COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (14 February 2022)

Posted on February 14, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

Since it’s Valentine’s Day, this week’s reminder that comic book covers can be awesome is also a tribute to America’s postwar fling with romance comics:

Bill WardPat Masulliromance comicslove comicsromance comicKen Baldromance comicsVince CollettaJosé Luis Garcia-LopezLuis Avila

 

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If you like Raising Arizona…

Posted on February 10, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

Like I mentioned last month, this year I’m going over the Coen brothers’ amazing body of work and recommending further films and comics for fans of each of their masterpieces. This time around, let’s focus on their outlandish follow-up to Blood Simple…

coen brothers

Raising Arizona (1987) is a surrealist comedy about an infertile couple (Nicholas Cage as a hilariously incompetent convenience store robber, Holly Hunter as a stiff police officer) who kidnap one of the quintuplet babies of a local furniture magnate. Wacky complications ensue, especially involving a duo of hysterical escaped convicts (John Goodman makes the first of his many appearances in the Coens’ filmography) and a cartoonish bounty hunter who may also be a vicious biker from Hell… or maybe a nightmare come to life… or perhaps the embodiment of Reagan-era fears of nuclear apocalypse! The result is a roller coaster of slapstick chase scenes, grotesque characters, and charmingly goofy gags accompanied by the sound of banjo and yodeling, all tied together by an oddly poetic voice-over, not to mention Barry Sonnenfeld’s virtuoso cinematography. Viewers who only knew the Coen brothers from the sober, understated crime thriller Blood Simple must’ve been flabbergasted by this madcap take on the genre (in turn, those familiar with Sam Raimi’s Crimewave, co-written by the Coens, were probably less shocked). And yet, for all the shouting and shooting and the unforgettable sight of Goodman bursting from the muddy ground as if from a grave – or a womb – the movie is surprisingly tender, closing on a whimsical note.

(It was also a pretty blatant inspiration for the NBC sitcom My Name Is Earl.)

brad pitt     wes anderson     nick spencer

If you’re into this kind of stylized extravaganza, an obvious next stop are the deadpan tragicomedies of Wes Anderson, whose lunacy also tends to be drenched in bittersweet melancholia. My pick would be The Grand Budapest Hotel, an explosive farce, painted in psychedelic colors, that follows the misadventures of a 1930s’ hotel concierge in Zubrowka (one of those fictional Central European states where everyone speaks with a different accent). Sure, the setting couldn’t be more different from Arizona and the movie owes a greater debt to the sophisticated works of Ernst Lubitsch, Leo McCarey, and Max Ophüls than to the Coens’ gonzo Americana… but they nevertheless share a breakneck pace, visual imagination, and the ability to constantly extract humor from the clash between elaborate speeches and sudden bursts of violence and rudeness. (Plus, Willem Defoe plays a possible ancestor of Raising Arizona’s demonic biker.) While all of Anderson’s movies are funny and bizarre, The Grand Budapest Hotel is the one where he fully unleashed his comedic id (and his subsequent works – Isle of Dogs and The French Dispatch – have been even more manic!).

What if the overblown aesthetics and magic-like absurdity aren’t the main things drawing you to Raising Arizona, but rather its lighthearted, western-tinged, twisty tale of a likable, if inept, lowlife biting off more than he can chew, much to his companion’s chagrin? In Gore Verbinski’s The Mexican, the MacGuffin is an antique pistol rather than a baby – and the wild card is now James Gandolfini, whose professional killer can go from menace to warmth in a heartbeat (‘I’m just here to regulate funkiness’), but at the core of the movie is once again a troubled relationship between two lovers screwed by the system/fate/their own misguided decisions. And while the final product is way less zany than any of the abovementioned films, The Mexican is nevertheless a fun romp that doesn’t skimp on the frantic chases and gunfights.

In terms of comics, my recommendation this time around is one of the most Coen-like crime comedies in recent memories: The Fix.

steve lieber

With twelve uproarious issues – collected in three books – out since 2016 (and sadly on hiatus since 2018), The Fix also focuses on a couple of fuck-ups involved in a frenetic string of amusing armed robberies gone wrong, often resulting in rollicking moments of physical comedy. Hell, even though Nick Spencer writes the protagonist with a much more cynical personality than Nicholas Cage’s heartfelt, well-meaning outlaw, I cannot help hearing his droll, unreliable first-person narration in Cage’s voice, with the actor’s characteristic cadence. Plus, Steve Lieber’s artwork, combined with Ironbark’s and Marshall Dillon’s letters/design, matches the Coens’ comic timing and formal inventiveness, conveying the humor not just by clearly depicting the situations themselves, but through original ways of framing them. That said, be warned: The Fix is way more mean-spirited – and raunchier! – than Raising Arizona, so this is a comic for those who appreciate the film’s exuberant sense of folly more than its sentimentality…

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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (7 February 2022)

Posted on February 7, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

A dynamic reminder that comics can be awesome…

Bill Everettold comicsAlex SchomburgLou Finegolden age comicsBill Reinhold John McCreaTim Trumangeoff darrow2000ad

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Spotlight on The Adventures of Tintin – part 2

Posted on February 3, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

hergétintinadventures of tintin

If you just look at the artwork in The Adventures of Tintin, it’s hard to deny the series’ ethnocentrism, since Hergé’s drawings – as was usual at the time – tap on recognizable stereotypes. If you look closely at the stories, though, it’s a bit more complicated. You can definitely find a humanistic strain in there, with empathy towards victims of imperialism going even as far back as Tintin in America, which, regardless of its caricatural portrayal of Native Americans earlier on, does contain this unforgettable slice of satire:

