Black Panther: The Complete Collection Volume 1

This is a collection of the run of Black Panther comics written by Christopher Priest (not the British novelist who wrote The Prestige) and published under the Marvel Knights imprint in 1998. The date is worth mentioning because if you don’t remember the ‘90s (and boy does it make me feel old to write that) then you might not get the references to the likes of Bill Clinton (not named, but clearly the “Bubba” president who goes chasing our nebbish narrator Everett K. Ross through the halls of the White House), Ken Starr, and Dan Quayle. Even I pulled a blank on knowing that LeeAnn Rimes recorded a cover of “Purple Rain” that was released in 1998.

The name of Donald Trump, however, has stayed with us, though he wasn’t a politician yet.

The date is also worth mentioning because the presentation is expressly in the manner of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), with everything jumbled out of order and most of the story being told in flashbacks. The second number basically has to retell the events of the first and fill in the blanks, and later we have to wait several issues to find out why Ross has been exiled to Iceland, and by the time we’re told, if you’re like me you may not care anymore. Meanwhile, whole episodes seem to come out of nowhere and are hard to place. I couldn’t figure out the chronology of the Kraven business, for example, though it was nice of him to drop in.

That said, I did think the jumbled storyline was well executed. I was a little less interested in the story itself though, and didn’t find it very involving. Achebe and his hand-puppet were an interesting double act, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what he was really up to, and at the end couldn’t even remember what happened to him. I assume he was himself a puppet of dark forces in the U.S. government. Killmonger shows up and . . . doesn’t have much to do. His agenda only becomes a bit clearer later on. Ditto the Avengers. The best of the bad guys is Hydro-Man, but he’s not long for this world, or series. Kraven the Hunter is fun and acquits himself well, but he’s quickly dealt with too, as is the team of B-list villains who take on the Black Bloc of superheroes and basically just get slapped around. The Fantastic Four make it onto the cover of issue 3, which is egregious mislabeling as they only show up in a single panel in the comic, and that’s part of a dream. Meanwhile, it was disappointing that we didn’t get to see the fight between the two bloated warrior egos of Thor and Zuri. That sounded like it was going to be epic.

One thing I did find interesting was the change in the line-up of artists, which added to the narrative scrambling to give another layer of fragmentation to the proceedings. We move from the thick shadowing and blurry outlines of Mark Texeira’s Claymation-style figures, through the Saturday-morning animation of Mike Manley, to the jagged striations of Sal Velluto, who draws torsos with more muscle groups than seem possible. Visually it makes for quite a change of gears, but it fits with the overall sense of continuity in chaos. If I had one complaint about the Panther’s appearance it would be about that strange semi-belt thing he wears. Is it just decorative? I thought it seemed odd. Plus, I know the colour has to be adjusted to show off the Panther’s physique, but it’s weird how blue he is. I would have gone with more greys.

In 1998 Priest thought it a real challenge to reinvent “one of Marvel’s least appreciated and dullest characters.” He mainly went about it by not focusing on T’Challa (or “the client”) at all, mainly letting us see him through the eyes of Ross, the “friend of the reader” who undercuts the heroic action every chance he gets with voiceover and play-by-play. It’s all knowing and ironic, but that was very 1998 too.

In sum, there’s a lack of clear conflict and rising dramatic tension, in large part due to the complexity of the storyline and the manner in which it unfolds. I still quite enjoyed it, but in many ways it’s a sort of anti-comic in that it doesn’t go for the kind of thing that we normally expect comics to do. I think that was what Priest was aiming for though and it’s a difficult mission that he accomplished.

Graphicalex

Criminal 8: My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies

The Criminal books are all set in the same world with many recurring characters, but they tend to alternate between ones that follow a broad overarching storyline and others that are more standalones with nothing but passing references to some familiar names. So Bad Night was about the comic strip writer Jacob Kurtz and then The Sinners had Tracy Lawless returning as the protagonist. The Last of the Innocent only mentioned Sebastian Hyde (the city’s crime boss) briefly and then Wrong Time Wrong Place was another Tracy Lawless story.

Which brings us to My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies, which deals with a new character in a separate adventure that just includes a phone call to Hyde to resolve the plot.

The central character here is Ellie, a girl with a troubled past who is in a drug rehab facility. While there she meets up with a young man named Skip. They get romantically involved and then break out and live on the run for a while before things come to the usual violent end.

I didn’t think very much of this one. It’s one of the two shortest books in the series, consisting of only a single issue. The story has a simple twist that isn’t too unexpected, and the main interest is in the telling of Ellie’s story through flashbacks. Her mother was a junky and this messed her up so that she idolizes famous people who died from overdoses. She’s also fallen in with a lot of bad people, including Hyde’s gang. There’s a link to the character of Leo from Coward, but that only comes in at the end.

I didn’t know what to make of Ellie’s referencing the song “Stevie Smith” by Vic Chesnutt and quoting from it. She doesn’t mention the fact that the lines she’s quoting, the lyrics of the song, are from the poem “Not Waving But Drowning” by Stevie Smith. I’m assuming though that Ed Brubaker was aware of this and he just didn’t want us to think that Ellie knew.

Graphicalex

American Vampire Book Two

The initial run of American Vampire comics jumped around a bit time-wise, but told a coherent story about the spread of a special strain of vampirism in the American Old West, led by the original American vampire, Skinner Sweet. An American vampire is a tougher strain than his Old World forebears, you see, and Skinner himself is well-nigh indestructible. Luckily there are forces arrayed against him, including an ancient society of vampire hunters called the Vassals of the Morning Star and Skinner’s own vampiric (but upstanding) descendants: Jim and Felicia Book, and Pearl Jones and her normie husband Henry Preston.

