The Hound of the Baskervilles

Part of the Graphic Pops series, this is a well done pop-up version of the classic Sherlock Holmes novel. The tale is told in graphic novel form, with most of the text coming in French flaps, leaving the paper artist (David Hawcock) to do his thing in seven showpiece spreads. I thought these were very good, with only a couple (the apartment at 221B Baker Street and Baskerville Hall) being a bit dull. The others are all striking (as pop-ups should be) and make good use of the form for some imaginative effect. The one pull tag is in the spread where Watson draws his gun in the hut on the moor, which also has a door flap to reveal Holmes as he first puts in his appearance. There are a pair of rhyming spreads with the hound and Holmes standing dramatically on clifftops. And there’s a final appearance of the hound’s head that is neat because as it unfolds/pops-up you see inside the hound’s mouth, until its jaws snap shut when the book is fully open and the covers laid flat.

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Simpsons Colossal Compendium: Volume Four

Probably my favourite Simpsons Colossal Compendium so far. Lots of funny stories that add interesting new dimensions to the Simpsons mythology. There are two adventures of the Springfield Bear Patrol, for example. And Duffman is given a Green Lantern-style backstory describing his recruitment into the intergalactic Duffman Corps. There are also the usual pop culture references from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s (the Simpsons have been with us a long time) that I suppose will soon be forgotten (if they haven’t been already) but that I got a smile out of. Complaining about the finale of Lost, lusting over Seven of Nine, singing “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” confusing Beethoven with Cujo. That sort of thing.

Finally, things wrap up with a prison-riot “Where’s Ralph?” puzzle by Sergio Aragonés (who also has a story included). This was a great idea because Aragonés’s art favours the kind of crowded chaos of figures that is well-suited to such games. And I liked that I was able to find Ralph fairly quickly (hint: he’s hiding).

The papercraft project is of a Krusty Burger store.

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Swamp Thing: Protector of the Green

Swamp Thing joins DC’s New 52.

And . . . I was impressed with the results. Scott Snyder had a template he had to work with, re-introducing us to a lot of the basic Swamp Thing mythology and recurring characters while hitting the reboot button on Swampy himself. As things kick off here Dr. Alec Holland has retired from being Swamp Thing and, fully human again, just wants to go back to living a normal life.

As if!

It’s not long before that wise forest council the Parliament of Trees is getting in touch and telling him that he has to become the Knight of the Green and defend the world from an invasive force of death known as the Rot. Apparently there are three primordial powers in the universe: the Green (plants and such), the Red (animals), and the Rot (death). We don’t hear anything about the Red in this book until the end, where it turns out that Animal Man may be its avatar or knight. The main conflict is between the Greens and the Rot.

The one problem Snyder can’t overcome is the fact that you know damn well from the start that Cross is going to take on the mantle of the “Protector of the Green” and become Swamp Thing again so he can once again become “the most powerful Green Knight on the planet” and fight the Rot. The story arc, which is tried and true, was set. All that had to happen was for his girlfriend Abigail to be threatened, which doesn’t take long.

The rest of the story, though, is quite good. Abbie, it turns out, is compromised. Something to do with her Arcane blood means she is turning into an avatar of the Rot. Indeed she’s going to turn into a Rot Queen who will rule “on her throne of bent flesh” alongside her king, Sethe. And hats off to Yanick Paquette for coming up with an original look for these two baddies. A monster with a fresh appearance is hard to do when it comes to horror movies and comics, and I thought he hit a home run here with Sethe being a sort of feathered rooster skeleton with a Venus flytrap head and Abby turning into something that mainly looks like a giant mantis, though with more of an ant’s head. Also worth noting in the art department is the homage to the psychedelic page layouts of John Totleben’s work on Saga of the Swamp Thing (there are other glances to the history of Swamp Thing in the Wrightson Diner and Totleben Motel, but those are more like Easter eggs). This is a good-looking comic throughout.

I also liked how various characters and elements are brought back in rejuvenated form. The Parliament of Trees are a grumpy bunch, but after being burned down in their rain forest home Swampy manages to regrow them in his own swamp. The zombies with backwards heads from Alan Moore’s turn at the helm of the franchise are here again, and a lot of fun to see stumbling around. And of course Anton Arcane and his Un-men are back as well, being allied with the forces of the Rot. In fact, Snyder goes a step further in retelling Swampy’s origin story by making Arcane responsible for that too in an unexpected way.

