Torso

Torso is a six-part series based on the Cleveland Torso Murderer investigation. Though the killer was never apprehended, it’s assumed that he killed and then dismembered some 12 victims in the 1930s, leaving their body parts scattered around Cleveland (for fuller accounts of what happened, see here and here). So we’re definitely in true-crime noir territory here, as if you couldn’t tell from the stark black-and-white art inking every face half in shadow.

There’s also a documentary feel to the proceedings, underscored by cityscapes backlit with vintage photos. And for the most part, at least in the early going, creators Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko stick fairly close to the record, even including a gallery of newspaper archive clippings and pictures with this edition (though there’s no bibliography or suggested further reading; even 300 had suggestions for further reading!). On the other hand, some names have changed and made-up characters have been introduced. The drama is heightened and compressed. And at the end a climactic shootout in a burning human abattoir that is very Hollywood is wholly invented. But overall it’s not bad on that front. Just remember that it is a fictionalization, a historical graphic novel.

The presentation plays off different tensions. The separate chapters begin by taking us in and out of focus and commercial stippling. As with the shadow – and there is a lot of shadow in this book! – it seems the harder we look the less we see. Another tension is between static and dynamic. Stencil-like figures are repeated identically throughout the book, sometimes throughout entire scenes of dialogue and sometimes reappearing in different scenes in different chapters. But this stationary feeling is given a spin by a layout that zigs and zags around the page, or that requires you to turn the book on its side to read. One scene, Eliot Ness’s interview with the killer “Gaylord Sundheim,” even forces you to turn it all the way around as it’s written in a spiral.

That spiral page (or double-page spread) will annoy some people, but I thought it had a thematic point and worked well playing off the circling movement with the way figures are repeated over and over. Plus, it’s a one-off.

This is a stylish but not artificially artsy book that I rated very highly, though I’ll concede that it’s probably not for everyone. Don’t get hung up on it being an accurate account of the Cleveland torso murders and just enjoy it for the dark entertainment that it is.

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Plants vs. Zombies: Zomnibus Volume 1

Sometime around about the year 2000 it became clear that videogames were taking over the movie business. You could say comic books were too, and in many ways it comes to the same thing. Lots of CGI and narratives structures built around the idea of progressing through various levels before facing off against a main bad guy at the end, then resetting or rebooting and doing the whole thing over again on an endless loop.

Plants vs. Zombies is a popular and very simple videogame that basically has the player using various weaponized plants to beat back an outbreak of zombies. Somehow they figured there was a comic book in there. And not just one book, but a whole series!

It’s all very bright and colourful, but as you could probably guess it’s spread pretty thin. A pair of eleven-year-old chums, Nate Timely and Patrice Blazing, team up with Patrice’s inventor-uncle Crazy Dave to stop the zombie army of Dr. Edgar Zomboss (he’s a doctor of thanatology) from taking over the town of Neighborville. Seeing as this is for kids there’s no real violence aside from the odd zombie limb falling off, and the day is always saved.

This “zomnibus” edition collects three story arcs, Lawnmageddon (an introduction to the basic storyline), Timepocalypse (using a time machine to collect various pieces of one of Dr. Zomboss’s evil inventions) and Bully for You (the best of the bunch, with a gang of college zombies getting revenge on Dr. Zomboss for having bullied them years earlier).

A comic for kids who would rather be playing a videogame doesn’t offer much for the rest of us. The standard zombie refrain of “brains” quickly gets tired, but not quite as quickly as Crazy Dave’s gibberish, which has to be translated throughout by Patrice. Meanwhile, the story just sort of jerks around with little in the way of connecting tissue between the various episodes, to the point where several times I had to check to see if any pages were missing. I guess it was worth sticking my head in the door, but it’s not a series I’ll be bothering with anymore.

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300

The first thing that strikes you about 300 (the collection of a five-part series that was originally published in separate volumes) is its physical appearance. There’s the shape of it: a stretched out format that allows each page to be a double-page spread that emphasizes strong horizontals in the art and an overall sense of epic, CinemaScope visuals. But at the same time it’s actually quite a slender book, under 100 pages, which underscores how efficient the text is. It is, after all, an action comic without a lot of interest in historical accuracy, and the hero (the Spartan king Leonidas) is suitably laconic in his words. The text is all very bombastic in a hokey way – as we’re back with the defence of Western Civilization against the evil Eastern empire – but at least there isn’t much of it to roll your eyes at. And besides, this is a comic book.

