manner his sons had been doing. I'm not a big fan of Kuhn's version of the Turtles, who are big and thick looking, although I do appreciate how distinct they are from all the other interpretations. His Splinter is great though, especially in the panels in which he imitates his sons and rushes around the lair to clean it up before they get home.
•In the Walz/Dialynas story, April, Casey and the now five Turtles all visit the Northampton grave of the late Splinter, talk to him for the length of a page, and leave a memento of some kind for him.
•Finally, Ronda Pattison and Pablo Tunica contribute a story set during the proceedings of the Sophie Campbell-written TMNT Reborn Vol. 6, as former enemy Oroku Saki instructs the Turtles in the arts of ninja mysticism in preparation for the upcoming "Armageddon Game" event story.
And then we get into all those glorious pin-ups. In addition to the previously mentioned ones by Dooney, there is plenty of representation from old Mirage hands.
There's also a particular strong one from Lawson, one from Berger, two by Eric Talbot, one by Eastman's Body Count collaborator Simon Bisley and one featuring the Turtles with frequent crossover character Usagi Yojimbo by his creator Stan Sakai.
There are a couple referencing The Last Ronin (one from that comic's main artists Esau and Isaac Escorza and a two-page spread by its sequel's artist Ben Bishop, who also contributed another featuring his version of the original TMNT) and a great piece from JJ Villard depicting the Mutant Mayhem version of the characters (that 2023 animated film being their latest mass media adaptation), keeping us completely up to date.
There are even references to Sophie Campbell's recent run, not only two pieces by the writer/artist herself (the previously mentioned variant cover, as well as a portrait of her version of Venus), but also one featuring Alopex and Lyta by Ronda Pattison, riffing on a famous Norman Rockwell painting.
And many more! Among my favorites (that I haven't already mentioned) are a black and white piece from TMNT crossover artist Freddie Williams II featuring the Mirage versions of the Turtles, Splinter, Casey Jones, Shredder and April; a rather weird-looking Williams and Jon Sommariva group shot of the Turtles in red bandanas and, finally, a striking "first appearance" image of the characters by artist Aaron Hazouri, whose work I am completely unfamiliar with, but who I am going to go look up right now, because the piece is so awesome. (Look him up yourself
here!)
Coupled with all the comics that preceded them, it amounts to a lot of TMNT art, much of it great and, as a long-time fan of the comics and characters, it's among the best $20 I've ever spent on a comic book. I sincerely hope that it helps introduce newer readers and fans, perhaps those only familiar with IDW's Volume Five or The Last Ronin or one of the more recent cartoon iterations, to check out some of the other versions of the Turtles that have appeared in the comics for the last four decades and discover some new artists to support and follow.
I'll certainly be looking forward to the 50th anniversary comic.*
Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Frozen Gold (Fantagraphics Books) The latest volume in Fantagraphics' Complete Carl Barks Disney Library, the one comics series absolutely every comics fan should be following, collects stories from quite early in the artist's comics career, with the contents all published between 1943 and 1945. (They've been publishing the series out of order, so though Fantagraphics launched the Carl Barks Library in 2011, this book is actually volume two in the series.)
If you've been reading them as released, then there's a good chance you'll notice how early these stories are, as there are a few panels scattered throughout where they don't look quite as...well, as perfect as they seem they should (and would in later comics).
There's only one real adventure story of the sort one tends to think of when one thinks of Barks' duck comics, in this particular collection. That's the title story, in which Donald and his nephews buy a plane to fly south for the winter and end up getting roped into a mission to deliver much-needed penicillin to the frozen north and getting involved in a criminal plot to steal an old prospector's gold in the process.
The rest of the book's stories tend to be of the domestic variety, most of them, as usual, turning on some conflict between Donald and his nephews (There are a few stories chronicling Donald's ongoing war with his next-door neighbor Jones; curiously, in one story, he has a Jones-like neighbor named Smith). All have the feel of comic book versions of Disney animated shorts, with a basic premise and then a series of gags riffing on that set-up.
It may not, therefore, be the very greatest work from Carl Barks, but it's still work from one of the greatest cartoonists, and thus not to be missed.
BORROWED:
Batman - Santa Claus: Silent Knight (DC Comics) This is a very weird comic, weirder than the title suggests, and thus I kind of loved it, despite some aspects of the presentation being wanting...the result, I imagine, of the original miniseries' accelerated publishing schedule, and the way in which DC plans their books.
Despite the title (which, yes, does include that weird punctuation instead of the expected slash or ampersand), this isn't really a Batman/Santa Claus team-up. It sort of starts out like one (although Zatanna appears to give Batman a hand before Santa is even introduced), but it then quickly spirals out to include more and more DC heroes. In addition to Batman, Robin and Zatanna, it also features Nightwing, Batgirl Barbara Gordon, Green Arrow, Black Canary, Green Lantern Jo Mullein, Hawkgirl, Wonder Woman, Superman, Blue Beetle Jaime Reyes and even Miss Martian, who I haven't seen in a comic in quite a while now. Still more heroes show up in the last few pages, just in time for a double-page spread of a DC hero Christmas feast.
I suppose that a "Justice League" or "DC Universe" branding would have therefore been a bit more accurate, but, well, one imagines comics sell far better when they have the word "Batman" in the title.
Writer Jeff Parker opens the holiday story—which was originally published weekly in December of last year, and the trade collection was apparently timed for holiday release this year—with a Norse strain of vampires that resemble humanoid bats slaughtering carolers in Gotham. Batman and Robin are soon on the scene and, realizing they're dealing with the supernatural, Batman calls in Zatanna to consult.
And then Santa Claus appears, riding a giant reindeer with glowing eyes he calls Prancer and holding a crossbow aloft.