In sum, I thought this was a great comic: true to the spirit of the character and history of the comic, dialing up some truly grotesque horror and solid action, and opening a tap into cosmic terrors without ever going the full Alan Moore. The New 52 was a mixed bag in a lot of ways, but they didn’t put a foot wrong here.

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Saga of the Swamp Thing Book Six

This volume collects the final issues written by Alan Moore for Saga of the Swamp Thing, with his usual collaborators providing the art. And in fact, regulars Stephen Bissette and Rick Veitch also took turns with writing duties for single issues (Veitch would take over writing the series full-time after Moore’s departure).

In outline, the main work of the issues collected here was to bring Swampy home to the bayou and the arms of Abby Cable after his exile on the blue planet. This is done in a very roundabout and bizarre way, beginning with an adventure on Adam Strange’s adopted planet of Rann, then taking us through an indescribable mechano-psychedelic space journey illustrated by John Totleben that even Moore had trouble keeping pace with, a stopover at a planet of sentient plants that drives Swamp Thing a little crazy before he’s put back on track by a member of the Green Lantern Corps, a surreal chapter break where he’s turned into a floating armchair by Darkseid, all before finally crashing back to Earth, visiting revenge on the people who “killed” him, and reuniting with Abby.

It is pure Moorishness, even in the issues not written by Moore. We go from pages of untranslated Rannspeak (“Tra. Ols sistrit bu, emsec. Claab glusten tho. Bad dol fao ael ap bu phanaglisp”), then pages of Swampy being raped, I guess, by a machine (“Peeling back the lids of circuit-laced cellulose from the photosensitive steel of new eyes, he watched in terror; in fascination as my drones dug finger-skewers of white gold into the soft plantflesh of their abdomens, cold hands glistening wet, groping amongst their intestines to reset, recalibrate, alter coordinates before entering the pulsing aperture of their choice . . .”), to some high-flown rhetoric from Veitch (“How does one convey the act of seeing all of infinity within one gigantic instant? To drink in billions of actions, the totality of everything, observed from every point in the universe, all in less time than it takes to draw a single breath”), and of course a sprinkling of over-the-top sexiness (“Her tongue . . . a miniature rose manta . . . reined by silver spittle threads”).

At some point you just have to throw your hands up at all this. You’re either grooving to it or you’re not. As I’ve said before in my notes on this series, I prefer it when Moore is more restrained and sticks to relatable storylines with traditional punchlines. I loved Swampy’s revenge tour, for example, which gives us several grotesque climaxes. The journey through space, however, for all the literary and visual pyrotechnics, didn’t work for me. It’s brilliant on one level, but also ridiculous, given that Swamp Thing is such an earthy creature. He doesn’t belong out in the cosmos.

Like everything about this run, and much the same can be said of Moore in general, it goes too far. I mentioned how, when he took over Gotham and turned it into a new Eden, Swamp Thing was presented as “very nearly a god.” Now he is a god (“For am I not a god?” he asks), and while this leads to some interesting thoughts on what being eternal and omnipotent might mean (in the end, just basically sitting back and watching the show) it’s all a bit much. But again, a bit much might be exactly what you came for. Though I’m curious as to how well these titles sold. Sure, now they’re considered classics among the comic cognoscenti, but did Swamp Thing fans like them?

Whether they liked it or not, the fact is that Moore reinvented the character, though I’m glad the psychotropic tubers he has sprouting like bacne never became as big a thing as Moore clearly wanted them to be. And I’m also glad he left the series when he did because you could read these issues as a high note, and one where there was no clear next step to follow. In sum, I think it was a landmark run, both a terrific bit of teamwork and a remarkable expression of a unique personal vision. But I wouldn’t want any more of it, and I can’t say I found all of it enjoyable.

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The Hound of the Baskervilles

When it comes to graphic novel versions of the classics, artists are in a tough spot. They’re rarely free to go their own way and the text, of which there is usually a lot, can be quite an anchor. Nevertheless, the right combination of an artist’s visual style with a classic author’s sensibility can have magical results.

This adaptation of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles falls somewhere in the middle range. It’s very faithful to the text, not just incorporating a lot of the original dialogue but even keeping the novel’s chapter breaks and titles. Luckily, Doyle’s story isn’t that long so it’s a manageable job. And the art by I. N. J. Culbard isn’t generic. He does have his own style, as perhaps best seen in his signature way of drawing faces with a curved vertical slash that descends from the middle of the forehead to past the end of the nose. I have to say this really puzzled me as it shows up on every face and I couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to correspond to. A cheekbone? Ritual scarring?