HergéTintin in AmericaTintin in America

Captain Haddock aside, openly racist characters are villains and Tintin clearly opposes at least the most vicious forms of bigotry, even in some of the comics from the 1930s. For example, in The Blue Lotus he stands up for a rickshaw driver being verbally and physically assaulted by a western asshole and, later in the story, he befriends a local kid, Chang, by mocking all the stupid myths Europeans believe about China. Sure, even this smacks of a certain ‘white man’s burden’ protective mentality (colonial officers are often allies in the early books), to which you can add a tinge of orientalism and a ‘clash of civilizations’ vibe (as is typical of the whole genre of adventure yarns about western characters encountering danger in exotic lands), although it is worth noting that The Blue Lotus and Chang’s character in particular were inspired by Hergé’s real-life friendship with Chinese artist Zhang Chongren. And while the depiction of many of the Europeans as bumbling and/or evil may not quite make up for the fact that the characterization of non-whites often falls into tropes (sometimes played for laughs) about simple-minded or culturally baffling foreigners, I’d still stress that there is variety among those depictions, including plenty of sympathetic and dignified characters.

The result can be an interesting mess of progressive values and culturally insensitive choices, taken to a complex extreme in The Red Sea Sharks, a 1950s’ tale about modern slavery that jumbles up comical prejudice and passionate anti-racism, tolerance and Islamophobia, sympathy and condescension, human rights discourse and dehumanizing, racialized artwork, including a vast web of characters portrayed with different attitudes along this spectrum…

tintinThe Red Sea Sharks

(By contrast, I think Hergé was quite deft at handling the – sadly still quite topical – issue of the discrimination of Romani people in Europe, in The Castafiore Emerald.)

Indeed, for all of Hergé’s positivist and Eurocentric mindset, curious moments of tension keep popping up (no wonder we’ve gotten a whole field of studies devoted to his work, with a host of specialized critics and scholars – so-called Tintonologists – dissecting its many layers…). Just before Tintin and Haddock embark on a journey that will eventually take them to Peru, following the trail of an Inca mummy’s curse and encountering sinister indigenous conspiracies and ignorance along the way, we get this intriguing exchange about archaeologists pillaging foreign ruins:

tintinThe Seven Crystal Balls

(I’m not sure if this is meant to represent an illuminated voice of reason or a supposedly conservative viewpoint, especially as Tintin doesn’t explicitly reveal his own stance on the issue…)

As usual, I am particularly interested in the depictions of international politics. The Blue Lotus denounces the Japanese occupation of China (depicted in a frantic montage similar to the one from Tintin in America above, once again using hyper-compressed storytelling to a powerful effect). The Calculus Affair has the secret services from fictional European powers competing for the plans of an ultrasonic device, at the height of the Cold War, with the heroes taking a pacifist moral stance (the issue isn’t which nation gets its hands on the invention, but the very fact that anyone could weaponize it). The Broken Ear cynically mocks Latin American dictators – as well as revolutionary rebels – as prepotent, selfish, and corrupt, although it also takes a pointed jab at Anglo-American capitalism, with oil companies and arms dealers promoting an entire war in the name of profit. Hergé returned to the latter themes and setting forty years later, in the mid-1970s, with Tintin and the Picaros, whose closing panels are a devastating indictment of power politics (positing that, even if Tintin could orchestrate a bloodless coup, the Third World needed much more than that).

Land of Black Gold merges plot threads about looming war, sabotage by an unidentified foreign power, and corporate competition for oil exploration. The fact that the full explanation for this conflation is amusingly sidestepped at the end (much like Hitchcock would do in North by Northwest) reflects the book’s own convoluted origin – its story was first serialized at the dawn of WWII, from September 1939 until May 1940, when it was interrupted by the German invasion of Belgium, and was finally completed a decade later, from September 1948 to February 1950, at the dawn of the Cold War. As if this wasn’t enough, Land of Black Gold was then redrawn in 1971 (i.e. during the Cold War’s détente phase) by Hergé and his assistant Bob de Moor, at the request of the British publisher Methuen, transferring the setting from UK-administered Palestine to a fictional Middle Eastern state (to which Tintin returned in The Red Sea Sharks, arguably the most politically rich book in the series, interconnecting several facets of international relations, from arms deals to human trafficking, from Latin American and Middle Eastern coups and civil wars to supporting bits by Soviet and American players…).

All in all, we get a sinuous tour through mid-20th-century geopolitics, even if the political intrigue is always at the service of the stories, not the other way around. Although I suspect Hergé was truly interested in the changing world around him, Tintin’s realism seems more like a sparse condiment than like a major concern. Hell, with their abundant tunnels, trapdoors, and disguises, these comics hit that sweet spot of unabashed pulpy entertainment, the kind you also find in many episodes of Mission: Impossible (like ‘The Cardinal,’ ‘Operation Heart,’ or ‘Old Man Out’), delivering a non-stop barrage of two-fisted thrills.

TintinThe Red Sea Sharks

It’s hard to overestimate how much of Tintin became the template for a certain brand of lighthearted adventure fiction. In Eurocomics, its influence ranges from the cartoonier Spirou & Fantasio to the more adult-oriented Blake and Mortimer. In cinema, besides the live-action adaptations (Tintin and the Golden Fleece and Tintin and the Blue Oranges, both featuring original storylines), these comics inspired plenty of fun movies, such as the obscure Balearic Caper or the more famous (and awesome) That Man from Rio, itself a pretty blatant inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones pictures (together with Fritz Lang’s The Spiders, Jerry Hopper’s Secret of the Incas, and Lewis R. Foster’s Hong Kong). Spielberg himself would later go directly to the source in 2011’s The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (which makes up for what it lacks in depth through relentless action scenes).