It turns out that Batman and Santa know one another. "We met during my years abroad," Batman tells Robin, "He showed me a few things I still use." (A young Bruce Wayne training under Santa Claus during his journey to become Batman? Now that's a story...although perhaps it's one better left to the imagination than to actually see depicted.)
Santa has come to Gotham on the trail of those vampires because this Santa, portrayed as a tall, muscular warrior by artist Michele Bandini, is a former monster hunter. Parker presents Santa's origin in the first two issues, first in the form of a passage from a book in Zatanna's library, and then as a magical flashback.
Parker ties DCU Santa's origins to real world origins of the folklore-turned-pop culture character—are at least
theories of his origins—like Norse mythology and the Wild Hunt (
this one, not
this one). Here he was apparently a "mighty woodsman" who joined the Norse gods on an annual hunt for monsters, which he would capture and imprison. Along the way, he befriended the Krampus, a mischievous wood god that delighted in frightening children. At some point, they became stranded on Earth, cut off from the world of Norse mythology, and eventually they came up with their good cop/bad cop routine of rewarding and frightening children into good behavior during the winter holidays.
This is all, by the way, presented with 100% sincerity; there's not a whiff of irony to Parker's presentation of Santa as a badass monster hunter. It's all played completely straight.
Which isn't to say that the book isn't funny, because it does have jokes, and some of them are quite effective, including the heroes' repeated awe of the fact that a) Santa is real and b) Batman knows him.
Anyway, Santa is on the trail of these vampires because it turns out they are monsters that he had previously hunted and captured. It turns out that someone is releasing all of the monsters he had captured, and the culprit turns out to be Santa's old but now long-lost ally, the Krampus.
Though we now tend to think of the Krampus as "the devil of Christmas", the very subtitle of the 2010 Monte Beauchamp Krampus book that reintroduced and popularized the European Christmas character to the United States, goaded by recent pop culture appearances of Krampus as a sort of Christmas villain or anti-Santa (think 2015 film Krampus), he is in actuality more of a bogeyman than bad actor, long since tamed by and subservient to Saint Nicholas.
Parker strikes the right take on the character, then, using him as the villain of the book, without necessarily making him evil, or even entirely at fault. In the end, he's Santa's partner and a wild spirit more interested in frightening than killing, but he finds himself playing the antagonist here because he's possessed by ancient evil spirits, spirits that are driving him in his various bad actions.
I'm not entirely sure who gets credit for this Krampus design. Bandini is the first artist to draw him, but I see one of the variants for the first issue appears to be a design variant featuring the book's version of Santa Claus by series cover artist Dan Mora, so I wonder if he did some design work for the series as well...?
At any rate, it's a very cool Krampus. He has the expected goat legs and hooves, horns, tail and long, always protruding tongue, but his face is white and frozen and mask-like (Which is perhaps ironic, given the fact that people in Europe wear often expensive, elaborate masks that resemble an actual living creature's face). He wears a black hood and cape trimmed in red fur, like a negative echo of Santa's garb in this comic.
The plot, then, involves Batman and his many allies racing to stop the army of monsters, culminating in a battle outside Santa's valley, and bad kid Damian being taken away and caged by Krampus.
As for what's wanting, well, you wouldn't expect it from the excellent Mora covers, but the art end of the equation isn't that great. I liked the work of Bandini just fine. He makes the various DC characters all look beautiful, graceful and dynamic, and, as I noted, his Krampus is great. He also does a fine job of depicting this new, bad-ass Santa in a way that feels true to Parker's monster-hunter, warrior take while also looking enough like the "real" Santa one probably sees in one's head when imagining the character.
The problem is, as ever, Bandini isn't the only artist. By the second issue/chapter, he shares an art credit with Trevor Hairsine (although the editors seem to have wisely deployed Hairsine, assigning him the eight-page flashback sequence). The pair share credits in the third issue, as well, the script of which doesn't allow for a tidy way to separate their art chores, and, for the fourth issue, neither is present, with art duties being handled by Danny Kim and Stephen Segovia.
The result, then, is that there is little visual consistency to the book, as the various artists' styles aren't terribly similar. I suppose this would have been less obvious if one were reading the book serially, as it was originally published, but read all at once in one sitting in its final, collected form, it's an unfortunate, distracting weakness in an otherwise fun comic.
I imagine the comic must have sold well serially in the direct market, as the same week DC released this trade, they also released the first issue of a sequel series, Batman - Santa Claus: Silent Knight Returns, this time with artist Lukas Ketner teaming with Parker. I wonder if this is the start of a new holiday tradition...?
Blood Hunt (Marvel Entertainment) For a publisher-wide crossover event story, the Jed MacKay-written
Blood Hunt miniseries seemed awfully small and narrowly focused, basically just another Avengers story arc with a couple of guest-stars.
In fact, reading it in trade after the event concluded as I did, it very much felt like I was reading a random Avengers trade from a run I wasn't following, with characters referring to events I was unfamiliar with (sometimes with footnote referring to past Marvel comics, sometimes not) and status quos that are very different than those that I remember.
That feeling is probably justified by the fact that MacKay is also currently writing Marvel's Avengers series, and, because of that, I found myself wondering if this story wasn't intended as an arc for that series, and some editor at Marvel saw wider potential in the premise and decided to promote it into a full-blown line-wide event.
Now, in fairness to MacKay and Marvel, it's been a while since I've read a Marvel comic, and I'm pretty out of the loop in terms of which characters are currently dead or retired or otherwise off the board, which teams have been disbanded and so on, so that feeling of joining a story already in progress is totally on me.