Was Culbard’s style a good fit though? I think so, at least for a version aimed at younger people. The violence is softened, with the bruises and welts on Beryl’s body, for example, turning into the faintest of shadowing. And I’m afraid the hound itself, in its climactic appearance, bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Slimer from Ghostbusters. But then the hound, whether in illustrated versions of the story or appearing on screen, is almost always a disappointment, going on over a century now.

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Foul Play! The Art and Artists of the Notorious 1950s E. C. Comics!

One of the most remarkable things about the immediate cultural impact and subsequent legacy of E. C. Comics is that their glory days only lasted for about five years, from 1950 and the beginning of their “New Trend” in (mostly horror) comics, to 1955 and the implementation of the Comics Code. They weren’t DC or Marvel, comic-book brands that are not only still with us but bigger now than ever. Even MAD, an E. C. spin-off that became an American institution for several decades, is today mostly defunct. Nothing of E. C. lasted in a business sense, even though they were always ahead of the game and the comics and magazines they published are now widely acknowledged to have been among the finest examples of the form ever. Meanwhile, we’re drowning in MCU and DCU slop. There’s a depressing lesson in there about how it doesn’t pay to be too good at what you do.

Foul Play! by Grant Geissman is an oversize coffee-table book taking the form of a gallery of pocket bios of the artists who made E. C.’s New Trend such a comics phenomenon. Presented in this way, it led me to a deeper appreciation of names like Johnny Craig, Jack Davis, Graham Ingels, and Wally Wood. To be sure, E. C. did have a house style, but taking the time for a closer look you become more aware of their individual qualities. Also included for each of the main artists is a full story pulled from their time at E. C. Not reproduced in the remastered format fans will know from the reprint editions recently put out by Dark Horse, but in all their original, faded and yellowed glory.

Along the way a lot of interesting tidbits come up. I liked hearing about the Leroy lettering system (not mechanical, but hand-drawn using a template), which was used by Wroten Lettering to do all the comics here. That outfit must have stayed busy. Having always been curious about the ads to send away for photos of the GhouLunatics – were they actual photos, or illustrations made to look like photos? – I was delighted to see reproductions. And yes, they were actual photos, with Johnny Craig made up to look like the Vault-Keeper, the Crypt-Keeper, and the Old Witch. It was interesting to find out that at a convention in 1972, the story “Horror We? How’s Bayou?” was voted the fan favourite as Best E. C. Horror Story, with Graham Ingels (who did the art) being voted “Favorite E. C. Horror Artist.” That story is included in full here. “Ghastly” stuff indeed, and its popularity tells you something about what readers wanted more of.

I’ve called this a coffee-table book, and I hope it’s clear that I don’t mean the label in a disparaging way. There are great books of this kind, and Foul Play! (a terrible title, by the way) is one of them. If you’re a collector of E. C. comics, or have any interest at all in the comics of the time, it’s well worth a look.

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Amazing Fantasy Omnibus

The comics collected in this omnibus edition cover a Marvel title that was in flux for most of its short life: from Amazing Adventures to Amazing Adult Fantasy, to simply Amazing Fantasy (the first issue of which contained the debut of Spider-Man). The numbering remained constant though, so Spidey’s first appearance was in Amazing Fantasy #15, even though that was the first in the serie to be so titled.

Anyway, Marvel was spinning its wheels a bit here trying to find its core programming, not yet having landed on superhero fare as its bread and butter. Titles like Fantastic Four and The Hulk were just starting at the same time and in the recurring adventures of Doctor Droom in Amazing Adventures we can see an obvious precursor to Doctor Strange. Instead of superheroes, Amazing Adventures was mainly about monsters, while Amazing Adult Fantasy (“The magazine that respects your intelligence!”) was more like a comic version of The Twilight Zone.

It’s always nice to read an honest critical introduction. In his intro to the Amazing Adventures section Stephen Bissette makes the point that, well, these weren’t great comics. Nowhere close to being up to the level of EC ten years earlier (admittedly pre-Code), they’re only juvenile and silly, culminating in the giant Ssergo being yoinked from the surface of the Earth by a “large sky-hook from Jupiter.” That wouldn’t have impressed six-year-old me.