Although less obvious, I’d say you can also draw a clear line to the 1960s’ Fantômas movies and to the original Pink Panther film series, which shared similar aesthetics and physical comedy (albeit naughtier), with Inspector Clouseau coming off as a composite version of the hilariously incompetent police brothers Thomson and Thompson (aka Dupont and Dupond).

adventures of tintinThe Secret of the Unicorn

Speaking of cinema, before I finish, as a film geek I must point out the similarities between the series’ most acclaimed entries – Destination Moon and its sequel – and Irving Pichel’s movie of the same name, which likewise came out in 1950. Besides anticipating the mechanics of space exploration with impressive detail despite having been conceived almost two decades before the actual moon landing, these works also share a Cold War-ish subplot about international competition in the space race.

What I most admire, however, isn’t the relatively accurate depiction of space travel, but the way the comics capture the sense of going on a daunting voyage. Even re-reading these books now, in an age when billionaires keep visiting the edges of the Earth’s atmosphere at will, it’s stirring to see Tintin and his friends fearfully embark on this journey… and it’s just as amazing to see Hergé smoothly blend tension, humor, wonder, and sharp characterization into a single sequence:

TintinHergéDestination Moon
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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (31 January 2022)

Posted on January 31, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

Golden Age Batman issues gave us not only numerous neat splash pages, but also plenty of riveting covers with the Dynamic Duo in quintessentially pulpy, beautifully acrobatic, and/or endearingly humorous situations. Although the era’s cover images tended to be more elaborate than the interior artwork (whose naïve-looking lack of distracting details has its own charm), they nevertheless exhibited a directness that I find quite appealing, seemingly striving for potent clarity and excitement, as you can see in this week’s reminder that comics can be awesome:

jerry robinsonbatmanbatman and robinDynamic Duobatman comicdynamic duobatman coverbatman and robin coverbatman robin supermanbatman and robin

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Spotlight on The Adventures of Tintin – part 1

Posted on January 27, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

Something I would like to do more this year is to write about Eurocomics – especially the old Franco-Belgian bande dessinée albums that were such a huge part of my childhood. Today, let’s have a closer look at just a few of the various layers we can find in Hergé’s seminal series The Adventures of Tintin, about the globetrotting escapades of the titular young reporter and his dog, Snowy (‘Milou’ in the original).

tintintintintintin

This series was originally published between 1929 and 1976, so naturally there is a striking evolution throughout. I cannot wholeheartedly recommend the first stories (the anti-communist Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, the colonialist Tintin in the Congo, and the anti-American Tintin in America) except for completists – even setting aside the ultra-reactionary politics (which apparently matched the tone of the Belgian catholic newspaper that originally published the comic), the artwork and plotting are pretty crude. Hergé was still finding his feet through fairly simple gag-driven narratives. To be fair, though, each of these already feels like a giant leap in quality compared to its predecessor and you can certainly discern some inventive uses of the medium among the goofy comedy and cringeworthy stereotypes – especially in Tintin in America, which comes off like a madcap, surreal mash-up of caricatures about the United States taken from westerns and gangster pictures.

It was with the fourth installment, Cigars of the Pharaoh (initially published in 1932-1934), that Hergé first nailed the ‘rollicking mystery’ style that would become the series’ core identity. The art was sharper (although the collected versions I read were partially redrawn by Hergé later on, so it’s hard to measure how much sharper) and the plot more elaborate (if not without some contrived coincidences), but not at the expense of any entertainment value – if anything, Cigars feels even more like a thrilling serial, as Tintin starts out by exploring an Egyptian tomb and ends up in the throes of an international drug-smuggling ring that stretches all the way to India… Along the way, he finds himself lost at sea, alone in the desert, buried alive, attacked by a tiger, and hypnotized by an evil fakir (plus, he spends some time living in the jungle, where – in a delightfully bizarre sequence – he learns how to communicate with elephants).

There are also chases and gunfights galore…

Cigars of the PharaohtintinCigars of the Pharaoh

(Notice how the larger page size of European comics allows Hergé to get away with an impressive splash and still cram plenty of twists onto the bottom of the page…)

The sequel, The Blue Lotus, was an even more ambitious Boy’s Own adventure, as Tintin and Snowy faced the remainders of the last story’s drug-smuggling ring, only to find themselves caught in the middle of the Japanese occupation of China. The Broken Ear then took them to a Latin America embroiled in revolution. By the time we get to The Black Island (set in the UK) and King Ottokar’s Sceptre (set in a fictitious kingdom in the Balkans), we find Hergé in full command of the medium, having overcome an earlier tendency for wordy dialogue and now striking a reader-friendly balance between words and pictures. His style became so seamless as to appear misleadingly simple, to the point where it is easy to dismiss or underestimate all the craft in display, but you really shouldn’t do so.

In 1938, when Action Comics #1 blew up the horizon of, well, action comics in the US, the European version seemed like it already was miles (or, rather, kilometers) further down the road in terms of narrative sophistication, not to mention pure kinetic power. By the time we get to The Crab with the Golden Claws, we find an Hergé successfully exploring the potential of splashes to elevate action beats, having already developed other formal techniques, including the ability to mine sudden ellipses for both pacing and humor…

tintinhergéThe Crab with the Golden Claws

(Tintin doesn’t look like an alpha male at all, but the series keeps suggesting that he is a badass brawler, as well as pretty comfortable handling a gun…)

Hergé’s incredible pace is arguably the main reason to read these books, as Tintin himself can be a relatively bland – if likable – hero most of the time. Without a trace of cynicism about the press, he’s a journalist who never seems all that keen to write or publish – his investigations are driven by curiosity and by a committed sense of justice, but he could just as easily have been a scholar or a detective instead. His strong determination and altruism reflect an age of ‘undeconstructed’ archetypes, especially when it comes to fiction aimed at younger audiences, which is bound to feel too naive for some modern readers (then again, they may find it refreshing). Tintin’s uncomplicated feelings are probably also a byproduct of the fact that the whole thing is plot-driven, with little patience for psychological drama.