Still, having read plenty of these sorts of event stories in the past, I was struck by how small this one seemed, at least in this, the series that serves as the spine of the event. The entire world was apparently imperiled, a true all-hands-on-deck situation, and yet there was no Fantastic Four, no X-Men, no Hulks of any color or gender, no Steve Rogers and no Spider-Man Peter Parker (barring brief cameos of Reed, Sue and Spidey in the Free Comic Book Day prologue, which we'll get to in a moment).
Wolverine's not even in it! Can you do a Marvel event without Wolverine?
Granted, there are a lot of tie-in stories. Skimming the event's Wikipedia page, I counted about 20 titles with the words "Blood Hunt" in them, and several other ongoings that seemed to tie-in to the event, which would, of course, account for the whereabouts of all of the above-mentioned characters and just what they were up to during the vampire apocalypse. It's just a little odd to me that the main series is basically just an Avengers comic.
The exception is, as I said, the FCBD story, taken from the pages of Free Comic Book Day 2024: Blood Hunt/X-Men #1. It's just 10 pages long and serves as something of a prologue to the Blood Hunt series, which immediately follows it in this trade collection. Though short, the sequence is the only one in the book that really seems to "check in" on various players in the Marvel Universe, attempting to depict the scope of the event.
It opens with Spider-Man Peter Parker, in the only three pages in which he will appear, fighting a villain named Doctor Dark, who wields darkforce powers (The darkforce seems pretty important to the plot, and seems to be a longstanding Marvel...thing, although I couldn't explain it to you if my life depended on it. Sorry.) Suddenly, the not-so-good doctor seems to explode into a tornado of inky blackness.
In Arizona, Reed and Sue Richards are flying around in a Fantasticar while Reed looks at a computer and says there's been a dimensional breach from the darkforce dimension. In Hell's Kitchen, Daredevil narrates about his senses for a while and then jumps into a crowd full of vampires attacking people. And in Atlanta, Brielle Brooks, daughter of Blade, is in the middle of fighting some vampires when she's confronted by Marvel's Dracula, still wearing his red armor and long white hair.
This segment is drawn by Sara Pichelli, and I was sort of surprised at how weak it read, particularly given how many comics Pichelli has to her credit at this point, many of which are quite good.
The opening lay-out with Spider-Man in action is a little messy, the character overlapping himself in one panel.
The splash of Daredevil leaping into action is sort of confusing, with the hero in the upper left corner of the page in an action pose, while there's a vampire cut in half floating above him (Did Daredevil somehow slice him in half with the wire connecting his clubs as he fell, or...?), and a random severed vampire head flying around in the lower right corner, knocked off its body by...someone, I guess.
Finally, the sequence with Brielle has her fighting vampires, and there are panels in which they seem to explode into burning skeletons while she poses with a stake poised above them, saying "Too slow." I couldn't tell if she's killing them with stakes, and telling them they are too slow, or if Dracula, who is about to be dramatically introduced, is killing them from somewhere off-panel before she gets a chance to, and she's admonishing herself for being too slow.
The main series, drawn by Pepe Larraz, isn't much better when it comes to depicting the heroes in action against hordes of vampires. The default is heroes posing while vampires are flung about, and it's often unclear what exactly the heroes are doing to fight the vampires.
Problematically, I'm not entirely sure what the "rules" of the vampires are in this story, regarding how one kills them (and the Marvel heroes all seem fine with killing them, there's no discussion of morality regarding slaying vampires), how one turns someone else into a vampire, and whether its permanent or not (Like, at the end of the story, Miles Morales and Doctor Strange are still both vampires, which seems like something that Marvel will want to reverse at some point in the rather near future, yeah?).
The darkforce dimension breaches mentioned in the FCBD prologue are centered on any Marvel characters that use the darkforce, of which there are apparently many (a page shows nine of them, although they are all unnamed), and they are somehow all turned into portals through which darkforce pours into the world, blocking out the sun. And then hordes of vampires immediately start attacking people all over the world.
Blade seems on top of it, visiting Spider-Man Miles Morales (as the latter is in the process of impaling a vampire with a glowing sword...?), calling a meeting of the Avengers at their new headquarters and then visiting Doctor Strange.
But! When Doctor Strange asks Blade who is the mastermind behind this latest vampire attack since it's apparently not Dracula (Spoiler alert!), Blade confesses "It's ME" and stabs Strange through the chest with one of his swords.
I found this to be a genuinely surprising moment, and one I thoroughly enjoyed. One advantage of not visiting the comics shop every Wednesday and not reading the solicitations every month? I've regained my ability to be surprised by comics again.
Blade's other strategic moves were, when meeting with Miles, turning him into a vampire and sending him after Brielle, and, when gathering the Avengers, having them attacked by his team of super-vampires. These are deeply weird-looking designs that I kind of loved; I'm not sure if Larraz created them all or not (I got the sense some of them were pre-existing characters), but they look great and prove more than a match for the Avengers. (And yes, this scene did call to mind Jason Aaron's Avengers run, wherein Earth's Mightiest Heroes also fought a super-team of vampires).
After various moves by the heroes—Clea and Doctor Strange's astral form asking Doctor Doom for help, Tigra and some guy named Hunter's Moon rescuing Khonshu from an Asgardian prison, Captain America Sam Wilson making a speech—the tide turns and there's a big showdown with Blade.
Or, in reality, the ancient vampiric entity that was using Blade as a vessel. That would be the first vampire, "Varnae", an apparent allusion to the pre-Dracula 19th century vampire novel Varney The Vampire. (We can't blame MacKay for that eye-rolling reference of a name though, as the Internet tells me the character was actually created in the early 1980s by Steve Perry and Steve Bissette.)
In addition to buttressing tie-in comics, one of the purposes of these sorts of stories is to implement some sort of important changes in the fictional setting of the Marvel Universe, to, you know, justify the sentiment that the "Marvel Universe will never be the same!" and so on.