“Truth be told,” Bissette admits, “what Amazing Adventures became remains far more interesting than what it was.” And what it most immediately became was Amazing Adult Fantasy. It was an unfortunate title even when it debuted in 1961. As Stan Lee tried to explain in a mailbag, “the only reason we put the word ADULT on the cover, is to distinguish our carefully-edited, and literately-written mag from the usual crop of comics which seem to be slanted for the average 6 year old with a 3 year old mentality! Anybody with brains enough to appreciate AMAZING ADULT FANTASY is our type of reader.” Remember, this is the magazine that respects your intelligence! And to their credit, the short stories in AAF (mostly written by Stan Lee’s brother Larry) are all pretty interesting in the Twilight Zone style I mentioned, with lots of last-panel plot twists. “The Terror of Tim Boo Ba!” which graces the cover of issue #9 as well as this omnibus edition is a great example. And there are even a couple of stories that riff on the classic Twilight Zone “To Serve Man” episode. But whether I’d call this stuff brainy is another question. The stories rely pretty heavily on simplistic caricatures, like the guy who builds a fallout shelter in his backyard and says things like this as he locks himself away:

“Goodbye, you poor fools! I don’t care what happens to all of you! But I shall live safely in my shelter and laugh at you when the bombs fall! Nothing can harm me here – nothing! Not even a direct hit by a nuclear bomb! I’ve enough provisions and oxygen to last five years! No matter what happens to the others, I shall survive! And if any of them try to get in to share my safety with me, I’ll laugh at them! I paid for this shelter . . . it is mine alone! . . . Nothing can harm me! No one can hurt me! Ha ha ha . . . let the rest of mankind perish! Who cares?!! I’ll be the last man alive on Earth!”

I don’t have to tell you that things don’t work out quite as he expected.

Still, as corny as it all is these stories are a lot of fun, and Steve Ditko’s art gives them an extra jolt. There’s a thing throughout of placing all-red figures against all-yellow backgrounds that has an electric effect. It’s all about heightening the impact, the visual correlative of the all-caps, all-exclamation mark speech bubbles that were the fashion at the time. I mean, when you have a character introduce himself matter-of-factly by saying “My name is Henry Burke! I’m a scientist!” then you know there’s nothing that isn’t going to feel like it’s being yelled or screamed in your face.

But in our own age of eye-ball grabbing headlines and click-bait thumbnails I think we have to smile. You do what you have to do to get attention in the media economy, and if that means always being dialed up to 11 then so be it.

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The Return of a MAD Look at Old Movies

I started off my review of The MAD Book of Mysteries by saying that since I’m a fan of both MAD Magazine and classic detective fiction it was a book that couldn’t miss.

Well, because I really like both MAD and old movies, when I was a kid this was another favourite pocketbook of mine, even though I know I didn’t pick up on many of the references. At least the more specific ones. I always wondered, for example, who Rhonda Fleming was, and even today I’m a bit surprised that she was a household name in 1970. But the send-ups aren’t of particular movies so much as genres. There’s a circus movie, a submarine movie, a pirate movie, a mad scientist movie, a historical biopic, etc.

There are strings of gags that I’ve remembered for fifty years now. Here is a police captain and his deputy busting into Dr. Fear’s Frankenstein-style laboratory.

Deputy (seeing the corpse on a tabe): This man has no pulse, Captain!

Captain (grabbing hold of Dr. Fear): Aha! And if my powers of detection serve me correctly, I believe this man is the thief! All right, swine, what did you do with that man’s pulse?

Deputy: You don’t understand, Captain! This man is dead!

Captain: Dead? Then he doesn’t need his pulse! We came all the way out here for nothing!

And here’s a bit from the WW2 submarine story:

Lieutenant: Sir, this may sound like a scatter-brained idea, but why not stuff our clothes and some junk and a little oil into one of the torpedo tubes and shoot it to the surface? When they see the oil slick and stuff, they’ll think they got us!

Captain: Not bad, lieutenant, but I’ve got one even better. Why not wait till they hit us, then hold on to everything so that nothing floats to the surface, and drive them crazy wondering!

Credit Dick De Bartolo for the writing there, and Jack Davis for the art. This was a book of new material (that is, not stuff taken from the magazine) and as the title indicates was a sequel to A MAD Look at Old Movies. Unfortunately I never read that one or had a copy and they’re quite expensive now on the second-hand market (where I’m sure they’re not in the best of shape given how well-read they likely were). This makes me wonder why someone doesn’t republish these old MAD books and magazines in some new editions. I’m sure there’d be a market. Just look at how popular the EC Archives titles are. Get on it!