Still, we do occasionally get some interesting characterization of other cast members, most notably of the flawed Captain Haddock – a bigoted, short-tempered alcoholic who becomes Tintin’s closest (human) friend. With his rough ways, Haddock can serve as equal parts sidekick, emotional id, and comic relief.

Hergéadventures of tintinPrisoners of the Sun

The continuity becomes more intricate starting with The Secret of the Unicorn, including a few two-parter albums and plenty of callbacks to earlier tales, weaving an expanding web of cameos and story connections. This is not to say that there is any lack of accessibility or instant gratification when you read each individual volume, especially as they dabble in different subgenres: The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun are my platonic ideal of an old-school explorer’s fantasy, Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon are hardcore sci-fi, The Calculus Affair is a Cold War spy yarn, The Castafiore Emerald is a screwball parody of Agatha Christie’s whodunnits, Tintin and the Picaros is a political thriller.

And yet, the series as a whole feels remarkably consistent. For one thing, this is one of those comics where, even though the world outside changes in real time, the characters’ ages seem perpetually frozen, so they sound comfortingly familiar throughout the decades. Moreover, there are a number of running themes linking even the most disparate tales, such as heroism, compassion, exploration, and geopolitical games (usually run by selfish individuals who don’t care about the masses).

And alcohol.

hergéTintin and the Picaros

(Alcohol is a recurring source of humor, drama, and characterization, culminating in Tintin and the Picaros, where it plays a key role in the plot.)

The consistency is also secured by Hergé’s rock-solid visuals. The well-delineated drawing style he perfected, known as ‘clear line’ (ligne claire), has come to be associared with serious, contemplative comics like Jason Lutes’ Berlin, Rutu Modan’s The Property, or Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina. In Tintin, however, it was commitedly put in the service of full-on comedy and adventure.

tintinExplorers on the Moon

Almost every page finishes on a cliffhanger, pushing you into the next one, and there is zero padding along the way (unless you consider the comedic bits filler, which I don’t). Despite the average of four rows of panels per page, the stories hardly ever slow down, as exposition gets typically intermingled with either breathtaking action or slapstick gags. The Secret of the Unicorn, for instance, features a 13-page tour-de-force that consists of little more than Haddock telling a pirate tale yet nevertheless manages to be visually gripping (the sequel, Red Rackham’s Treasure, then gives us a properly extended seafaring yarn). The result is almost cinematic in the way it creates rhythm through parallel montage and constant movement.

Between this and the fact that the stories often playfully feature doubles, conspiracies, and a wrongfully accused protagonist on the run, the tone seems very close to the films of Alfred Hitchcock (whose career spans pretty much the same decades). Not that Hergé was necessarily following Hitchcock’s work or vice versa, but they probably drew inspiration from the same type of sources, which explains the profusion of similar set pieces in 1930s’ Tintin and in Hitch’s The 39 Steps, Sabotage, Young and Innocent, and, especially, The Lady Vanishes and Foreign Correspondent (except that Hergé was much less interested in romantic subplots… or in gutsy female characters, for that matter). Hell, it’s the same sort of material that would inform Hollywood’s World War II propaganda thrillers just a few years later, although Tintin’s relationship with WWII turned out to be quite different…

On top of the series’ conservative origins and ethnic stereotyping, some critics have charged Hergé with collaborationism due to the fact he continued to work for the establishment throughout the Nazi occupation of Belgium. It’s one of the things that makes Tintin’s 10th book – the apocalyptic The Shooting Star – so fascinating.

hergetintinThe Shooting Star

On the surface, The Shooting Star resembles escapist science fiction, as Tintin goes on a naval expedition to retrieve a fallen meteor (one of several stories that owe a clear debt – direct or indirect – to Jules Verne), culminating in a climax that anticipates the monster movies of the 1950s. However, once you take into account that the tale was first serialized in 1941-1942, you start spotting a more sinister subtext… It’s not just that Tintin’s expedition is made up of scientists from Axis, occupied, and neutral countries – it’s that their evil rivals sound Anglo-Saxon and are led by a large-nosed banker who conspires against them in the name of profit (and apparently there were other antisemitic caricatures in the original, which didn’t make it to the collected edition). Still, it’ s worth noting that if you set aside your outside knowledge about WWII and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (in other words, if you read the book like I first did, as a kid), it does work as a moral fable, one where the heroes are willing to forego victory in order to help a stranger in need and where the villains are the ones prone to cheating and endangering others to get what they want.

All this brings us to the unavoidable subject of Tintin’s racist undertones, which I’ll be discussing next week, when I’ll delve deeper into the series’ politics…

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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (24 January 2022)

Posted on January 24, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

A reminder that comics can be awesome, close-up edition…

jack kirbydon heckLou Camerondavid laphamAmy ReederhewletRob Liefeldalex rossJ.G. JonesBrian Bolland

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Gotham crime graphic novels

Posted on January 20, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

The trailer for the upcoming The Batman movie looks pretty darn awful, once again doubling down on the gloom without any hint of what makes the source material so much fun in the first place. That said, I suppose the film can still get some of my goodwill if, instead of just giving us yet another self-serious take on superheroes, it ends up exploring Batman’s umbilical relation with crime fiction.