That seems to be the case, here. Not only are a couple of characters left as vampires at the end, but the sun no longer seems to have an adverse effect on vampires and, most dramatically, Doctor Doom has become the new Sorcerer Supreme. After the happy ending and the heroes all posing facing the sun, there are a few pages hinting at new status quos, and then a final scene that feels like a cliffhanger, with Doom announcing his new position to the world and the very last panel featuring a giant close-up of his masked visage over his name while the assembled heroes, tiny in the bottom of the panel, face him.
Taken on its own—which is, of course, the way I have to take it, as that's the way Marvel presents it here—there's not too much to recommend the main Blood Hunt series. It doesn't feature much of the Marvel Universe, those characters included don't particularly get much focus themselves in the way of character work or big, cool moments, and the action is, outside of a pair of fight scenes between the Avengers and the super-vampire team, mostly implied and left to the reader's imagination.
Of course, the argument could be made that this isn't the way to read stories like this, and that one would find it far more satisfying were they checking in on the main story as it was published serially, taking in many of the tie-ins between installments. That would certainly help give the event a bigger, wider, more impactful feeling, and fill in the several blanks in the story ("After what we just went through?" Brielle asks rhetorically in the final issue of the series, which sounds weird, given that we haven't seen her, Dracula and Miles at all since they left Doctor Strange's house a few issues ago, but an asterisk points readers to Dracula: Blood Hunt #1-3).
Reading events as they're published is no longer an option for me though, so I have to assess them as they are presented in trade and, as a standalone trade, Blood Hunt seemed wanting to me.
Did any of you guys follow this event? If so, do you have any recommendations for any of the tie-ins to make a point of checking out? Though I didn't love the main series, the basic premise of "Marvel characters fight vampires" seems compelling enough that I imagine at least some of the tie-ins must have made for good reads.
Call Me Iggy (First Second) In
last month's column I mentioned that
Monster Locker, a rollicking all-ages adventure comic, was set in its writer Jorge Aguirre's hometown of Columbus, Ohio...although it turned out to be rather light on Columbus-specific content. Given that Aguirre hails from my former hometown, I figured I should check out his other comics work, and so I picked up his
Call Me Iggy, a collaboration with artist Rafael Rosado (Who was born in Puerto Rico but is based in Columbus) that was released back in February (Although I had completely missed it at the time).
Cally Me Iggy is also set in Columbus, and has some interesting Columbus-related content. An opening establishing shot, following a three-page sequence set in 1982 Colombia, features the city skyline in the background and one of those weird humanoid deer statues by artist Terry Allen that went up in 2014 in the foreground, under the words "Columbus, Ohio."
Later, two of the characters take a break from cleaning an office building on the roof and look out at a two-page spread of downtown Columbus and, later still, they go on a date to a French film, the sign and entrance to the Wexner Center for the Arts clearly visible in the establishing shot. The Franklin County Conservatory and the Statehouse also make appearances, and there's a scene set at Spoonful Records on State Street, with a panel showing the partially obscured sign in front of the store.
So if you're a Columbusite and a comics fan, and there is obviously quite a large overlap between the two, do check out Call Me Iggy.
The city and it's sight-seeing aren't the only reason to check out the book, though. The book is also an excellent high-concept YA graphic novel, a coming-of-age story of a young man learning to accept his own immigrant roots.
Iggy is the youngest son of two Colombian immigrants. He was born and raised in Ohio, and is, at the start of the comic, just about to start high school, where his older brother is a popular upperclassman. Iggy's real name, by the way, is Ignacio, but he prefers the less ethnic-sounding nickname, and the fact that he does is an early clue of just how integrated he and his family are into the U.S.
In fact, Marisol, a Mexican classmate of his (and the girl on the cover), calls him a "Gringo Latino." Iggy doesn't even know any Spanish, which is how he ends up in a Spanish class on his first day of school...despite having signed up for French.
He decides to stay, however, when he notices Kristi, a cute white girl he knew from junior high, is also in the class.
So far, so normal, right?
Well, the high-concept comes in around age 45 or so, when Iggy accidentally disturbs the ashes of his grandparents in the urns kept in his basement, somehow summoning the ghost of his grandfather! Iggy's abuelito, complete with a poncho and floppy peasant hat and looking just like he did in the short, three-page prologue in which Iggy's father is shown leaving Colombia for the United States, is just as confused as Iggy is, but he rather quickly integrates into his grandson's life. No one but Iggy can see or hear him as he follows him through a typical day of school and videogames, and Iggy's abuelito becomes something akin to an imaginary friend to him, albeit one who can talk back.
There are, of course, advantages to having your dead Colombian grandfather's voice in your head at all times, and one of them is it makes Spanish class much easier, and Iggy is soon impressing Kristi and spending a great deal of time with her, as he begins tutoring her. His grandfather simultaneously tries to play Cyrano, helping Iggy win the girl of his dreams. ("Ouff! She's way out of your league," Abuelito says upon first laying eyes on Marisol, but then, when Iggy points out Kristi to him, he's relieved, "Oh...No problem.")
Things go great for a while, until Spanish class starts to get more advanced...too advanced for Abuelito to keep up ("I dropped out of school in the fourth grade to work the farm. Grammar is not my specialty").
And so Kristi's mom hires a real tutor, and Iggy goes seeking a tutor of his own among the living. He turns to Marisol, who agrees on the condition that Iggy help her with her after school job: Cleaning office buildings with her parents.
The more time he spends with her, the more he learns about how some immigrants' experiences differ from those of his parents, as Marisol and her parents are undocumented, and her older brother, also undocumented, has already been deported.