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Mighty Marvel Masterworks: The Avengers Volume 4

I read this shortly after reviewing the Marvel Epic Collection containing The Avengers #1-20. What we get here are issues #31-40, and while the line-up of heroes is mostly the same as at the end of the Epic Collection volume, and I think the spirit of their adventures is similar, things were under different management. Jack Kirby had been replaced by Don Heck and Stan Lee was in the process of letting Roy Thomas take over writing duties. And as much as Lee and Kirby are justly lionized for being two of the creative giants who got Marvel started, I don’t think there’s any falling off. In fact, I prefer what we get from Heck and Thomas over any of the Lee and Kirby collaborations. Comics were growing up fast.

The earlier issues have more of Lee’s hyperbolic salesmanship. “Read this yarn slowly – carefully! It’s just possibly one of the most deeply-moving, off-beat thrillers of the year, and we want you to savor every prize-winning panel!” I wonder what prizes he was referring to. Or there’s this: “Caution! Whatever you do, wherever you go, be sure to hang on to this irreplaceable ish, for it’s certain to become one of the most talked-about collectors’ items in the annals of comicophilia! We kid you not!” Lee said “I kid you not!” a lot, and I think it’s where I picked the expression up.

We’re also still in the days when The Avengers actually weren’t the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Captain America’s shield is just a regular metal disc that is easily bent or destroyed and then replaced. The Scarlet Witch only seems to know a few basic spells, and her “hex power” is underwhelming. The Wasp is pretty much useless, as always, and forever swooning over the hunky boys she meets. Goliath starts off being stuck in his giant size and one of the storylines has him having to figure out a way to get small again. And he still needs to work on other things. In the final issue the Wasp has to give him a ride because she has wings and he doesn’t and she asks an obvious question: “Why don’t you give yourself the power to gain wings when you shrink?” His lame reply: “Y’know, I’ve been so busy on other projects, I never thought about it! Maybe I will, one of these days!”

As a result, they need to focus on teamwork to fight off the bad guys they face. Especially the mighty Ixar (“the Invincible”). Or the Thinker and his team of B-listers. I kind of liked how the Thinker wasn’t some superhero but just a computer nerd who tries to calculate the best way to take down the Avengers. A computer nerd must have seemed cutting edge at the time. Then in the final issues Hercules unofficially joins the team and he adds some much needed muscle given that Thor and the Hulk are out. Giant Man never seems to pull his weight as a clean-up hitter.

So this is quite entertaining in the mid-‘60s Marvel way. I enjoyed seeing the word “sawbuck” for the first time in a long time, and then realized I’d never had any idea what a sawbuck was. It’s a $10 bill, in case you were wondering, so called because the Roman numeral X looks like a sawbuck, which is a style of sawhorse. Timely trivia aside, the Avengers were on their way here to becoming the franchise they would become but they still needed a lot of work before they’d be fully assembled.

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Sherlock Holmes: The Final Problem

Most graphic adaptations of classic literature are massive disappointments. They tend to either go with a generic comic-book look or adapt the work in some way that makes a mess of the source material, often without even being interesting.

Swiss artist Hannes Binder’s illustrated version of Conan Doyle’s “last” Sherlock Holmes story, “The Final Problem,” is a wonderful exception. I put last in quotation marks because this is the story where Holmes was supposed to be killed off, falling from the Reichenbach Falls, only Doyle had to bring the great detective back due to popular demand. Even though it’s not really much of a story, it’s always been a favourite among illustrators because of the iconic scene where Holmes and Moriarty grapple at the top of the falls before plunging to their supposed deaths. That’s a moment you get here as well, though I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s not an event that is ever described in the story itself because in fact it never happens.

Binder’s black-and-white scratchboard technique is well suited for evoking mists and smoke and spider-webs, as well as hinting in a way I can’t really explain at a sort of aural quality. I think this latter is something Binder is conscious of too, as the full-page drawings of a screaming mouth and then an ear point toward the same thing. The mouth and ear are also suggestive of vortices that, like Moriarty’s sinister web, draw us in to our doom. Then the illustrations of a falling brick or a utensil shattering a dessert explode in ways that don’t require any textual effects. We can hear them well enough.

The text is abridged and adapted quite a bit, but in a way that I thought was remarkably efficient. And I liked the way Moriarty, a figure almost entirely absent, at least as a physical presence, from the story, shows up as a glowering atmospheric presence, a demonic eye of God. Binder isn’t just doing his own thing here but is making something distinctively in his own style while respecting the source. Holmes has been illustrated by a lot of different artists, right from the first published versions of his stories, but Binder doesn’t take a back seat to any of them.

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