World's Greatest DetectiveBatman #612

My ideal Dark Knight is the World’s Greatest Detective and I love it when Batman stories amount to eccentric mystery yarns, something that has been largely lost even in the comics, although it still occasionally pops up (like in Becky Cloonan’s and Terry Dodson’s cool short story ‘The Fool’s Journey,’ from the latest Batman: Black and White series). The link to crime fiction – which harkens back to the character’s sadistic origins – was probably taken as far as it can go in 1987’s Batman: Year One, although there are plenty of other hardboiled books that should please fans of the genre, including some of the sequels to Year One (Catwoman: Her Sister’s Keeper, The Long Halloween, hell, even Prey) and a handful of 21st-century entries (Broken City, City of Crime), not to mention Elseworlds’ pastiches (Nine Lives, Gotham Noir).

Once you stretch your definition of Batman comics, there is even more crime-ridden goodness to check out there, likewise geared towards ‘mature’ audiences who enjoy a fair amount of sex and violence (although, for some odd puritan reason, not much swearing) in their cape-adjacent escapades… These books occupy a stimulating place in Batman lore, either contextualizing the Dark Knight’s actions by shedding light on the police authority he replaces – thus questioning if, why, when, and how it needs to be replaced – or humanizing the personal dramas and motivations of the criminal underworld targeted by the Caped Crusader, thus challenging his caricatural worldview. If you want to see this done particularly well, here are five Gotham-set graphic novels collecting tales where the Dark Knight isn’t the main star, but which are nevertheless obligatory readings for those who dig the franchise’s connection to hard-hitting narratives about cops and crooks:

 

GORDON OF GOTHAM (2014)

Gotham City

In order to capitalize on the Gotham TV show, in 2014 DC put out this beauty collecting three badass mini-series from the mid-nineties about Gotham City’s police force (which, as the book reminds us, has more bent cops than a Sidney Lumet film or the average season of Line of Duty). Very gritty – and it looks the part – but pleasingly unpretentious, Gordon of Gotham is a truly compelling crime book…

The first chunk of the collection features Gordon’s Law (by Chuck Dixon and Klaus Janson, with grimy colors by Kevin Somers), a taut yarn about Commissioner James Gordon getting his hands dirty while investigating a violent heist at the Federal Reserve. There is tough-talking dialogue all around, but also a punchy, intricate plot with a twist ending that masterfully mines the medium’s visual tropes, such as atmospheric shadows and hard rain. Another great procedural, G.C.P.D. (by Chuck Dixon, Jim Aparo, and Bill Sienkiewicz) has more of a Hill Street Blues or Chicago P.D. vibe, with different officers crossing paths while working on separate cases… Is it copaganda? I suppose so, in the same way that Batman-centric narratives romanticize vigilantism, but – like those – once you take these tales for the dark fantasy that they undoubtedly are, they can make for a pretty entertaining read. Finally, the titular Gordon of Gotham (by Dennis O’Neil, Dick Giordano, and Klaus Janson) revisits Jim’s past as a lieutenant in Chicago (which seems to be almost as corrupt as Gotham!). It’s a clumsier thriller than the previous ones, but it’s interesting to see the post-hippie Denny O’Neil writing a conservative protagonist while negotiating his ambiguous attitude towards law enforcement (notably, these are all post-Rodney King comics, with two of the stories opening with indictments of police brutality).

This volume also works as a kind of retroactive prequel to the brilliant Gotham Central.

 

CATWOMAN: TRAIL OF THE CATWOMAN (2011)

catwoman

This collection of Catwoman stories from the early 2000s explores the moral ambiguity of cat burglar Selina Kyle, one the most famous (and most captivating) Gotham citizens. There are tense heists, dangerous gangsters, self-destructive private eyes, and dirty cops galore, all rendered in a noirish style akin to Batman: The Animated Series. The tales in this paperback formed a soft reboot of Catwoman, so there isn’t much you really need to know going in other than the fact that Selina, who had recently tried to blackmail Gotham’s mayor, was officially dead at the time (a plot thread that gets wrapped up early on). That said, longtime fans will probably appreciate the nods to Batman: Year One and to Catwoman: Her Sister’s Keeper.

The book opens with ‘Selina’s Big Score,’ a magnificent caper written and drawn by Darwyn Cooke, in which Selina puts together a crew to rob a train full of mob money (did it inspire the last season of Breaking Bad?). It’s one of those nifty thrillers where each chapter follows a different character’s perspective, and of course the twists never stop coming. Cooke also illustrates the titular ‘Trail of the Catwoman,’ written by Ed Brubaker, where the mayor hires tough-as-nails detective Slam Bradley to find our missing protagonist (ideally, this one should be read before ‘Selina’s Big Score,’ but since both stories play around with non-linear chronology it works fine this way as well). It’s only in the third tale, ‘Anodyne,’ that Selina returns to her Catwoman persona, as she finds her place back in Gotham’s East End while tracking down a serial killer of prostitutes. The final stories then go on to deal with the grimmer sides of drug traffic and addiction. (Seriously, don’t be fooled by the cartoony artwork – these comics are emphatically not aimed at kids!)

Underneath it all, you can hear echoes of the voices of Richard Stark, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and Elmore Leonard. Cinema is also a clear influence, with characters blatantly inspired by Pam Grier, Lee Marvin, and Chow Yun-Fat, not to mention the Tarantino-esque structure. Regardless, these are pure comics, making the most out of the medium’s possibilities, from the stylized designs to the gripping pace, shaped as much by literary captions as by striking visuals… In particular, the whole thing is brought together by the awesome work of colorists Matt Hollingsworth, Lee Loughridge, and Giulia Brusco, as well as letterers Sean Konot and Willie Schubert, who fully embrace the retro-noir mood.