And the more time he spends with his grandfather's ghost, the more he learns about his own father, whose immigration experience wasn't as smooth as it always seemed to Iggy, and the tensions between the generations, and the importance of his ancestors in his own life...whether he can hold a conversation with all of them or not.
All this growing up takes place in the fall of 2016, and thus with that year's consequential election playing out in the background.
In fact, as Iggy's brother drives him to school one day, the boys hear a snippet of Trump's campaign-launching escalator speech over the car radio ("When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems... ...and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists..." )
While Iggy immediately, almost instinctually recoils ("I hate that guy"), his brother has the opposite reaction ("He's cool. He tells it like it is and he's rich."). By the end of the book, Iggy's brother will be sporting a red hat.
After a trip to the museum, Iggy and his dad talk politics for about two pages after they run into a big pro-Trump demonstration in front of the Statehouse, and Iggy is sort of surprised at his dad's ambivalence between Trump and Clinton: "Well, Trump is a reality show host with no experience in government, but maybe he's right...but I don't trust Hillary," he says, before ultimately concluding, "Iggy, don't ruin a perfectly nice day with politics." Abuelito, watching from the backseat, simply says, "I like their hats."
Trump will weigh increasingly heavily on Iggy and, especially, Marisol, as the book progresses, MAGA hats and coffee cups turning up occasionally in their cleaning to remind them of him, and the threat he poses for Latino immigrants.
Ultimately, over a family dinner at a chicken wing place, Iggy's father tells him that he is writing in the name of his favorite French actor Gerard Depardieu as, of the two candidates, "One is too plain. One is too spicy. Neither is the perfect wing."
We know how things ended up going. Everyone seems stunned and shaken by the election results, with the exception of Iggy's brother, who is pumped about Trump's win. Marisol takes it the hardest, freaking out when Ohio is called for Trump and then, after his win is official, she disappears for days, worrying Iggy, who thinks the worst.
(Aguirre is not above editorializing, writing in a narration box a few panels after Iggy's mom assures him, "Don't worry...Trump will never, ever win," "Spoiler: Things do not go as expected" and, as Iggy listens to Trump's victory speech and the President-Elect says "The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer...it is going to be a beautiful thing...", another narration box appears, reading "Spoiler: It wasn't so beautiful".)
It was especially weird to read this in November of 2024, after the results of Trump's re-election, with this second victory coming without the many asterisks of him having lost the popular vote...and James Comey's thumb on the scale...and documented Russian interference...and Trump having broken campaign finance law with his illegal cover-up of the Stormy Daniels affair (I guess it will take some time to see to what extent Russia interfered this time, and how many campaign laws Trump might have broken this time....although, as has become obvious over the last few years, his breaking of laws no longer seems disqualifying in the eyes of the Department of Justice, the Supreme Court or, most crucially, the electorate itself).
Trump did seem to increase his share of the Latino vote this time around, though, so it was odd to be reading about Latino immigrants, even fictional ones, with such a wide variety of views on him during his first campaign, the one that, again, launched with his calling Mexicans rapists and had, as one of its major themes, the building of a wall on the southern border.
Despite how much I just talked politics here, though, Call Me Iggy doesn't focus so squarely on them throughout its page count; I just highlighted almost all of the political talk from the book. Aguirre uses it as one more stressor on the lives of the vulnerable, like Marisol and her family, and one more difference between the increasingly conscious Iggy and the thoroughly integrated members of his family like his father and brother, who tend to think of immigrants as other people, despite the fact that their presence in this country is so new (and, in the eyes of some, tentative, as we see when a MAGA-hatted classmate jokingly asks to see Iggy's papers after the election, and Iggy's brother has to break up the almost-fight, telling the other boy, "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Sorry, my brother's a little sensitive.")
I can't say enough good stuff about Rosado's art. It's perfect. Just realistic enough, with incredible character work and "acting" throughout.
I'd highly recommend Call Me Iggy...and not just to Columbus readers.
The Holy Ghost: A Spirited Comic (Harry N. Abrams) As with
Call Me Iggy (above), I sought this book out after reading and reviewing a new work by the author and wanting to see what he had done before. In this case, it was the odd but thoughtful hybrid book
The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien by artist and writer John Hendrix (which I reviewed for
Good Comics for Kids here).
Hendrix's resume is an interesting one, consisting of works that are told in combinations of words and pictures, but differing formats. He has several picture books to his name, including John Brown: His Fight for Freedom (2009), Shooting at the Stars (2014) and Miracle Man: The Story of Jesus (2016). His 2018 book for young readers The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and The Plot to Kill Hitler was, like The Mythmakers, an illustrated prose/comics hybrid (although with relatively less comics content). And then there's 2022's The Holy Ghost: A Spirited Comic, which collects about 70 comic strips that originated in Hendrix's sketchbooks.
The main character, the Holy Ghost, first appeared in Hendrix's sketchbook while he was drawing in church one day (We can draw during church?), as a sort of generic cartoon ghost floating above the congregation and, in the last panel, commenting on the lyrics of the hymn being sung.
That strip, reprinted in the back on a page facing Hendrix's Author's Note and not, therefore, an "official" installment of the strip, bears the title "The Adventures of the Holy Spirit." If you are not at all conversant in Christian theology, the Holy Spirit is one third of the Holy Trinity, or three aspects of the one God, with the other parts being God the Father (or "God") and God the Son (Jesus).
While God and Jesus appear frequently in the Bible and throughout popular culture—and you likely have a picture of them in your head whenever you read the words "God" and "Jesus"—the Holy Spirit is more mysterious and can be quite hard for one to wrap one's head around, believer or not. If depicted at all in art, the Holy Spirit is usually presented as a dove.
