Criminal 3: The Dead and the Dying

The third entry in the Criminal series is itself made up of three separate stories that are linked by way of certain recurring characters. In other words, you could think of The Dead and the Dying as a sort of microcosm of Criminal as a whole.

All the stories are set in 1972, so they deal with a previous generation to the characters we met in Coward and Lawless. Though to be honest, nothing here feels a bit different from the later stories. I don’t think Center City changes very much. The middle story, “A Wolf Among Wolves,” is about Teeg Lawless, the father of Tracy and Ricky (and yes, it’s yet another story of a heist gone wrong). Then we get the back story of how Sebastian Hyde came to be the crime boss of Center City. But the main connecting thread has to do with a woman named Danica (whose pussy is “a deadly weapon”) and how she is abused and let down by various men.

It’s another effective comic. I especially liked the black beats that interrupt Teeg’s section. That’s a technique that might not have worked, but Brubaker and Phillips don’t set a foot wrong with this material and I thought the interrupted visuals added to the sense of Teeg’s mental and moral disintegration. Otherwise, it’s a comic that fills in blanks and adds to the sense of a tightening web of fate being drawn around these people. It’s funny how each comic ends with the words “The End,” as it’s clear that nothing is ever over in this town.

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Mighty Marvel Masterworks: The Incredible Hulk Volume 1

When I was a kid I had a paperback collection of the first six or so issues of The Incredible Hulk, so basically the same comics as are collected here. I read that book until it fell apart, but didn’t have any other books like it. I don’t think that experiment really took for Marvel, but this Mighty Marvel Masterworks series seems to be doing well. They’re cheaper reproductions in a smaller format than the Epic Collections, but as long as you’re not a comic purist who gets upset at any tampering with the format or colour of the original then they do the job.

So what we have here is the Hulk’s original origin story, with Dr. Bruce Banner being irradiated from the blast of the gamma bomb he designed. He should have been observing the blast from a safe distance but he had to go out to rescue 16-year-old Rick Jones, who had driven out onto the test site. Rick Jones will, unfortunately, continue to be the Hulk’s sidekick for all of these early comics and he’s a pointless burden. Literally as he holds on to the Hulk’s back as they go hopping around.

Stan Lee was just trying out ideas here, looking to see what would work. In the first issue the Hulk is actually gray but this turned out to be too hard a colour to manage so in subsequent issues he experienced a chromatic shift (without any explanation) into the more familiar green. As initially introduced he also turns into the Hulk only at night and is Dr. Banner by day, which was too limiting for the character and so was discarded nearly as quickly as the gray skin. Then for a while Banner built a gamma ray machine that allowed him to change himself into the Hulk and then back again, but you could tell that device was wearing thin already by the later issues here. And finally there’s the question of how the Hulk gets around. In issue #3 Rick easily runs away from him: “Lucky for me the Hulk can’t move too fast!” But later in the same issue the big green guy is literally flying around with his island-hopping jumps.

In short, things were very much in a state of flux and it wasn’t clear what sort of a character the Hulk would be. Though that’s something that has stayed with the Hulk over the years, as evidenced by the different forms and colours he’s taken. Essentially this is another take on the Jekyll-Hyde dichotomy, the “milksop” scientist and the unleashed beast, and it’s always been a live question how much the one bleeds into the other.

The writing is slapdash in the extreme. Apparently Dr. Banner and Rick have excavated that underground hideout where the Hulk can be locked up all by themselves. And when the Hulk breaks the door down and smashes the elaborate mechanism used to shut it, it can be quickly repaired. “Lucky I was able to replace this shattered steel ramrod!” Rick tells us. Lucky indeed. When the Toad Men arrive from outer space their “grapplers” are quickly able to identify “the most brilliant scientific brain on Earth” (which would be Dr. Banner). When the Hulk and Rick and Betty Ross escape from the underground kingdom of Tyrannus the Mighty, Betty is in a state of shock that is like “some kind of amnesia!” Which means she conveniently won’t remember any of their adventures. You can see how comics had a lot of growing up to do. At this point superhero comics were juvenile entertainment and made no bones about it.

Originally published from 1962 to 1963, there’s the usual Cold War overlay, something I mentioned before in my review of the contemporary Ant-Man comics. The Hulk faces off against such Red menaces as the Gargoyle (whose defeat might signal “the beginning of the end of the Red tyranny too!”), Mongo (not a “gladiator from space” but a robot built by the “wily Reds”), and General Fang (a Chinese Communist warlord who leads his hordes against peaceful neighbours). “Do those commies think they’re playing with kids?” the Hulk asks, as he crushes one of their grenades in his hand. If so, they are soon disabused of the notion.