You could read it as vaguely homophobic and as foreshadowing the later trouble Frank Miller would get into with the anti-Islamic comments he’d go on to make. But in Miller’s defence, while the knock on those boy-loving Athenians makes no sense, as there was even more of this in Sparta, where it was even more deeply embedded in the culture, it’s also true that being on the receiving end of homosexual sex was still seen in Classical times as something shameful, and could be cast as a military metaphor. See, for example, the Eurymedon vase and compare it to what is said here about the Persians showing the Greeks their backsides at Marathon. And as far as the cultural angle goes, the view of Persians (or are they orcs?) as being pleasure-loving and decadent (politically as well as morally) goes back at least as far as Herodotus, and insofar as Miller addresses the subject of religion here, in the form of the Spartan ephors, it’s clear he has no time for any of it.

Acclaimed when it first came out in 1998, it’s a work that’s only grown in stature after the release in 2006 of Zack Snyder’s mostly-faithful film adaptation (which Miller served as a consultant and executive producer on). I think it misses a chance to be something more than just a rousing, boo-yah adventure story, but as an action comic I think it’s exceptional, with the art in particular balancing motion with stasis (those galloping horses suspended in air) and visions of chaos with discipline and order. There are also surprising perspective shifts (mixing in lots of overhead “shots”), and the motif or visual punctuation of forests of bristling spears and arrows that thrust us forward, stand at attention like exclamation points, or lie scattered and broken in the chaos of a battle’s aftermath. So while it’s a story that doesn’t occupy me very much it’s still a book I can return to fairly regularly just to admire the unique style of its presentation.

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The Empty Man

This one left me with mixed feelings.

The main problem I had with it is that it’s murky. What I mean by that is two things. In the first place, Cullen Bunn’s story is so vague (not to mention unresolved at the end) that I honestly had no idea what was going on. There’s an outbreak of suicidal dementia that gets dubbed the Empty Man virus because that’s something the victims are heard to mention. There’s a preacher who thinks this might be a sign from or manifestation of God. Or it might be aliens. Or it might be some actual psychic virus, one that began with a possessed patient zero who the Empty Man cult is keeping alive. I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone in the comic understands either. A pair of FBI agents are investigating, and so is the CDC. They have visions and receive messages, but are these just hallucinations? Again, I don’t know. And we’re never told.

(I should add as an aside here that they made a movie “based on” this comic that was released in 2020. From what I’ve heard, it only has the loosest connection to the comic.)

Then there’s the art by Vanesa R. Del Rey. It’s very sketchy and rough. Which you could say makes it a perfect complement to Bunn’s story: you can’t understand what’s going on and you can’t see what’s going on either. What the hell is happening to the woman’s husband in the first issue? Explosive diarrhea? There’s no amount of looking at that picture that makes it clear to me. In other places the drawing is so crude and the colouring so dark I literally couldn’t locate faces, much less read them. No question Del Rey has her own style, but it wasn’t my thing even if it did give the book a really distinctive feel.

These caveats entered, I still found myself enjoying it, or at least committed to reading along. Bunn and Del Rey do, somehow, conjure up an effectively grimy vision of madness, and if it’s all a mess, well, that could just be the way things fall apart in the end times. But don’t ask me to explain any of it.

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Batman: His Greatest Adventures

Batman: His Greatest Adventures is a collection of standalone titles from Batman Adventures, which was the tie-in comic to the Batman: The Animated Series show. That’s where the style of artwork comes from, which you either love or hate. Personally, I love it. It’s highly stylized, with exaggerated but simplified forms. Batman’s face is represented as a flat plane like the side of an office building, and the Penguin (who in one story arc becomes mayor of Gotham) has the appearance of an Art Deco paperweight. Even Cat Woman, who looks more like a cartoon mouse with giant ears than a cat, is lots of fun.

The Joker and Riddler also show up, as well as Spellbinder in the final story, which is set in the Batman Beyond universe. Two villains you won’t see though are Two-Face and Poison Ivy, who are the two figures standing behind Batman on the cover. Talk about false advertising! How do comics get away with this?

Things start off great, with the first story being the best. It seems the Penguin has taken over Gotham Zoo with a flock of radio-controlled birds. I didn’t care as much for the other episodes. The Cat Woman story was good and the rest were only so-so. I thought the Batman Beyond episode had too much going on to fit into one comic, and the Scarecrow comic was just weak. All of the stories tend to wrap up quickly, but that’s the format.

Neither as dark as Batman too often gets, nor overly complicated in plot terms, this is just a bit of throwback comic fun. I haven’t read widely enough in the Batman Adventures to know if the stories collected here are the best in that series, but I had a real good time.

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Birches

Robert Frost is one of my favourite poets. I think he’s a favourite poet for a lot of people. A few years back (well, I guess it was a quarter-century ago, because time does fly) the American poet laureate Robert Pinsky ran something called the Favorite Poem Project and Frost had a half dozen poems in the mix, with “The Road Not Taken” being the clear winner among the more than 18,000 entries.