This aspect of the trinity is also sometimes referred to as "The Holy Ghost," which I guess you could say is a sort of nickname. It is that name which seems to have inspired Hendrix's portrayal. His character as it appears in these comics is barely changed from its first appearance in his sketchbook. You can see it on the cover above. Essentially a stylized version of your generic, cartoon concept of a ghost, it has a somewhat bulbous head, hollow, blank, often inscrutable eyes and two tiny arms, the rest of its form trailing off into insubstantiality. Visually, it's basically a big blue comma capable of expressions.
As to why it's blue instead of the traditional ghost color of white, I guess we'd have to ask Hendrix, but, if I had to hazard a guess, I would assume it was because were it white, it would blend into the paper too much and fail to visually pop as it does in blue.
As for the character's nature, it fittingly seems to be both God and not-God at the same time. In some appearances, the Ghost performs what we might consider Godly duties, like answering prayers, escorting the other main character through the sky after it apparently died and, in two strips, battling what seems to be its opposite number, a red comma-shaped character with little devil horns atop its head (This it does by bonking it on the head).
At the same time, the Ghost talks of God as if God was an entirely different person. The Ghost seems to know God's mind (and to have been present at creation), but speaks of God more like a friend then, you know, itself...or an aspect of itself.
This likely sounds heady and religious. That's probably due more to the limitations of my writing than an accurate reflection of Hendrix's strip (Patrick McDonnell, the Mutts cartoonist and maybe the most talented artist whose work you can find on the newspaper comics pages today, does a far better job of detailing and explaining Hendrix's strip in his short, six-paragraph introduction to the collection than I can manage here, despite how many more words I'm spending).
Because while the subject of the strips are most often faith, prayer, religion and various philosophical concepts (immortality, beauty, the nature of reality), it's still a comic strip, and thus generally still has a gag or gag-like structure, with jokes of a sort almost always being told in each one.
McDonnell rightly compares the strips to parables, sutras, koans and poetry, and there is definitely a meditative aspect to each. One will rarely laugh out loud after a strip, but one will appreciate the joke-like climax in the basic comic strip structure, and usually be left to think about something, as oftentimes the punchlines linger in one's mind with the questions they ask.
Though you may have detected a religious streak in Hendrix's bibliography as I laid out above, and though the subjects of these Holy Ghost strips are more often than not religious in nature, it is not at all preachy. Hendrix's strips are rarely certain when it comes to spiritual matters, the Holy Ghost usually nudging the other characters, emphasizing an irony, or asking a question itself.
As for those other characters, more often than not it is a squirrel, whose dialogue appears in yellow dialogue balloons with a darker, orange border along the bottom. (The Ghost's words, meanwhile, appear in your traditional comics balloon, often with a blue outline.)
The squirrel, though not quite human, is used as a stand-in for humanity in general, giving the Ghost someone to talk to. The squirrel isn't necessarily a believer, and, in fact, its specific beliefs tend to vary from strip to strip, depending on the joke (or joke-like structure) they need to serve.
And so the squirrel is sometimes an atheist, albeit a questioning one...or a believer in God, but a skeptical one. There's an overall sense of questioning and questing to the character, who I guess we could best describe as spiritual, or at least curious about the nature of reality and what's important.
A third character appears far less frequently, and that is a badger, whose dialogue appears in white text over a black balloon (Sandman-esque, then). The badger, unlike the squirrel, seems to be both religious and certain in its beliefs; this leads the two to taking up opposite ends of arguments in the strips in which they both appear (And only rarely does the badger appear with the Ghost without the squirrel).
The shape of the strips varies from installment to installment. Sometimes they are six-panel, vertical layouts. Sometimes there are but two panels. Sometimes there is a single image with dialogue. Though the format varies, they generally take up about the same amount of space on the page, with lots of airy whiteness around them.
Among my favorites are those that poke at the title characters' identity.
In one eight-panel he is shown eating popcorn and watching a movie, the dialogue we overhear ("Marion! --Don't look at it! --Keep your eyes shut!") making it clear that he's watching the scene in The Raiders of the Lost Ark where the ark of the covenant is opened, and the Nazis' faces melt and their heads explode. The Ghost turns off the TV, goes to look at itself in the mirror, and its head explodes.
In another, a six-panel strip, the Ghost appears wearing a party hat because, as he explains to squirrel, "It is Pentecost...That's my birthday—Well, sort of." He hands squirrel a handmade card because "That's what I like to do on my birthday...Also, you're now fluent in French."
Solid jokes about the Holly Spirit!
Most of the strips tend to tackle heavier subject matter though, but with a light touch. Thought-provoking, elegiac and often quietly funny, the strip's better installments remind me of Charles Schulz's Peanuts or McDonnell's own Mutts at their most philosophical.
They're well worth reading, beyond their primary and most immediate virtue, that of an artist using comics and cartooning to give a shape, characterization and voice to the perhaps the most mysterious and ineffable aspect of the Christian faith.
Kagurabachi Vol. 1 (Viz Media) In a seemingly gun-less fantasy world that appears to be much like our own save for the fact that katana are the primary weapon, and magic is real (if relatively rare), the affectless young man Chihiro trains to succeed his legendary swordsmith father. Though he's relatively goofy and immature around the house, Chihiro's father is no joke: He crafted the six enchanted blades that helped bring a war to an end.
When Chihiro's dad is killed by sorcerers and the blades stolen—an event that manga-ka Takeru Hokazono handles with a time jump and then a flashback—the boy takes up his father's seventh and final magic sword, and heads to the city on a mission to avenge his father and recover the lost swords.
He and his partner, his father's best friend who is also a sorcerer, don't have a lot to go on. They just know of a particular gang said to work under sorcerers, and so Chihiro engages in a full-frontal assault against them, hoping to knock loos some information.