I liked this well enough when I was a kid, which isn’t surprising given that was very much who these comics were aimed at. That’s obvious just from the presence of Rick Jones and the Teen Brigade. These kids are actually the most dated part of all these books, saying things like “Daddy-O.” But that’s the price you pay for being hip.

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Asterix and Cleopatra

Asterix and Cleopatra is one of the classic Asterix comics. Perhaps the best known and best loved. I’ll always cherish it for the scene where tiny Dogmatix jumps into Obelix’s arms and he says “Dogmatix! You nearly knocked me over!” This is funny because Dogmatix is so small and Obelix so big, but ever since, with all the dogs I’ve had, whenever they’ve come up to me for a hug I’ve always told them that they nearly knocked me over. That’s how tightly some throwaway line read in childhood can weave itself into your life.

Anyway, Asterix and Obelix, joined this time by Panoramix the village druid and the newly named Dogmatix, are off to a Cecil B. DeMille version of Egypt, where Cleopatra is having a torrid affair with Caesar. In an opening argument the Queen of the Nile makes a bet with Caesar that she can build a palace in only three months. In order to make this a reality her clueless court architect Edifis has to travel to Gaul and enlist the help of you-know-who. So once again we have the formula of a journey out and back (the pirates are thumped again, or rather scuttle their own ship rather than have to take a beating), ending up with a celebratory banquet back home. Along the way there’s a lot of local colour, from the imperial architecture (which I loved as a kid) to the clever way the Egyptians speak in hieroglyphics. These speech bubbles rhyme and even cross over with the always creative grawlixes, which aren’t just typographical characters but take the form of storm clouds and skulls.

As a comic it’s also very smart. You have to be on your toes to catch the jokes that are happening even in the margins. And then there all the Latin tags and historical winks. As Asterix is leaving he says to Cleopatra “If, one day, you want to build something else in Egypt, a canal between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, for example . . . well, then call upon someone from our land, by Toutatis!” This is a nod to the fact that it was a French company that was in charge of building the Suez Canal in the 1850s. I think most readers, especially French readers (and we’re talking about children here), would have got that in 1965. Today I’d bet against that sort of general knowledge.

I don’t know if this is my favourite Asterix story, but it’s the one that first comes to mind whenever the subject of Asterix comes up. Not all of these comics have kept their glow over the years but this one has and it made me happy that I decided to revisit the whole series.

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Tales from the Crypt Volume 2

In my notes on The Haunt of Fear Volume 2 I mentioned how EC editor Al Feldstein had written every one of the stories in the collection, as well as the “The Old Witch’s Niche” and the text-only shorts. I also mentioned how he was doing most of the writing for the other EC bi-monthly publications. At least he was for Tales from the Crypt, because he again gets sole writing credit for all 24 of the comics in this volume and probably wrote all the short stories as well, though these are uncredited.

“So,” as I said in that earlier review, “if there are some duds in the mix here, or the action starts to follow a formula, are you surprised?” You certainly shouldn’t be. And I wasn’t. There are a number of recurring EC horror archetypes. Reduced to its most basic elements a classic EC horror story features a murder for gain with the victim returning from the grave (sometimes after being buried alive) in order to exact a gruesome revenge on their killer.

I think that synopsis might describe two-thirds of all the horror stories EC published. Now Feldstein did his best to add little twists. Like the first story here being about a man coming back from the dead, except it’s told in the second person. But there are few real surprises. Riffing on a Poe story is to be expected, and that it’s the less well-known “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” doesn’t change things up much. Nor is it that big a twist when a developer disturbs an ancient Indian burial mound and the spirits thus released come back from the dead to scalp him.

If I wanted to be really critical I’d also focus in on the letters in “The Crypt-Keeper’s Corner.” I thought that very few, if any, of these were real. They read like plugs for the very comics you’re reading. And the constant pitching from the three GhouLunatics to buy their pictures got a little wearing.

