Parasyte Full Color Collection 1

Another popular manga series, this time in a deluxe colored version. Hitoshi Iwaaki’s Parasyte was originally serialized from 1989 to 1994, when it appeared in black-and-white. Having success (over 25 million copies in circulation by 2022), it would later go on to spawn some spin-offs and be made into a TV series and some films.

As you probably know, I’m not the world’s biggest manga fan, and Parasyte shares some of the main faults that characterize the form, at least for me. The two I’d highlight are (1) the lazy artwork, with indecipherable fight scenes, generic figure, and characters who somehow fail to register any emotion at all on their faces even when supposedly experiencing incredible shocks, and (2) the odd blend of violence and gore with leering, juvenile sexual elements.

But even with those strikes against it I enjoyed Parasyte. It’s has a good basic story, with alien spores falling to Earth, where they immediately crawl inside the brains of other, host life forms. One of them tries to get into the brain of highschool student Shinichi Izumi but he stops it and it can only inhabit his right hand. He calls it “Migi” (Japanese for “right”), and they share a consciousness and talk to each other so that Migi is able to explain to Shinichi what is going on. Migi also has special alien powers that allow him to fight with other aliens. This is important as the aliens can sense each other and they’re not happy that Migi and Shinichi form a human-alien hybrid. And these aliens are very dangerous, as they have the ability to split open and unwind in fantastic ways that allows them to tear humans apart and eat them. This leads the newspapers to be full of reports of the “mincemeat murders,” because that’s all that’s left of people once the aliens are done with them.

What I liked about Parasyte is that it avoids the usual manga trap of just repeating the same situations over and over, with the hero taking on progressively more powerful bad guys. The story is more complicated than that, with a number of interesting pieces that introduce some real drama, like Shinichi’s relationship with his parents, a would-be girlfriend, and a sexy teacher who is an alien. There are also allegorical and political messages in play, from the way Shinichi’s battle with Migi’s impulses stands in for anxiety over masturbation to the environmental angle that, in this first volume at least, is only hinted at.

The upshot being that this is a manga that I actually want to continue reading. High praise!

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Sinister War

One for the big-time Marvel fanboys.

Basically we have Spider-Man here taking on nearly every enemy he’s ever had. Or, as he puts it, it’s “a battle royal with every single baddie who’s ever looked at me sideways.” Some of these I had never heard of. Who was this Morlun guy? He seemed important. What’s with the yellow lizard? I had to do a search to find out he’s called the Dragon King. I never did figure out what his super powers were. There are so many villains on parade that sometimes they just have to be introduced as the teams they’re a part of: the Sinister Six, the Savage Six, the Sinister Syndicate, the Superior Foes, etc. They come flying off of splash pages so filled with figures they don’t even register as individuals. But at the end of the day, as with most battle royals, they end of spending most of their time just milling around in the background.

The guy behind all of this is Kindred, and if you don’t know who he is then I don’t have time to fill you in because it’s complicated. Really complicated. Basically he’s a supernatural figure with demonic powers, including the ability to send centipedes into people’s ears and control their minds, sort of like the slugs in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Kindred has assembled this all-star team of supervillains (even raising some of them from the dead) to make Spider-Man pay for his sins. Or something. They all go along with it because they think Kindred has the power to send them to hell. I don’t know if Kindred can actually do this. I also don’t know what sort of hell it is we’re talking about. There’s talk of souls and punishment and the like, but there’s no theological content to any of it. It’s just another part of the multiverse I think.

The four-part series collected here was the culmination of a longer story arc by Nick Spencer. At the end they collect some of the teasers from previous issues that helped set things up (but shouldn’t these have been part of a prologue?), and the story went on from here as well, so it’s really all quite confusing unless you’ve been following along pretty closely. Which I hadn’t.

There was too much going on. Which is too bad because I liked the main story arc, which has Doctor Octopus again cast in the anti-hero mold. He’s the one who takes down Kindred at the end, using science. Spider-Man is mainly just a punching bag throughout, only being spared when the bad guys start fighting each other. (Why Kindred didn’t see that was going to happen when he set things up as a competition to kill Spider-Man, I’m not sure.) I didn’t like Mephisto being involved because that only increased the confusion as to what was actually happening. That confusion also had the effect of watering down all the psychodrama involving the Osborn family, which I didn’t understand anyway.

I think this is a problem with the current era of Marvel comics (and the MCU) generally: an inflation in the roster rolls and an increase in complexity that caters to a readership expected to be up on more and more information regarding backstories and different timelines. So if you’re just coming in here, good luck!

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Aliens: What If . . . ?

I continue to be impressed at how good the Aliens comics are, coming up with interesting original storylines that put the film franchise to shame. Aliens: What If . . . ? is another great example, taking as its starting point the end of the film Aliens and positing that the character of Carter Burke (played by Paul Reiser) actually survived the destruction of Hadley’s Hope.

This is the sort of thing that might have most fans saying “Oh no!” Carter Burke, after all, was one of the great heels of moviedom, the sort of villain you love to hate. And that’s the reputation he’s carried with him here, as he’s stuck managing an office at a mining outpost in the back of beyond. “He’s the most hated person in the universe. Literally.” And “Humankind’s most reviled Judas. Next to Judas.” A judgment that comes from his daughter!