He's only been training in combat for about three years, but having a magic sword goes a long way towards leveling the playing field against a bunch of guys who just have regular swords.
Eventually, our heroes get a better lead in the form of a mysterious (and, thankfully, adorable and funny) young girl that the same sorcerers seem to be pursuing. Chihiro's mission now includes protecting her from a series of would-be kidnappers.
With a potent set-up and a goal-oriented, quest-like structure laid out, Hokazono's manga seems built for the long-haul. The action is fairly blistering, with Chihiro's whirling blade cutting down enemies like grass, sudden, striking white space appearing in its path where the bodies of his opponents should connect. Limbs are often severed, and blood gushes, although Hokazono pulls off a pretty neat trick of managing the ultra-violence in such a way that it seems artful, cinematic and anything but gory. It helps, of course, that the comic is black-and-white, and thus the blood looks like the splashes of ink that are used to depict it rather than actual blood, and those cut tend to separate cleanly, as if they were made of paper rather than flesh and bone.
A winning supporting cast begins to form around Chihiro in this volume, and their strong personalities and comedic quirks go a long way towards counter-balancing the violent action, especially given how rarely our hero seems to show any discernable emotion (This is not a response to his trauma, though; in the early scenes set before his father's death, he is presented in the same way).
By the end of the first volume, a pattern seems to be emerging, as Chihiro first battles a sorcerer who summons exploding daruma in a 20-page fight scene and, as this volume ends, a second sorcerer confronts him. The book seems to be taking the shape of a fight manga, then.
Though I wasn't blown away by the premise, what's here seems to be very good, and Kagurabachi seems to have the potential to be a big hit. Definitely a manga worth keeping an eye on.
Universal Monsters: Creature From the Black Lagoon Lives! (Image Comics) This is actually the third book in a line of Universal Monsters comics generated by a new-ish partnership with Skybound Entertainment and published by Image Comics, following series featuring Dracula and Frankenstein. It is, of course, the first one that I've read, a fact that I'll attribute to the Creature being a bit more interesting than the first two of his peers to be featured in miniseries. Frankenstein and Dracula, particularly Universal's versions of them, have become so commonplace in pop culture as to be something akin to folkloric wallpaper. It can be hard to notice them, let alone get too excited about them.
(Of course, conversely, that very fact
could give new comics featuring them quite a bit of potential to surprise, as they offer steep challenges to their creators. I mean, if you're a writer tackling Universal's versions of Dracula and Frankenstein, which have been so thoroughly explored in official sequels, parodies and allusions over the decades, not to mention all the other narratives riffing on the public domain characters, well, you better damn well have something new and interesting to say.)
The Creature, on the other hand, feels a bit fresher: He made his film debut some two decades after Dracula and Frankenstein, he only had two official (and relatively little-seen) sequels, and, because he wasn't based on a work long since lapsed into public domain like Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley's novels (and, of course, was never quite as popular), he hasn't been as exploited.
The main reason this one piqued my interest though, is that I've long noticed that the Creature seems to have quite a few fans among comics artists, given the amount of fan art I've seen posted on social media, some of it from some incredibly talented artists...and/or some of my favorite artists. I was curious about what an artist given the chance to tell "officially" draw the Creature might look like (Certainly the last licensed comic to feature him, the 1993 Arthur Adams-drawn adaptation from when Dark Horse was producing Universal Monsters comics, was tour de force).
For this round of Universal Monster comics, the focus seems to be on original stories rather than adaptations, which does make them quite a bit more exciting, although I suppose it might be daunting for the creators to work in the shadows of some of the most iconic movies ever made.
Taking up the challenge here are writers Dan Watters and Ram V and artist Matthew Roberts, whose work is here colored by Dave Stewart and Trish Mulvihill. The book, as collected into a nice-looking hardcover, is 7.25-inches-by-10.88 inches, so slightly bigger than your typical comics collection, which flatters the art nicely and, though the size isn't that much larger, it does help give Roberts' work something of a more cinematic scope.
The story is not set in the 1950s, but seems to be set in the modern day, although the writers seem careful not to date it too much; there's something of a timeless quality about the setting that feels appropriate, given the classic nature of the character.
It is set in the Amazon, in and around the location that serves as the Creature's last name, and the protagonist is a beautiful woman, allowing for visual references to the films scenes of the curious, perhaps lustful creatures stalking her from below the surface of the water.
This woman isn't quite the damsel in distress that Julie Adams played in the original film but is instead the sort of female character that Greg Rucka was so often writing when he was doing comics regularly: Tough, troubled, addicted to something and usually in a tank top. She's also blonde; apparently the Creature doesn't have a specific type!
She is Kate Marsden, an American journalist who survived an attack by a serial killer who drowns his victims. She has traveled to "the ass-end of Peru" against the advice of her editor to track down a lead: Someone has apparently been drowning people in the vicinity, and she suspects her would-be killer. The locals, of course, blame the creature.
As for what the killer is doing in the Amazon, aside from, you know, killing, he's apparently an ex-marine, and was hired by local narcos to train them with the skills and discipline of the U.S. military.
The other players in the drama are a local doctor who has been pursuing the creature his whole life, and, of course, the Creature itself, who spends most of his time lurking around Kate, watching her from afar or swimming just beneath her, maybe even rescuing her from drowning at one point...?
It's hard for Kate to say, exactly (it's easier for the readers to do so, of course). That's because one of the side-effects of her near drowning is seeing things, so she can't always tell what's real or not. Whether the plants in the jungle are full of eyes, for example, or if the shape poised above her as she's dragged out of the water is the man she's pursuing or some weird fish-man hybrid.
All of the players eventually connect and converge for a climax set in the Creature's cave network.
