Druuna: Mandragore

Mandragore is the fifth volume in the erotic adventures of Druuna, though I have a hard time following much of a sequence through them. As I said in my review of the previous book, Carnivora, this is “a story cycle that runs in place, never really going anywhere because time and place have no meaning in the Druunaverse.”

If you’ve managed to follow the plot thus far you know that Druuna, in various states of undress, is trying to find a cure for a techno-biological plague known as the Evil. She travels a futuristic wasteland full of mutants and robots that may be all in her head, or in somebody else’s head. The somebody else primarily being a computer AI that has merged with a spaceship captain named Lewis. This human-AI hybrid has also absorbed the consciousness of Druuna’s former lover, Shastar. Meanwhile, a different ship’s captain, Will, and his medical officer Doc, are trying to find a cure for the Evil. In Mandragore they do this by sending Druuna into the computer’s mind. So she thinks she’s dreaming, and what happens all seems like a dream, but it’s not her dream but Lewis’s. As Shastar, who retains some independence, gamefully tries to explain:

After all these centuries his mind is exhausted and has fallen into a state of inertia . . . into a kind of lethargy wherein his unconscious impulses amplify reality, creating his own autonomous universe! Yes, Druuna, we are products of that universe, of his dream . . . a complex unconscious psychic elaboration!

Did you follow that? Anyway, this conversation takes place within the dream so technically it checks out, even though outside the dream, on Will’s ship, Druuna has a separate existence.

Now since this is a Druuna comic the “serum” or antidote to the Evil takes the form of . . . male ejaculate. That would be the mandragore. Which is something Druuna has no difficulty coaxing forth. Unfortunately for the otherwise more-than-willing donors, the only time that such seed can be harvested is when a guy is strangled, so Druuna finds herself being the fluffer in a series of snuff films within the Lewis mind. Though I wasn’t sure why Lewis (or the AI) was so keen on getting a supply of mandragore. But then if you learn one thing from reading these books it’s that you can’t ask too many questions.

So there’s a lot of sex, and of course a lot of Druuna running around in a thong and tight t-shirt. Plus for some reason in this book she’s wearing stockings as well. That really made no sense, but I guess Serpieri had a thing for girls in stockings. In any event, this is the end of the series for me. The series did go on for another four volumes but I haven’t read any of them and I doubt I will now. They’re actually collector’s items and hard to track down. This one cost me $15 or so back in 1992. Today it’s only available from resellers, with the best price I found being $560 on Amazon. Obviously it’s not for everyone, as it pushes a lot of boundaries relating to sex and violence and consent, but in its own sub-sub-genre of philosophical SF erotica I think it’s something special.

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Absolute Martian Manhunter 2: The Agency

They lost me with this one. More swirling clouds of psychedelic smoke. More inexplicable happenings in an alternate alien and/or psychological reality.

I couldn’t even tell you what the story is about. There’s some secret government agency that’s keeping tabs on the “Martians.” They capture MM, somehow, and spirit him away to some black hole called Nihilo Bay, which is literally a black hole, to perform an autopsy on him. Or vivisect him, since he’s still alive. In the meantime, John Jones’s marriage is breaking down and he’s been saddled with a blue Martian named Despair-the-Zero. Despair spends the rest of the comic whispering in John’s ear about how he should just kill himself but John digs deep and shrugs him off and manages to rescue MM. How does he break into Nihilo Bay? Where is Nihilo Bay? Does Nihilo Bay even exist? Don’t know. “We break the mind/body barrier and leave physical reality in our incomprehensible dust . . .” and Bam! there we are.

Is any of this real? Or is it all just a figment of John’s imagination as he’s having a breakdown over the death of his son? Or is his son really dead? We know the Martians can’t be killed because they “do not have death concept. Life death do not apply.” So the White Martian is still out there too, dancing in a conga line with the other Martians. Maybe. Or perhaps it’s all psychodrama-a-go-go. In any event, I’m out. It does look great but I can’t take it anymore.