 

GOTHAM CENTRAL: IN THE LINE OF DUTY (2008)

GCDP

Undisputedly one of the greatest comic book series set in Batman’s corner of the DC Universe, Gotham Central was a police procedural about the city’s Major Crimes Unit, adult in content and tone – by which I mean not just occasional references to sexual violence, but also an exceptional degree of storytelling sophistication. The cops are our main POV characters here, although – like in Gordan of Gotham – this is not to say the police is presented in an exclusively positive light. Originally published in 2002-2006, with alternating scripts written – and sometimes co-written – by Greg Rucka and (again) Ed Brubaker, Gotham Central remains well-remembered for its witty dialogue, tight plotting, attention to detail, and realistic world-building, on top of penciller Michael Lark’s enviable sense of physiognomy and geography. Just as Lark obsessively and meticulously rendered each character and setting, so did Rucka and Brubaker invest in fleshing out the cast and institutions… Here were two of the medium’s most accomplished crime writers at the top of their game (Rucka is a pretty good crime novelist as well, having penned the neat series of books about the bodyguard Atticus Kodiack). For instance, consider how, in the excerpt above, the conversation fluidly integrates both real-world, professional slang (‘the vic’) and speculative, Gotham-specific expressions (‘the Bat’).

By imagining how a frustrated police department would cope with the Dark Knight’s vigilantism and his rogues’ gallery, we get a fascinating exploration of the disturbing tension between the realistic and fantastic elements of Batman comics. This theme is powerfully conveyed in the jarring opening sequence, where the shift in perspective is enough to make a scene we’ve seen countless times before now come across as particularly shocking. Sticking to the cops’ street-level POV means that not only do the colorful villains seem scarier (if sometimes pathetic), but so do the occasional cameos by the Caped Crusader, who comes off like a larger-than-life force of nature.

The first edition of Gotham Central: In The Line of Duty, from 2004, only collected the first two arcs (i.e. the first five issues). It was not a bad deal, but you’ll get more bang for your buck if you get the collection that has been coming out since 2008, which also includes the series’ third – and by far most famous – arc, ‘Half a Life,’ which had a dramatic impact on fan-favorite character Renée Montoya.

 

HITMAN: TEN THOUSAND BULLETS (2010)

garth ennisjohn mccrea

If you like your crime fiction with more of a comedic – and action-oriented – edge, then look no further than Hitman (and I don’t mean Hit Man, the blaxploitation remake of Get Carter, although that one is quite cool as well…). This cult series revolved around anti-hero Tommy Monaghan, a Gotham-based killer-for-hire with telepathy and x-ray vision who rarely used either because they made his head hurt… which should give you an idea of the comic’s overall attitude, playfully acknowledging the outlandish reality of its DCU setting but preferring to focus on more human-level crime stories taking place in the working-class periphery of Batman’s world. Creators Garth Ennis and John McCrea jointly crafted quite an idiosyncratic vibe halfway between slapstick caricature and heartfelt characterization, somehow managing to produce genuine pathos along the way.

Hitman’s second trade collection is the one I would recommend to crime fans, since it’s less about superheroes or other supernatural elements and more about people shooting at each other in-between droll conversations (with a couple of war flashbacks thrown in for good measure). The book opens with the titular arc ‘Ten Thousand Bullets,’ in which Tommy gets a contract put on his head by a vengeful gangster who carries around the corpse of his dead Siamese twin (still attached to his body). In the wonderful ‘The Night the Lights Went Out,’ Tommy and his buddies, while waiting for the superheroes to sort out the latest apocalyptic event outside, barricade themselves in a bar and exchange tales about when they came close to death (this taps into the series’ metafictional dimension, as each supporting character reflects a different macho subgenre: classic John Wayne-ish narratives, blaxploitation, Hong Kong gun fu, dumb grindhouse shlock). Finally, ‘A Coffin Full of Dollars’ – drawn by Carlos Ezquerra and Steve Pugh – follows an assignment in Texas that turns into a gonzo spaghetti western homage.

The result is as much about male bonding as it is about crime, violence, and laughs. Yep, it’s like someone let Guy Ritchie into the DC Universe.

 

NIGHTWING: FALSE STARTS (2015)

dick graysonhuntress

The other reliable source of kickass crime and action in the late 90s’ Bat-books was Nightwing, which focused on the vigilante exploits of (former Robin) Dick Grayson. Even before Chuck Dixon turned it into a proper cop series by having Dick join the police force of the neighboring city of Blüdhaven, this comic leaned heavily on genre tropes from early on, especially in the tales collected in False Starts, which are full of mobsters double-crossing each other, undercover operations gone wrong, and further proof that they should definitely defund the GCPD!

In the first story, ‘Cosa Nostra’ (mistitled in the table of contents as ‘Casa Nostra,’ which wouldn’t have been a bad name…), Nightwing runs against another crimefighter – the loose cannon Huntress – when trying to prove that a wiseguy is innocent of killing a sex worker because he was busy committing a whole other felony at the time. Illustrated by Greg Land (whose cheesecake style is suitably roughed up by Bill Sienkiewicz’s inks) and sharply scripted by Devin Grayson, this is an unsung gem, delivering a labyrinthine plot with a fast pace and plenty of nice character beats.

In the rest of the book, we once again get to see Dixon’s talent for penning fun, frantic thrill rides, pitting Dick Grayson against both sides of the law in Blüdhaven, especially in an adrenaline-charged arc involving a copycat vigilante who unintentionally lures in everyone who has a grudge against Nightwing (which, as it turns out, is a lot of people!). There are a number of guest appearances (Barbara ‘Oracle’ Gordon should practically get second billing) and subplots picking up from – or leading into – other books, but these issues belong to that great tradition of comics where you usually get enough context clues and satisfying payoffs to get your money’s worth without having to chase down a dozen other collections (one exception is the chapter ‘Paper Revelations,’ which is part of a convoluted martial arts crossover). In particular, I have a soft spot for the self-contained murder mystery ‘The Forgotten Dead,’ where Dick actually does quite a bit of detective work while investigating a 15-year-old cold case concerning a gang killing.