“Birches” isn’t quite as well known, but it’s still popular among what the critic David Orr refers to as Frost’s two audiences: poetry devotees and the great mass of readers. To these two (obviously not mutually exclusive) groups I’d add a third: those versed (as Frost would put it) in country things. This seems obvious to me because I grew up on a farm, close to nature. This was both a good and a bad thing, as Frost himself knew, but more than that it’s also a very rare thing in today’s world. I think something like 5% of the current population of North America grew up on farms. So most people aren’t versed, or at least as versed, in country things.

When I read “Birches” I like what it gets right. Like when, after a storm, the trees are encased in an enamel of ice that melts in the next day’s sun, the “crystal shells / Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust.” Why the snow crust? Because there’d been an ice storm and that means the surface of the snow is a hardened carapace that the broken ice bounces off. Or take the whimsical evocation of “some boy”

As he went out and in to fetch the cows – Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself, Summer or winter, and could play alone.

Damn. That really was me growing up. Even walking out to fetch the cows.

I mention all this only as a way of bringing up the fact that I have never heard of anyone riding birches the way Frost describes the activity here. I even have trouble imagining how it would be possible. I looked on the web and couldn’t find any videos of it. And more to the present point, despite it being what the poem is, on the surface, “about,” Ed Young doesn’t illustrate any kids doing it. Perhaps he didn’t know what it looked like either.

What Young’s paintings do re-create is the peculiar forest camouflage of the distinctly patterned birch trees. The way their short horizontal stripes balance the long verticals of their trunks and the spangle of their canopy, a very dome of sky flecked with shimmering fire. And of course there are those country things, like bringing in hay and walking the dog. This is the landscape and poetryscape of memory, if you were there. The past is another version of the poem’s vision of heaven that we can climb toward, if only to be dropped gently back to earth. And I can’t say I’d mind being snatched away to such a place, not to return.

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Grass Kings: Volume One

Comics, with their serial publication, seem especially fond of self-contained communities containing a full slate of recurring characters. L’il Abner and his hillbilly cousins in Dogpatch. Archie and the gang in Riverdale. Asterix and the village of indomitable Gauls. Springfield and the Simpson family. The Grass Kingdom – so named, I assume, because of its location on the prairies rather than its status as a grow-op – is a similar sort of place. It’s a scrappy (built out of scrap, looking for a fight) village vaguely located somewhere in the American (or Canadian) West. In this first volume we’re introduced to all the locals: the three brothers who constitute the kingdom’s first family, the sniper in the tower, the author, the pilot, the guy who sells the booze, etc. I don’t see where or how there’s a functioning economy, or even how everyone manages to stay fed, but they seem to get by as a group of people living together apart: “a closed community, running of the grid,” armed to the teeth and apparently left to their own devices by the distant gubmint.

For all its familiarity, I found the setting quite unique. In a similar way, the story feels put together out of borrowed bits and pieces, but taken as a whole it’s something very different. A woman rises out of the lake and her husband, sheriff of a neighbouring town, wants to take her back. She is reluctant, and violence breaks out. While this is all taking place in the present there are flashbacks that build up a subplot involving a serial killer living in the kingdom, and deeper historical dives that make the place out to be a sort of temporal nexus for violence over the centuries, or indeed millennia. This in turn plugs the story into archetypal narrative forms like myth, romance, and folktale, and we needn’t be surprised that scenes like the woman rising from the lake will be followed up by fire-breathing dragons flying around. That’s one way of saying this is a timeless tale, with the battle between the kingdom and the town of Cargill being like an episode in the Trojan War.

So hats off to Matt Kindt for the concept here, and the artwork of Tyler Jenkins makes a good match with its sketchy outlines and washes of watercolour nicely evoking the dreamlike atmosphere. Jenkins also draws horses well. The only pictures I felt he was pulling up short on were the police car being riddled with bullets and the bomb being dropped on the town. I didn’t think those kind of big, explosive moments were a good match for his light, almost transparent style.

I thought the characters needed to be a bit fuller, and there’s really too much going on, but for its world-building and multi-layered plot I’d give this high marks and a hearty recommendation. It’s one of the few comics I’ve read recently that I immediately went back through and read again, and it left me interested in seeing where it would be going next.

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Plunge

The back cover calls this a “surreal and gory celebration of ‘80s horror” but while I was picking up clear vibes of Deep Star Six and Leviathan (not to mention the more recent Underwater) the supplementary interviews with writer Joe Hill included in this edition make clear the story was mainly meant as an homage to John Carpenter’s The Thing crossbred with H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.