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Injection

Some graphic novels you read for their story, others for the characters. Injection, at least for me, falls pretty squarely into the latter category.

There are five main characters, members of a team tasked with the mission of making the twenty-first century more interesting. Not kidding; that was the mission. They did so by creating something they call The Injection, then they went their separate ways. Sometime later, The Injection is back and the brainy avengers have to re-assemble.

Author Warren Ellis saw each of the team members as being an archetype. There’s team leader Maria Kilbride as the slightly mad scientist. There’s Brigid Roth as the hacker. There’s Vivek Headland as the detective (Sherlock Holmes as played by an Indian Benedict Cumberbatch). There’s Simeon Winters as the agent (“James Bond. Of course.”). And finally Robin Morel, the magician, or “cunning man.” He’s an expert on English mysticism and folklore, which is something that comes in handy.

It’s an interesting group and each character is given room to develop. So much so that none of them individually takes over the story. Where I thought the series broke down though is in the presentation of The Injection. This is described, I don’t know how accurately, as a “non-biological artificial consciousness emulator” (we’d just say AI) that was, as I mentioned above, designed by the team in order “to make the 21^st century more interesting.” But this isn’t just any AI but a “haunted AI”: “a strongly tactical, problem-solving, inductive and object-oriented machine learning system” that came to be inhabited, somehow, by something one of the team members “can only describe as the Other.” Or maybe it always was the Other. I wasn’t sure. Anyway, it can open a gateway to the Other World, which leads to the release of supernatural forces from that world, based on myth and folklore, that proceed to rip people to shreds.

Why does it do this? It isn’t clear. As Brigid tries to explain “they hate us like we’re spiders. Because we’re alien. Or they’re just pricks.” She hasn’t decided yet. And I’m not sure if we can even speak of them in the plural. Are they perhaps all just facets of The Injection? Or are they an independent, third force that The Injection has released? I didn’t feel like Ellis had fully thought this out. Or maybe he had ideas for where it was all going but never got around to explaining them. It seems clear that he intended the series to go on, but this collected edition takes us through issues #1-15, ending in 2017, and I don’t think there have been any new developments since.

So the story is frankly mush. And it wraps up with a straight steal from the end of the 1967 film Quatermass and the Pit. I mean, I don’t mind a bit of borrowing or homage, but this is just cut and paste. However I did like following the different characters around as things got going and I actually would be interested in reading more if they ever continue the run.

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Criminal 6: The Last of the Innocent

Yeah, I didn’t feel very proud going to sign this one out of the library. Not with that title and cover. Afraid I might catch some dirty looks from the librarian.

But the thing is, the picture on the cover doesn’t really reflect anything about the content and the title left me scratching my head. I guess this is a picture of Lizzie and she’s the last innocent person Riley Richards knows?

To fill you in: Riley Richards is a generally worthless guy who married into a super-rich family. His wife, however, is a slut (something he should have seen coming) and he decides to kill her and frame an old rival (who is also now her lover) for her murder. As part of his plan he makes use of an old friend who is a lifelong drug user, but the friend finds out what he’s done after the fact and even though he promises not to tell anyone Riley kills him too just to be safe. Then he arranges to have the rival killed in prison, leaving Riley rich, safe, and free to ride off into the sunset with his hometown sweetheart Lizzie.

It’s a pretty simple crime story, with the main hook being a visual one as Sean Phillips draws all the flashbacks in a different style, like an Archie comic. Which fits because these are all drawn from Riley’s high school days and the characters have different Archie analogs (Riley Richards is Archie Andrews, Lizzie is Betty, Felix is Veronica, Freakout is Jughead, etc.). But it’s also incongruous because Archie and company didn’t find themselves in the sort of adult situations this crew do.

There’s very little connection here to the main Criminal story arc, though Tracy Lawless and Sebastian Hyde have brief appearances. I would wager though that there is more to come in this series about Riley, as The End feels more like To be Continued.