These caveats in place, I still enjoyed all of this. I liked the in-jokes and odd bits of humour in the background (like the ship the honeymooners are on being the S. S. Pinafore), as well as all the contemporary historical details. I think having a television in your living room in 1951 meant you were pretty well off, for example. Or the Black Widow murderer having to buy seven funeral wreaths for a total of $14 and leaving the florist muttering “Fourteen dollars! The beast . . .” I looked it up and a basic funeral wreath today will run you around $200. I guess that’s inflation. And there was one language reference I had to look up, when a pair of cops examining the body of a murdered husband refer to him as a “poor old gink.” “Gink” isn’t a word that’s encountered much nowadays, but it does, or did, have the meaning of a foolish or unfortunate person. I’ve never heard it used before.

But my favourite story was the one with two medical students who need a dead body to study anatomy on, or else they’ll never be able to graduate! Corpses are expensive you see, and aren’t covered by their lab fees. So of course they decide to dig a freshly-buried one up. But they can’t dig it up themselves, even though they’ll both be present at the exhumation, so they have to enlist the help of Clem, “the rather stupid college handyman.” This leads to further problems, as you might expect, but I just laughed at the notion of the two students being unable to dig up a fresh grave by themselves and needing to pay a general labourer the whopping sum of five dollars to do it for them while they watch. I mean, Feldstein needed Clem to deliver the punchline at the end of the story but it’s still funny how useless the would-be doctors are.

So it’s another entertaining collection, though I wouldn’t recommend reading a lot of these all at once since EC horror was pretty much of a piece. Just dipping into them every now and then is the way to proceed.

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Trout: Bits & Bobs

A dream, or nightmare, set in some fantasy realm where a little boy or large baby named Trout is cared for by an old man named Giuseppe Lint, head of the Lint Brothers’ Turnip Works.  Trout doesn’t speak but in the first story he has a repressed memory that comes to life and starts eating up an entire town. In the second story a traveling puppet-show monster steals the souls of all the town’s children and turns them into tadpoles.

I didn’t know what to make of the story. It really wasn’t my thing. I did like the art though (Troy Nixey both wrote and illustrated, so he takes praise and blame). There’s a spiral motif worked throughout, from the long sleeves of Trout’s pyjamas to Giuseppe’s handlebar moustache. The faces and figures of people and monsters (there’s no clear dividing line between them) are quite original and there’s no denying the unique world Nixey has conjured up, but it all feels a bit like an elaborate doodle. I gather Nixey really had his heart set on making movies anyway. I’m not sure how many more Trout comics he did but while I could appreciate some of this, there was enough of it here for me.

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Absolute Batman Vol. 2: Abomination

The first part of the Absolute Batman series, The Zoo, ended with the Joker, reimagined as a psycho oligarch, calling in Bane to take care of Batman. So that’s what we’re all about here.

Just as a backgrounder, in this version of the Batman story Bruce Wayne isn’t a rich kid but a middle-class grinder with a penchant for working out, combat sports, and engineering. He has a set of childhood friends who he still plays poker with: Waylon Jones (Killer Croc), Eddie Nigma (the Riddler), Oswald Cobblepot (the Penguin), Harvey Dent (Two-Face), and Selina Kyle (Catwoman). None of them are bad guys (yet), or even much out of the ordinary, but this comic explains their transformation at the hands of Bane, who is himself an abomination. Specifically, Bane is a product of medical experimentation run by a bunch of secret Ark M labs headed by a Dr. Arkham, who is working under the Joker. He’s like the Bane we’re used to, but the Venom drug has made him super strong and given him crazy regenerative powers. Plus he’s big. Really big.

Even without his Venom power-ups I’d say he’s two or three times bigger than Batman (albeit with a pinhead because his noggin doesn’t grow along with the rest of his body). And as I said in my review of The Zoo, Absolute Bruce Wayne is a total unit. How big is he? Well we get some precise measurements here when Batman is captured and Dr. Arkham and her staff start doing tests on him. He’s 6’9” and 421 pounds of pure muscle. Just for the sake of comparison, when he muscled up to play Jack Reacher the actor Alan Ritchson was 6’2” and 240 pounds. Those numbers are almost exactly the same as for Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was in his prime. So yeah, Bruce is way more muscularly developed than either of those guys. But Bane, when he goes into full Hulk mode, is ten times bigger than that. Seriously, he’s the size of a very large house. Which is also his weakness, because there’s only so much Venom a body can take.