And, as a bonus, we also get some bombastic artwork by Scott McDaniel and Karl Story, distinctly drenched in Roberta Tewes’ moody colors:

chuck dixondick grayson

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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (17 January 2022)

Posted on January 17, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

Your ‘true crime’ reminder that comic book covers can be awesome:

crime comicsjohnny craigtrue crime comicJim McLaughlinMatt BakerCharles Biro Dan ZolnerowichJohn Prenticecrime comicjack kirby

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2021’s book of the year

Posted on January 13, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

First, a disclaimer: Rutu Modan’s latest graphic novel, Tunnels, has been translated to English and published by Drawn & Quarterly last year… and whenever a new Modan book comes out, the chances of it being my favorite comic of that year are pretty high. Alas, I still haven’t managed to get my hands on it, so let’s talk about some of the awesome comics I did read!

As 2021 raced towards the finish line, my choice for Gotham Calling’s book of the year kept switching back and forth. Even though, when push comes to shove, I tend to privilege compelling writing over innovative aesthetics, I was sure the top place was bound to look amazing, since we’ve gotten so many impressive examples of visual prowess throughout the year, from the Hedra-ish science fiction of EPHK’s Mawrth Valliis to the Afrofuturism-by-way-of-Tartakovsky of Juni Ba’s Djeliya, not to mention the ultra-dense tapestry of Barry Windsor-Smith’s Monsters. For a while, the best candidate was James Harren’s Ultramega: Stand with Humanity, which managed to unironically inject the kaiju genre with renewed vitality through smart, gutsy storytelling whose blood-splattered images are the quintessence of a certain branch of wacko post-apocalyptic/cosmic fantasy comics that flows straight to my pleasure centers…

Looking back, though, despite the resonant subtext (about dealing with a deadly disease that can affect thousands of people around each infected person) and the jaw-dropping artwork (with jaw-dropping colors by Dave Stewart and jaw-dropping lettering by Rus Wooton), Ultramega’s epic romp couldn’t quite match The Department of Truth: The End of the World, which was the one book I ended up compulsively revisiting, recommending, discussing with friends, and mulling over more than any of my other reads.

the end of the world

This paperback, published back in February, collects the first five issues of the ongoing series The Department of Truth, effectively establishing its captivating high concept: it turns out truth is literally a product of hegemonic consensus and it changes – on the material plane – according to what the majority of people believe, so the US government has set up the Department of Truth to prevent the spread of fake news from actually altering reality.

This notion raises so many intriguing questions that I can’t see the series running out of steam any time soon, as there is so much to explore… Before the scientific consensus over the earth’s shape or its position in the solar system, was the planet flat and static? If so, what was the basis to develop the current models of geography and astronomy? And does this mean that collectively denying climate change, rather than an irresponsible attitude with devastating consequences (because nature doesn’t care what you think), would turn out to be a solution to the problem, retroactively making it unreal?

On another level, should the materialization of mass delusions be considered the ultimate embodiment of democracy, a justification for faith-based wars, or an inspirational encouragement to will utopias into existence? And does this premise give the comic carte blanche to develop endless alternate timelines that have been wished out of existence, like a perpetual motion machine of speculative fiction (a subgenre I love so much that I had a blast watching For All Mankind, despite all the corniness)?

In a classic move, the series starts by following a newly recruited agent as he is introduced to this underworld, namely Cole Turner, a former FBI teacher specialized in online communities of right-wing white supremacists who now finds himself in an ironic position: he becomes part of what is essentially a deep state-ish organization secretly fighting a meta-conspiracy – going at least as far back as the Kennedy assassination – aimed at disseminating conspiracy theories. Predictably, it’s a matter of time before Turner starts wondering whether he is truly working for the forces of order and security or just for one of two sides locked in a lasting war for the determination of a dominant truth… After all, if facts are so subjective to the point that they can be radically overturned, that means he isn’t protecting reality itself, only a specific version of it. In other words, defending the established truth is inherently reactionary, since it reifies the status quo (including the existing power structure).

James Tynion IV

The same set-up could’ve led to something playfully surrealist or broadly satirical, but the approach is closer to Vertigo-style horror, which makes sense given where writer James Tynion IV comes from. The horror here is both of the supernatural kind and of a more psychological, paranoid strain, owing a clear debt to The X-Files yet pushing that show’s themes to the next level.

In fact, let’s get the references to other works out of the way. The result is more mind-bending than The Matrix, less absurdist than Men in Black, and more metafictional than JFK, albeit borrowing superficial elements from each of these. So far, it’s not as erudite as Umberto Eco’s dense novels about this sort of conspiratorial rabbit holes (most notably the phenomenal Foucault’s Pendulum, the horrifically gothic The Prague Cemetery, and the comparatively lighter Numero Zero), but its ambition keeps growing with every new issue.