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Absolute Superman 1: Last Dust of Krypton

No, I didn’t like this much. It’s a collection of the first six issues of the Absolute Superman comic and it’s all backstory, explaining how Kal-El escaped the destruction of his home planet of Krypton and crash-landed onto the Kent homestead in Kansas. The way the story is told we switch back and forth between the events leading up to the death of Krypton “years ago,” and then what’s happening on Earth in the present.

The main conceit is that the two planets mirror each other exactly. On Krypton Kal-El is raised by homesteading parents, who are effectively Krypton’s version of farmers, in an area known as the Redlands. And just as Krypton is being destroyed by subterranean forces set loose by excessive mining or fracking and its social structure pressed to the point of revolution between the different political orders (scientists at the top, labourers at the bottom, a police state maintaining the hierarchy), so a near-future Earth is dominated by a militaristic technofascist organization (the Lazarus Corporation) that keeps the miners and other plebs under its heel by brute force. The Kents are the last of the yeoman farmers in America, so Kal-El is ready to join the revolutionary underclass when he grows up and becomes Superman. Meanwhile a shadowy figure named Brainiac is keeping tabs on Superman, though for what purpose isn’t clear, while a kick-ass Lazarus agent named Lois Lane is on Supe’s tail.

As with all the Absolute Universe stories this is a pretty radical re-imagining of the title character, though not as wild as Absolute Batman or Absolute Martian Manhunter. This feels more like the familiar Superman transported to a different or future timeline. The main change is that a lot of his power seems to come from his suit, which is operated by an AI called Sol that requires solar power to recharge and that provides Kal-El (his identity as Clark Kent is never mentioned) with helpful advice and information as he goes along. And Sol is also an aid to the reader, who is probably even more at sea given how much needs to be explained about what’s going on.

But no, I didn’t like it much. It feels like it’s all background with no clear story in the foreground or villain aside from the faceless Lazarus Corp. Brainiac remains mostly offscreen and it’s only on the final page that an angry Ra’s Al Ghul rises from a Lazarus pit (so that’s how it got its name!). There’s some conflict being set up, but it’s taking some time to get going and I can’t say it hooked me, I think mainly because Kal-El/Superman remains such a vague figure. I could understand him as a boy, but on Earth he struck me as a total cipher, and not that interesting either. Meanwhile, the political subtext was pretty standard stuff for a lot of SF stories, going back over a hundred years.

Will I read the next volume? Maybe. But I’m not in any rush.

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Simpsons Comics: Dollars to Donuts

There’s a mix of good and bad in this selection of Simpsons comics, though the good outweighs the bad because the best stories are the longer ones that were originally published as anchors to individual issues.

So, for example, the first story is 27 pages long and it follows a $5 bill through various adventures around the town of Springfield as it passes through several hands. There are giant, radioactive hamsters at the nuclear plant and a revolutionary group plotting in an ice cream shop and everything loops around with Professor Frink traveling back in time to stop the assassination of President Lincoln. It was a lot of fun. But then it’s followed by a 4-page quickie about an award ceremony for local anchorman Kent Brockman that was just a brick. Next up is another entertaining portmanteau effort that is 27 pages with Homer sitting around the Employment Office swapping hard-luck stories with other job seekers like Sideshow Mel, Groundskeeper Willie, and Police Chief Wiggum. Then another 4-page dud about Homer trying to make money as a panhandler.

To give credit where it’s due, most of the longer stories are written by Ian Boothby. He’s worth whatever Matt Groening is paying him. Or maybe more. As I’ve wondered before, I don’t know why Groening is on the masthead on every comic here. Is he even executing any kind of editorial function? The job titles he’s given (“The Great Anticipator,” “Beloved Employer,” “Bad Apple”) are all gags. I figure it’s just a legal requirement that he be named.