The portrayal of the Creature is hardly a negative one, as viewers over the decades have come to view the fish-man sympathetically, to the point that Guillermo del Toro's 2017 kinda sorta unofficial remake/extrapolation reimagined him as a romantic hero. Rather, he is here simply a mostly aloof part of nature, curious about humanity (or, at least, humanity as represented by the heroine), but mostly keeping to himself. He is, of course, able and willing to respond to violence with ferocious (and far more effective) violence of its own.
Watters and V's point here isn't a terribly original one, and you could probably guess it from my summary, if not within the first pages of the book, given that it features a serial killer: Man is, as in so many monster movies and other narratives, the real monster. They do take that idea to an...unexpected extreme, however, with the killer attempting to physically become the Creature of the Black Lagoon himself, and threatening to make Kate himself into something of his mate, that latter bit something of a monster trope, although presented in here in a scary, more realistic way than in many of the cheesier monster movies to attempt it over the years.
Thankfully, the comic is written as a comic, with a fair amount of the story told in narration boxes, and meaning conveyed through the relationship between those words and the images presented. In other words, despite the fact that this is something of an official sequel to a fairly famous movie, the creators don't try to approach it as movie in comics form.
Roberts' work is pretty great. While not as baroquely detailed as it could have been given the dense, alive setting of much of the story (For example, Kelley Jones' depiction of an American swamp in 1995's Batman #521 and #522 still sticks with me), it's effective, and his Creature is a compelling depiction: Inscrutable and implacable, it's appropriately weird and alien and managing to look far more realistic than the version from the movies, while also looking enough like that design to seem like "itself."
At 96 pages, it feels somewhat slight, not quite as hefty as a novel or as involved as a film, but it's a satisfying enough read, one that is able to achieve the exploitation of the IP in a way that honors its source material and offers the requisite genre thrills.
I imagine Skybound will cycle through the other Universal Monsters before returning to the Creature but I wouldn't be too terribly surprised if we saw more of him in comics before too long. Like I said, he's got a lot of comics artist fans. Probable enough that this particular monster could support an ongoing with rotation creative teams, if the Skybound and Image so chose to devote themselves to one.
Have any of you guys been following Skybound/Image's Universal Monster comics? Are the Dracula and Frakenstein ones worth checking out? After reading and writing about this, I've just about talked myself into seeing what their creative teams managed to do with them...
REVIEWED:
Girlmode (HarperAlley) Writer
Magdalene Visaggio teams with artist Paulina Ganucheau (who contributed a story to
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Black, White and Green, above) for a new YA graphic novel that reads a lot like a Hollywood high school comedy in comics form. All the tropes are there: Makeovers, rival suitors, the push and pull between popularity and being yourself. What's different, perhaps, is the subject matter. Our protagonist is Phoebe Zito, a newly transitioned young girl who has also just started a brand-new school in California. That, and the care with which Visaggio handles the various characters that orbit Phoebe, giving them real depth and various hang-ups regarding a trans classmate that they need to face and work through. So yeah, it's got its serious side, but it's also a lot of fun. More
here.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Naruto #1 (IDW Publishing/Viz Media) If you've made it all the way through this post, then you can probably tell that I came to this crossover more as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reader than a Naruto one. I have read a little Naruto, but just a little, and now long ago: I was buying and reading Shonen Jump for a while when it first started a US version and release in 2002, but I gave up on it after too long, as the phone book-sized issues were piling up faster than I could read them. Naruto was, of course, one of its original features.
Still, relative lack of experience with the characters aside, I was curious, especially since I can't think of another time a character from a manga series was featured in a crossover with American comic book characters like this.
The results are, obviously, a bit weird, with writer Caleb Goellner and artist Hendry Prasetya seemingly creating a new version of the TMNT characters that exist in the world of Naruto, and those Naruto characters appearing in what is basically a regular American super-comic. It can be hard to judge a comic series by its first issue, of course, but from what I've seen so far, they seem to be on the right track. My full review is here.
Tegan ad Sara: Crush (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Just about a year and a half after
Tegan and Sara: Junior High was released, writers Tegan Quin and Sara Quin and artist Tillie Walden return for its sequel. (I suppose it's no surprise to learn that Walden must be able to draw pretty quickly; that's apparent from the quite sizable bibliography she's already assembled despite her relatively young age.) This time out the focus is more on the twins' burgeoning music career than it is on the ordinary trials and tribulations of middle school, but, just like the previous volume, it's an extremely well-made comic about growing up and becoming yourself. More
here.
*
DC Comics recently published a rather disappointing Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong
(which I reviewed in this column), featuring the Warner Brothers/Legendary Pictures American version of the character, and they have since announced a sequel. Meanwhile, Marvel just released Godzilla: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus
, collecting their 1970s Godzilla
series for the first time since 2006, and they also published a series of Godzilla variant covers for their superhero line of comics in September.
**You know what I'd really like to see for the TMNT's 50th anniversary? A nice, big, thoroughly researched and well-written prose book chronicling the characters' creation and the lives of Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird and their Mirage Studio collaborators who are responsible for this comic book-turned-pop culture phenomenon. If the Turtles have just turned 40, then, well, they're creators aren't getting any younger, and they have one of—if not the—most unique and most compelling success stories in comics publishing history, a history that includes far more sad stories than happy ones.
I'd pursue such a book myself, except for the fact that I am 1) not very charming and affable (Like, I couldn't imagine Eastman or Laird wanting to talk to me for endless hours about their lives), 2) I hate to travel, 3) I have relatively little experience with research and 4) I don't have a resume with, like, any published books on it (although I am working on it!), so I would be a tough sell to publishers, despite how interesting the book would prove. So any diligent, talented and experienced book writers in the reading audience? Start pursuing that Eastman/Laird/TMNT biography now! You've only got ten years to write it!