The best thing about Abomination is that there are no more childhood flashbacks to Bruce and his superfriends. I hated those. What’s left is brutal action. This is a great comic but is it ever dark. For example, it kicks off with a nearly standalone episode where Batman fights Mr. Freeze. Or Victor Fries Jr. This was a good example of both the imaginative way Scott Snyder has rebuilt the pantheon and how disturbing the new bad guys are. You see, Victor Jr. was stricken with a fatal disease as a child so his scientist parents froze him until they could find a cure. This was not the pleasant cryo-sleep of science fiction though, but an endless agony.  “I felt everything. Every moment. And the pain . . . my god. Ice grinds and twists . . . The ice isn’t grace. It is fury. It’s reckoning.” So, with a new fetishization of pain and some other special powers Junior returns the favour on his parents by freezing them and a bunch of other Gotham luminaries in a kind of living death. He plans to freeze Bruce too, but Bruce escapes and turns into Batman so Fries thaws out his frozen zombies to fight for him. But Batman knocks them to pieces. Only they keep coming at him, “like they want” to be killed.

Put a pin in that, because later we encounter the grotesquely cruel experiments of Dr. Arkham at the secret Ark M sites. When Bruce gets loose from his cell in one of these he encounters some of the deformed monstrosities that have been created and they ask him to help them. When he says he doesn’t know how they ask him to “make it ssstop.” Help them escape? Make the experiments stop? Or put an end to their suffering by killing them? I think it’s the latter, because when when Waylon Jones, now transformed into Killer Croc, helps Batman escape, he asks Batman to “save” him by killing him, begging Batman to put him out of his misery. That’s just the kind of world we’re in here. And then there’s the final fate of Bane, which is more endless torture, pain and suffering. Dark.

I mentioned this is the volume where the childhood gang of friends become supervillains, which comes about due to their being captured by Bane. So Oswald Cobblepot has nearly every bone in his body broken without damaging any vital organs. If he lives, a doctor tells Bruce, he’ll be two feet shorter with deformed hands and feet. Enter the Penguin, eventually. Meanwhile, Harvey Dent has had half his face burned off and Edward Nigma has had his skull ripped open and Venom fed into it, turning him into a supergenius (but still not a bad guy yet). The only one of the gang who doesn’t get done in is Selena Kyle, who Bruce is hooking up with. He also calls her “Se” and I wasn’t sure when reading that how it was meant to be pronounced. She’s a supersexy bobblehead (even sexier in the variant covers) who, along with Killer Croc and the Riddler, helps Batman take down Bane.

I won’t give away how Bane is finally defeated because it was both surprising and a really good fit with the story, bringing together a bunch of different parts of the plot. Like I say, this is a great comic. But dark, even for the Dark Knight.

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Criminal 2: Lawless

This is the second volume in the Criminal series by Brubaker and Phillips and the action picks up sometime shortly after the events of Coward, with the main character here, Tracy Lawless, visiting Leo Patterson in prison at one point. Even though these are technically standalone comics, there is a larger story being told about the interactions of multiple generations of families involved in the criminal life of Center City, and with Lawless we see the web being drawn tighter.

Tracy Lawless is what’s known as a hard man, also known as a badass. He’s been in trouble with the law. He’s been in combat in Baghdad and Bosnia and “seen things he’d never imagined.” He’s a big guy and tough and has all sorts of skills when it comes to violence. He’s got burns on one side of his face, though this is something that doesn’t really register in Sean Phillips’s drawing. And he’s on a mission to avenge the murder of his little brother Ricky, which happened while Tracy was stuck in a military prison.

As with Coward, the plot itself is standard noir. There’s a heist that’s planned and things go off the rails because of double crosses and the like. There’s a femme fatale named Mallory. There’s a suitcase of stolen money that comes with more problems than it’s worth. And bubbling away underneath there’s the motivation of revenge. If not revenge, then all of these stories deal with some kind of payback, which is the real currency of Center City.

It’s all very readable, and looks good (though Phillips did turn in some lazy pages, I thought). I also liked the world building and the deft time management, the way the story slips ahead and then back in subtle ways. I don’t mean the flashbacks, which the series has a lot of and that are clearly signaled, but smaller shifts within the time present of the narrative. Given that this is all such familiar ground, that skill and professionalism in the storytelling makes a real difference.

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Captain America: Winter Soldier

I actually hadn’t read this comic, which came out in 2005-2006, before seeing the 2014 movie they made of the same name that was loosely based on it. I remember liking the movie but honestly can’t remember a thing about it now except for the return of Bucky Barnes as a Russian killing machine with a cyborg arm. Which was all it really took from the comic, as it turns out.