So overall a good time, even as there is a leitmotif of failure running through the stories selected. I already mentioned the line-up at the Employment Office, a bunch of losers who are only saved by Mayor Quimby rehiring all of them on a “Gross Incompetence Amnesty Day.” Then Old Gil, the perennially down-on-his-luck salesman, shows up several times, always falling on his face and begging for a break. Mr. Burns loses his power plant and is left lying around Smithers’ house all day eating junk food while Smithers tries (unsuccessfully) to find a job that will support the two of them. Superintendent Chalmers loses his job, again temporarily, and Homer becomes principal at the Springfield High, where he starts a group called Junior Underachievers that brings in people “to talk about how they screwed up their lives.” Speakers include Krusty, Dr. Nick, and Old Gil.

Like everything about the Simpsons though we mostly laugh with these guys, not at them. Failure is part of the human comedy.

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Absolute Martian Manhunter 1: Martian Vision

DC’s Absolute Universe (AU) is a re-imagining of the DCU that I think takes pride in just how radically it refashions the traditional DC line-up of superheroes. That’s certainly the case with Deniz Camp’s and Javier Rodríguez’s version of the Martian Manhunter. Gone is the shape-shifting guy from Mars who assumes the human identity of a detective on Earth named John Jones. Now John Jones is an FBI agent who is somehow possessed by (or psychically “entangled” with) an alien force that can read minds, which is the essence of the “absolute perspective” that is “Martian vision.” What this looks like on the page is a groovy psychedelic burst of swirling clouds of coloured smoke with text that reveals various inner lives. The Manhunter him- (or it) self is rendered as a green Picasso face with a single big red eye and long rubbery arms. Yes, he’s Gumby. But he has no physical form that anyone can see and remains John’s imaginary friend.

He’s not even called the Martian Manhunter here but the Martin Mind****er. Because that’s what he’s all about. He’s not a superhero so much as an alien therapist with the reach of the Internet, operating like some concerned AI program able to read the minds of everyone in Middleton. “Why do people do the things they do?” John asks. MM replies in his typically disjunctive manner: “Traumatic quantities of pain damage despair! You I we are coming apart! Overexposure to fundamental reality results in anti-life spiral!” It seems the whole world is suffering some kind of psychic breakdown.

It’s nobody’s fault though because what’s really happened is that people have been infected with the mind virus of the White Martian. This is another alien force, opposed to the MM, that is turning people into homicidal maniacs. Together John and his Gumby parasite have to stop the White Martian, which I think they mostly do, though I couldn’t follow the story at all.

OK, it’s something different. Very different. Different enough to give you a headache. The feeling I came away with though is that there really wasn’t much story here. It felt like six issues of set-up, at the end of which I still didn’t think the idea had been properly introduced. If the style of it is your thing, I think this is creative to the point of being visionary and it’s incredibly original. At times I felt blown away. But in the end I wish it had been more grounded, with an actual story, and had made a bit more sense or been more coherent. Plus I hate almost everything psychedelic.

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Criminal 5: The Sinners

I don’t know if this is the longest volume yet in the Criminal series but it sure felt like it. There’s a lot of plot to get through. When last we left tough guy Tracy Lawless he’d gone to work, reluctantly, for Center City’s crime boss Sebastian Hyde. As things get going here he’s basically an enforcer and hit man, but Mr. Hyde thinks he’s not a team player and is too soft because he only whacks people who have it coming, not just anyone the boss man thinks needs whacking.

A problem has arisen though in that a bunch of crooked but supposedly protected types (“made men”) are being offed and nobody can figure out who’s doing it. Hyde puts Lawless on the case, which ends up involving a gang of vigilantes looking to clean up the mean streets. At the same time the army has sent a special agent after Lawless, who has technically gone AWOL. And Lawless is trying to rein in Hyde’s wild child of a daughter while at the same time having an affair with Hyde’s wife.

There’s a lot going on that needs to get sorted out, which it is in the usual brutal fashion. The pieces all fit together nicely though and I thought this was the best constructed story in the series so far. The only complain I’d register has to do with the speech balloons. These are often doubled so that two balloons are placed side by side with an open gap between them. The problem is that the space doesn’t make it clear if the text should be read straight across or in all of one bubble first and then on to the next. Once you get used to it you can read it more easily, but it remains a bit off-putting.