This anthology collects four standalone storylines set in the same American Vampire universe and it constitutes more of a grab-bag than Book One. Scott Snyder is still the writer for all of them, though his original partner Rafael Albuquerque only draws the first and last sections. Once again we’re on a rollercoaster trip through American history. In the first story, “Ghost Wars,” it’s the Second World War and Henry Preston is sent on a mission with a bunch of guys from the Vassals of the Morning Star to take out a vampire colony on a Japanese-occupied island during the Pacific campaign. Skinner Sweet has come along for the ride, which, when Pearl finds out, leads to her joining her hubby on the island and leading to a lot of vampire-on-vampire violence. The second story, “Survival of the Fittest,” has Felicia Book and her boyfriend, Cash McCogan, heading off to Nazi Germany just before America’s entry into the war to investigate a possible cure for vampirism. There they run into a legion of Nazi vampires and an ancient race of super-vampires the Nazis were trying to exterminate. This leads to another battle royale and a lot of vampire-on-vampire violence. The third story, “The Beast in the Cave,” is set in New Mexico Territory in 1871, which is before Skinner Sweet has been turned into a vampire. He and Jim Book are U.S. soldiers fighting Indians and the natives have a secret weapon in the form of a reawakened vampire woman named Mimiteh. And in the final story, “Death Race,” we’re in California in the mid-1950s and a James Dean-type rebel in a hot rod turns out to actually be a vampire hunter named Travis Kidd. He’s on the trail of Skinner Sweet, who we must figure has a hundred lives by now. The Vassals try to give Travis a helping hand but he prefers to work alone.

In other words there’s a whole lot going on and things only connect in the loosest of ways. For what it’s worth, I thought the fourth story was the best and the third the weakest. I’d actually forgotten about Felicia Book and Cash McCogan from the original story, but the Raiders of the Lost Ark vibe from “Survival of the Fittest” worked pretty well. “Ghost Wars” had a lot of action but I thought the story flimsy. In any event, Snyder was clearly intent on stretching the basic mythology in a bunch of different directions, and while the results were a lot less coherent than the original series it’s all entertaining enough if you just want to enjoy the action.

Graphicalex

Empire of the Dead: Act One

The set-up for Empire of the Dead felt so much like that of George Romero’s movie Land of the Dead that I had to check the dates. Once again we’re in New York City (the “Empire” in the title is for “Empire State”) sometime after the zombie apocalypse. A social elite live in high-rises while a military force keeps the zombies at bay and an underclass survive on eating rats while being entertained by zombie fights held in Central Park. But the zombies, while always restless, are getting smarter. We follow one of them, a former SWAT team member named Xavier, as she returns to the city with actual thoughts in her head.

A lot of this sounds like Land of the Dead, but the movie had come out ten years earlier and this story adds one big wrinkle. Those elites who run the city are actually . . . vampires! It seems the bloodsuckers are a few rungs ahead of the flesh-eaters in the hierarchy of the undead, being smarter and all, but there are complications. As I understood it, a vampire can actually be turned into a zombie if they become infected, so if that happens they have to be “excommunicated.” To kill a zombie you still have to shoot them in the head, but to kill a vampire you have to split the heart in two, left side from right. It doesn’t have to be with a wooden stake.

At least that was what I thought was going on, mainly gleaned from some expository dialogue. But if you get killed by a vampire, do you come back to life as a vampire, or a zombie? Or a zombie-vampire? That seems to be a live question with one victim that the doctor character here is studying. I’ll also add that the doctor is the sister of Barbara from Night of the Living Dead, whose story is retold and extended a bit in a nice little bit of fan service.

You’ll have guessed from this that there’s a lot of world-building going on. And I did find the notion of zombies vs. vampires kind of interesting in an Underworld-style monster mash-up sort of way. But I don’t know if I’ll ever find out what happened as Act One is only the first of three volumes of this series (each containing five issues) and I haven’t been able to find the other two anywhere.

Graphicalex

Criminal 7: Wrong Time Wrong Place

I’ve mentioned before how bleak the Criminal comics are. I don’t know if Wrong Time Wrong Place is any worse in that regard, but it’s a real downer. After surviving a brutal stint in prison in the mid-‘70s, Teeg Lawless takes his little boy Tracy on a road trip that’s directed toward various violent and criminal ends. The upshot of it being that Tracy realizes his course is already set in life and he’s just going to end up the same as his dad. It’s sad, but credit to Brubaker and Phillips for conveying that message so effectively.

It’s a simple story, padded out by lengthy fragments of comics that are being read by Teeg in prison (a Conan rip-off called Zangar the Savage) and Tracy on the road (a Werewolf by Night crossed with Shang-Chi effort called Fang the Kung-Fu Werewolf). This is a bit of self-regarding fun that the creators have indulged throughout the series, from the Frank Kafka strip in Bad Night to the Archie-style flashbacks in The Last of the Innocent. Unlike with those earlier examples though, I didn’t think the comic-within-a-comic thing served much of a purpose here. I suppose the comics are just meant to be escapist fantasies that also make some glancing comments on the action. Teeg is Zangar and Tracy is Fang, without the same scope for heroic action.

A coda has Teeg stealing some Christmas presents for his two boys that turn out to be girls’ toys. Another heist gone wrong in Center City, leaving everybody worse off and unhappier than before.

Graphicalex

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.

Graphicalex

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.

Graphicalex

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.

Graphicalex

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.

Graphicalex

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.

Graphicalex