Apparently bringing Bucky back from the dead was a big deal, as writer Ed Brubaker tells us in an afterword to this collected edition that recounts how Winter Soldier came to be. “There are several constant truths in Marvel Comics, or unwritten rules, if you will. And one of them was, no matter what else you did, Uncle Ben, Gwen Stacy . . . and Bucky Barnes all stayed dead.” So, leaving aside the long, phantasmagoric afterlife of Gwen Stacy, coming up with a storyline where Bucky didn’t die in that midair explosion but fell into the sea and was flash frozen, to be picked up by the Russians and turned into a super Cold Warrior, was pretty radical.

And it works. I thought Brubaker crafted a detailed and complex story with plenty of moving pieces and WW2 flashbacks. It really sucked me in. Indeed, the only problem I had with it is that it wrapped up too quickly, with the aid of that laziest of all plot devices the Cosmic Cube. Otherwise I was on board with all of it, which I wasn’t expecting given that Bucky Barnes was one of those teenage superhero sidekicks I dislike so much. Robin. Rick Jones. Bucky Barnes. I can’t stand them.

But Bucky, who was Brubaker’s “favorite character” as a comic-loving kid, is all grown up here and he’s quite the bad-ass. The thing is though, he’s not really that important a character in this story arc. He’s mostly kept in the shadows until the end, and the main story line has to do with Cap trying to figure out what’s going on with the Russian general and the Cosmic Cube. I found all of this quite engaging though, both in terms of the plot and the characters. The art wasn’t quite my thing aside from the somber palette, but overall I think this is a comic that deserves its high reputation in the Captain American canon.

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Criminal 1: Coward

Coward is the first volume in the Criminal series of semi-standalone neo-noir crime stories by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. I say semi-standalone because each can be read independently but they’re set in the same fictional “universe” (as we have to call these things nowadays) and they share recurring characters and themes.

The coward of the title is a thief named Leo Patterson, though his reputation as yellow is partly a disguise. It leads people to underestimate him, and the fact is he isn’t so much cowardly as careful, always thinking of the ways a job can go wrong and planning in advance. His caution keeps him out of jail and makes him a survivor.

There is a plot here involving some crooked cops enlisting Leo to help them with a heist, but the way it works out is pretty much just the regular sort of thing, with double-crosses and fallings out. What I thought set Coward apart was the character of Leo, who feels authentic and well-rounded. He grew up in the trade, and now cares for his elderly uncle Ivan, who is both a junky and suffering from Alzheimer’s. Though despite this Ivan is still mostly functional, or functional enough to be a problem.

We’re very much in Sin City-style territory here, and if I had a gripe about Coward it’s that the ending is so clichéd and predictable. But it’s still better than most contemporary crime comics, thanks to Brubaker’s writing and Sean Phillips’s thick lines, shadowed faces, and signature starburst gun flares. I’m sure the rest of the series will be more of the same, but I’m down for it anyway.

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Hulk: Gray

This was a six-issue miniseries by the all-star team of writer Jeph Loeb and artist Tim Sale that was first published in 2003-2004. It’s an oversize comic, on the scale of Marvel’s Grand Design series, though I believe it came out before that series started.

I loved seeing Sale’s art blown-up to this size, though I could have lived without the wide side borders on every page. The full-page and double-page spreads are like movie posters and they’re used really effectively throughout. The Hulk is a big dude and he can fill a page any size. Sale has a great sense of space and he can move from epic vistas looking like Monument Valley to close-ups of the Hulk’s mouth full of rocky teeth. You can tell Sale had a lot of fun with those teeth.

As great as it is to look at, I’ll admit that after a while I was just turning pages without reading it very closely. I thought Loeb, whose The Long Halloween is probably my favourite Batman comic, really mailed this one in. It’s a tired story that basically retells the Hulk’s origins, covering the 24 hours after Dr. Bruce Banner was caught in the explosion of the Gamma Bomb. The Hulk steals away into the desert with Betty Ross, and first Iron Man (in his vintage yellow “tin can” suit) and then General “Thunderbolt” Ross (Betty’s father) chase after him. The whole thing takes the form of a flashback, with Bruce relating these events to the superhero shrink Dr. Leonard Samson. It’s a narrative device that didn’t serve any real purpose, as their back-and-forth didn’t add anything and the ending was the flabbiest part. I guess it’s a breakthrough for Bruce to realize that Betty Ross really loved him as both monster and man? I don’t know. It all seemed pointless to me.

So a great comic to look at, with nice lettering too by Richard Starkings, but the effect is almost like a coffee-table book that you just want to pick up and flip through. I ended up doing that a lot. But I wasn’t into reading it.

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