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Criminal 4: Bad Night

The fourth volume in the Criminal series is a bit of a side alley off the main mean streets of Center City. Several times in earlier comics we’d seen glimpses of a newspaper serial about a Dick Tracy-clone private investigator named Frank Kafka. And just saying that much I want to stop for a second and wonder when this neo-noir series is set. The stories in the previous volume, The Dead and the Dying, were time-stamped 1972. Bad Night is presumably set a generation later but I don’t think there were many newspapers running serial comic strips around that time. And the nod to Dick Tracy is unambiguous, down to the sharp brim of Frank Kafka’s fedora. I guess it’s always the 1930s or ‘40s in neo-noir, a timeless shade of gray.

Anyway, Bad Night tells the story of Jacob Kurtz, the creator of the Frank Kafka strip. Kurtz is haunted by various demons, including some damaging run-ins with the law years earlier, just after the death of his wife and being busted for his involvement in a counterfeit ring. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what all happened in the past, but it got a police detective named Max Starr (yeah, right) on Jacob’s case and there’s a mutual hate between the two that has continued. This complicates things even more when Kurtz falls in with a femme fatale named Iris and gets involved, against his will, in another bad heist. There seem to be a lot of bad heist plans in this series.

I found it perfectly readable, with all the requisite squalid highlights. Iris, for example, is a nurse and a stripper (virgin and whore), someone so sexually damaged that “to get off, she needed a savagery that bordered on contempt.” Which is another way of saying she has bad taste in men. I had some trouble figuring out what was driving Max Starr though, and the ending seemed a little muddled. Kurtz has visions of Frank Kafka appearing at his side throughout the back half of the book and it’s clear that he (Kurtz) doesn’t enjoy robust mental health, so any conclusions you draw have to be qualified given that you may be reading the diary of a madman.

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The Death of Superman

At the time (1992-93) this comic was an event and caused a sensation. But then with its success (it sold over 6 million copies) it became a kind of trend. Now superheroes, and indeed whole universes, are dispatched with ease. Because you can always bring them back in another timeline. Or, as happened in the case of Superman, have him regenerated somehow. It wouldn’t take long before The Simpsons were even mocking the whole thing as a “fake-out.”

I wouldn’t be quite that cynical, and I am a cynical guy. Sure you could call this a publicity stunt, but DC is in the business of drawing attention and selling comics. I don’t knock them for it. I was, however, a little disappointed at what they came up with for the Man of Steel’s final act.

This comic only contains the first of three story arcs that make up the Death of Superman cycle. It’s called “Doomsday!” which is the name of the behemoth who takes Superman down. Nowhere is it explained who or what Doomsday is. According to Maxima, who gets inside his head at one point, “He’s hate, death, and blood lust personified! Nothing more.” Huh. Later comics would go into his background, and it is kind of interesting, but here he’s just a juggernaut who destroys everything in his path. Why it takes so long for him to get out of his straitjacket wasn’t clear to me. Once we get a look at him he didn’t seem that striking in appearance, with his most distinguishing characteristic being the horny protuberances that stick out of his joints.

What really let me down though is that he’s dumb as a bag of sand. I would have thought Superman might have used his had and come up with a winning strategy given how predictable Doomsday is, but instead they just go toe-to-toe in a series of slobberknockers that turns the story into a repetitive slugfest, punctuated with sound effects like “KRAKATOOM!” and bellows of “GRAAUHRARR!”

It’s not a bad comic, and given the stakes you can excuse how seriously it takes itself. I also liked how the final issue is presented entirely in full-page drawings, with a final double-page spread of Superman expiring in Lois Lane’s arms. They really wanted this to be a comic for the ages. I don’t think they did though just because Doomsday is so limited a villain and there’s no plot to speak of at all. It does have a kind of primitive force to it though and is easy to remember, even if the rumours of Superman’s demise were, as everyone guessed, greatly exaggerated.

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