As far as comic books go, naturally I have to point out the Dark Knight’s neat contribution to this subgenre in the form of Conspiracy, written by Doug Moench (who is obsessed with this type of fringe theories and often wove them into his Batman comics). Provocative takes on the Kennedy shooting have quite a rich tradition, with memorable tales by Peter Milligan (in Shade, the Changing Man), Brian Azzarello (in 100 Bullets), Gerard Way (in The Umbrella Academy), John Ostrander (in Blackhawk), and Steven Grant (in Badlands). Although less creatively successful, 9/11 truther fiction has popped up in the medium as well, from Rick Veitch’s one-shot The Big Lie to the final volume of the Franco-Belgian black comedy/cop series Soda. Above all, though, I’d say The Department of Truth follows the path of Grant Morrison’s, Jonathan Hickman’s, and Warren Ellis’ many intricate spy-fi thrillers (picture a less unhinged update of The Filth or The Invisibles), with blatant visual echoes of Bill Sienkiewicz.

best comic 2021james tynion

And yet, The Department of Truth: The End of the World manages to never feel like a mere recycling job, if nothing else because it’s so damn topical, tapping into the subjects of most of my conversations throughout 2021 while also feeding my interest in the complex workings of ideology and imagination. Not only does the book engage with post-truth populism, social media bubbles, coronavirus negationists, and QAnon’s collective text interpretation game, it links these ideas to older threads (like the 1980s’ satanic panic), historicizing them while dissecting their inner logics and perverse appeal. For instance, the third chapter is a twisted spin on Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina: it follows the harassed mother of the victim of a school shooting dealing with accusations that she’s a crisis actor participating in a false flag hoax… and the heartbreaking twist is that she gradually chooses to doubt her own memories because it’s more comforting to believe her son might be alive somehow.

Indeed, more than dramatizing old debates about empiricist positivism versus postmodern relativism, The Department of Truth cleverly works thought-provoking readings of contemporary politics into its narrative. By treating belief as active rather than reactive (i.e. as creating rather than merely apprehending and reflecting an external world), the comic’s starting point appears to validate the crusaders against science (or, rather, against official science) while also presenting them as sinister, since their nightmarish fantasies stem for fear and prejudice. For example, at one point, the head of the Department of Truth insightfully argues that Pizzagate and Trumpism are logical extensions of the Birther Movement – if JFK’s assassination opened the door for skepticism about mainstream accounts of the truth, it was Obama’s election that pushed a vast section of the North-American population over the edge:

Martin Simmonds

Between all these fascinating ideas and the sprawling scope of the story, Tynion’s scripts deserve praise for producing something that generally feels like more than an illustrated chain of exposition (although it does feel like that, at times). He keeps the cast’s dialogues and inner monologues snappy and cool, breaking them down into digestible chunks that generate a consistently gripping pace.

This task is crucially complemented by artist Martin Simmonds and designer Dylan Todd, who give each cover and page a strikingly original look, with collage-like visuals, loose watercolors, and constantly shifting layouts that invite you to get lost in (and later revisit) each scene. The backgrounds are just as likely to be abstract as to be figurative; they can be snapshots of what’s on people’s minds or even purely symbolic (in one of the less inspired choices, a double-spread juxtaposes the US flag with flying bullets and dollar bills, which isn’t exactly subtle!). Thematically, this lack of realism obviously suits the comic… The scratchy drawings and blurred figures literalize the notion of foggy, shadowy forces at play. The ink drips, the irregular coloring, and the imperfectly aligned shape of the word balloons around Aditya Bidikar’s letters all evoke the sense of a destabilized reality where everything is in flux and nothing fits naturally into its place.

I make it sound too conceptual and emotionally removed, but TDoT proves capable of delivering touching moments among all this chaos. Most notably, in the brilliant third issue there are several ‘silent’ passages depicting the loneliness and alienation of the grieving mother. One page just has her entering her home and switching on the light, somehow lending a powerful gravitas to this everyday gesture, as the gradually illuminated page channels the character’s own growing sense of safety from the dark world outside. A few pages later, the contrast between the light inside the house and the threatening silhouettes seen through the window is worked into this haunting sequence:

department of truth

A second volume, titled The City Upon a Hill and collecting issues #8-13, came out in late October. It continued to explore the paradoxes that come from fighting lies through deception, using fiction to make people believe in reality, and protecting the truth by hiding truths. Along with the other independent series James Tynion IV has coming out at the moment (The Nice House on the Lake, Something is Killing the Children, and House of Slaughter), this book confirms he’s becoming one of the great masters of intelligent horror comics, simultaneously scaring readers and urging them to think about how their fears operate (this reflexive attitude towards the genre can also be seen in his Batman work, like the Clayface origin he did for Detective Comics Annual #1).

Indeed, besides giving more weight to cyberwarfare and twisty intrigue, The City Upon a Hill is quite focused on religion and magic (i.e., the art of manipulating ancient symbols) and a bit more prone to lengthy lectures, to the point that one of the chapters closely resembles the most esoteric issues of Promethea (I know I was supposedly done with the references to others works, but this one is pretty hard to dismiss).

the department of truth

What about issues #6-7? Those were a couple of flashbacks set in the Department’s archives, likewise written by Tynion but rendered in more conventional visual styles – despite some nifty pastiches – by the fill-in duos of, first, Elsa Charretier and Matt Hollingsworth (the artistic team behind the cool crime comic November) and, then, Tyler Boss and Roman Titov. These detours from the main narrative can be read out of sequence, so they’re bound to be collected later on.

Besides telling relatively standalone stories that are quite entertaining in their own right, such issues deepen the world-building, gradually filling us in about the weird history of TDoT’s universe. In doing so, they also assuage a complaint I had early on, which was that the series seemed too focused on the USA… After all, in this age of Russian bots and China viruses, I want to see The Department of Truth’s take on international cover-ups!

Elsa Charretier

All in all, The Department of Truth is an imaginative distillation of all the reflections over the past years about how to make sense of the Trump administration’s embrace of alternative facts, the assault on the US Capitol, or the rise of an anti-vaccination movement in the middle of a pandemic. In fact, the series is so anchored in the current zeitgeist that I’m not sure how well it will age when looked at from the vantage point of the upcoming decade or so. Such timely resonance, however, is precisely what makes this Gotham Calling’s 2021 book of the year.

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