But it turns out Burke wasn’t all bad. He was a corporate stooge for Weyland-Yutani, nothing more. And the thing is, he is a dedicated family man. He wants to find a Xenomorph egg so that he can hatch a new Xenomorph and use its blood as a cure for his terminally ill wife, who he is keeping in a cryochamber. It’s a totally crazy idea, but he thinks he can make it work. And he’s also lied to his daughter Brie about how she can’t leave the mining planet because her lungs won’t be able to adjust to a different gravity, just so she’ll have to stay with him. That’s not very nice either, but . . . like I say, he’s a family man. That counts for something.

You won’t be surprised when Burke’s plans go awry, and before long the mining colony is hopping with Xenomorphs. And the action that follows is kept simple and easy to follow, which isn’t always the case. But what sets Aliens: What If . . . ? apart from the other books in the series is the jokey flavour throughout. It’s full of the sort of snappy dialogue that may put off die-hard horror fans but that I found to be a fun change-up. Despite the gore, there are whole scenes that play out as comedy, like when Burke interviews the cubicle monkeys in his office to try to find a suitable host for the facehugger to impregnate. Despite his bad reputation, Burke is a soft touch, you see, and he just can’t bring himself to select a guinea pig.

One of the hooks here is that the concept is co-credited to Paul Reiser himself, along with his son Leon and three other writers. Five writers for a concept? Well, that’s what they say. Anyway, I don’t know how much of a hand Paul Reiser had in this – somewhat less, I imagine, than Keanu Reeves with BRZRKR – but the rest of the writers, including Leon, all come through with a solid story populated with an interesting group of characters, including a replicant who provides a lot of comic interplay with Burke and a Yutani offspring who romances Brie before revealing his true family colours. I enjoyed all of it, and as this volume collects issues #1-5 and ends with Burke, Brie, and the cast of The Office (that’s obviously the reference) on their way to bring down Weyland-Yutani (and save Burke’s wife), I’m looking forward to more.

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Godzilla: Complete Rulers of Earth

There have been a number of comics I’ve looked at for these Graphicalex posts involving media franchises that have been adapted into surprisingly good comics. I’d single out the Aliens and Simpsons titles as being the most impressive. I think they did a really good job with those.

Godzilla isn’t as well served in this long-running series. I’d be inclined to cast some of the blame on Godzilla himself, as he’s just a big lizard who gets angry and goes on destructive rampages, but (1) that hasn’t held the movies back from being successful, and (2) that’s as much “character” as the Xenomorphs have, and the Aliens comics are great.

So I don’t know why I didn’t enjoy these Godzilla comics more. They’re not bad, and they do tend to follow in the spirit of the movies, but they just don’t work all that well for me.

The story arc, from writer Chris Mowry, has a bunch of shape-shifting aliens (I think they’re called the Cryog) coming to Earth looking to wipe out the human population and take it over for themselves. In this mission they find allies in an undersea kingdom of Devonians who look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The way they plan to achieve their goals is to unleash a massive kaiju attack (kaiju, in case you don’t follow these things, are giant monsters). In general these big guys line-up on two sides, though there’s no real reason they should. On “our” side we have Godzilla, Mothra, Jet Jaguar, King Caesar, Sanda (the good Gargantua) and Mechagodzilla. On the other side is everyone else. Gigan. Destoroyah. Varan. Biollante. And a whole bunch of other critters whose names I didn’t catch. “I don’t know how you remember so many of these names,” one of the army guys says to a scientist at one point. I could certainly relate.

Yes, the gang’s all here. Though they don’t have much to do except slug it out and then wander off. No matter what happens they seem to be immortal, able to re-form themselves even after exploding. So it’s hard to feel as though much is at stake. In addition, the fights between the kaiju are hard to follow visually. At least I didn’t know what was going on a lot of the time. And, as with the movies, this is what you came in for so it’s kind of important. But at least we get a full buffet of sound effects. Here’s a transcript of seven pages of one battle. Obviously there is no dialogue as it’s all just the big guys:

THOOOMPF, KOOM, KOOM, KOOM, RRNGK, RRRMMMMBLLL, MIRRAWWW, GRRRONNK, WHAM, SKRREEEEEE,THOOM, SLKLRRCH, SLSHH, FZZZT, SKRRREEEEOOONMNGK, THWACK, GRRRNN, GROOONGK, ZZLSSH, MRRWWARRRN, THOOM, KZZT, KATTHOOM SKRRNNGK, MIRRRAWWW, KZZT, FSSSSSHH.

If this isn’t your thing then, aside from my wondering why you’d be reading a Godzilla comic, there’s always the human story. But as with the full slate of monsters I thought there was too much going on here too. Basically there’s a military outfit known as the CKR (Counter-Kaiju Reaction force), and a bunch of youngish science types known as the Kaiju Watchers. The tough CKR leader and one of the scientists seem to have a romance growing, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Ain’t nobody got time for that when there are monsters to be dealt with. Of slightly more interest is the fighting between the Cryog and the Devonians, who have a falling out over who’s going to inherit Earth once they get rid of all the humans. This would have made a decent storyline on its own, though hardly original.

In general, fans seemed to like it. I’m a bit of a Godzilla fan though and I didn’t think it was anything special. Basically Mowry was running a conveyor belt with as many action figures as he could think of coming along to do their thing before moving the story on to the next big fight. The thing about the other franchise tie-in comics I started off mentioning though is that they didn’t restrict themselves to this kind of fan service. They came up with stories and art that added a lot more. That doesn’t happen here and I came away not so much disappointed as indifferent.

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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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