There’s maybe too much going on here (a Walkman that reads minds?) and there’s a bit of a sense that the story was getting away from Hill at the end, but overall it’s pretty darn solid. Even stock characters like the treacherous corporate flunky (a stand-by in the films of the period) worked well. But I especially liked the fraternal relationships and how they played out. It’s a little thing, but an effective twist on the clichéd business of having the sexy marine biologist turn out to be a romantic interest. I was glad that didn’t happen (again). Also good was the way the alien worms scaled: they’re threatening at both the micro and the macro level. Finally, the art by Stuart Immomen gives us an authentic ‘80s horror vibe of practical gore effects but with its own dark and distinctive look. A comic that’s hard to find fault with then, and one that didn’t disappoint on any level. First-rate stuff.

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Underworld Unleashed: The 25^th Anniversary Edition

I started out loving it. The first issue of the original three-issue miniseries was great, setting the table perfectly. We’re introduced to Neron, a demon lord who is going around collecting souls and taking them to hell. His plan is to power-up all the world’s greatest supervillains in exchange for their souls, which will lead to planet-wide chaos. Among his “inner council” are the Joker and Lex Luthor. It’s a great start and I was expecting great things from it.

I kept my hopes up even after the main storyline was derailed by the introduction of the four standalone issues. The first of which takes place on the planet Apokolips and required stuffing what felt like the entire history of Game of Thrones into a couple of pages of exposition. Unless you’re up to speed already on that whole bit of world building you may feel a bit discombobulated.

I didn’t mind these change-ups that much. I felt the crossovers might have helped to tell a coherent larger story. Only they don’t. There’s another inter-story that has Neron making more trouble in Arkham Asylum for Batman, but since he’d already broken Belle Reve Prison wide open in the first issue this seemed repetitive. This Arkham story was good as a standalone, but not as part of a through narrative. I was also really disappointed by the final issue, which had Barbara Gordon trying to figure out who was behind all the outbreaks of violence and being interrupted by Neron. Most of this issue was just profiles of all the baddies that Neron had recruited, and nothing was at stake since even Neron knew that Babs wasn’t going to go for his deal.

Then the climactic episode of the main story fizzled because it turns out that Captain Marvel/Shazam was the key to Neron’s plan but we hadn’t been prepared for this at all (Captain Marvel hadn’t even been seen anywhere in the series before this) and Neron ends up being defeated kind of easily, with no help from the army of souls he’d been acquiring. Indeed, after the first issue I think we only hear from the Joker and Luthor again briefly as they’re attempting to figure out the source of Neron’s power, which is another point that never pans out as being of any significance.

Still, if I had to give this an overall grade it would be pretty high. There’s so much good, original stuff in here, and I like the changes in art across the different stories, even if in the end things just don’t add up as well as I thought they should have and it felt like a lot got left on the table.

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Old Man Logan 1: Berserker

I guess one thing to say first off is that while this series is said to have been an inspiration for the 2017 movie Logan, the two don’t have anything in common except for an aging Wolverine. So if you hated that movie, you still might like the comics. Or not.

Anyway, I’ve said before how the multiverse became what defines superhero comics in the twenty-first century, and Old Man Logan provides yet another instance. In this alternative universe (it’s bar-coded as  Earth-807128) there has been a “supervillain uprising” that has seen the good guys all but wiped out and the Red Skull become president of the United States. Logan/Wolverine is now a homesteader in a version of the Wild West where the Hulk Gang (the degenerate offspring of Bruce Banner and She-Hulk) are running roughshod over everyone. Then somehow Logan gets sent back in time to our present day, a timeline where he memorably died and where he now takes it as his mission to prevent the grim future state of the supervillains from occurring. But if we believe in the whole idea of a multiverse with an infinity of variant worlds and timelines, this strikes me as Quixotic. Which, to be fair, is a point that’s raised here.

I like the basic idea of the superhero as retiree. Older readers in particular will be able to relate. There’s also a sort of Watchmen vibe going on, with Wolverine representing the Marvel O.G. against new incarnations of familiar names. I was nodding in agreement with Logan’s complaint about the 50 shades of Hulk and how that character “changes more than the moon. Grey, green, dumb, smart.” I also thought Andrea Sorrentino’s art really handled the action well, with lots of original signature panels and a style that evoked a world burnt-out with violence. Logan’s face is lined with what may be as many wrinkles as scars, looking like a map scratched out on parchment.

What I didn’t like was the whole idea of being thrown into another weird timeline I didn’t feel connected to in any way. Still, Jeff Lemire’s story here was good and the characters interesting if motivated in a rather dull way (the film that Logan took its cue from was Shane, while this comic draws from The Searchers). Also included in this volume is a standalone story set in the alternate-universe West where Wolverine takes out the Hulk Gang and the Hulkster himself in a gory series of showdowns (which was the climax of the original Old Man Logan arc). But of course if he could have done that in the first place, why the need to go back into the past to hunt Banner down there? Or maybe he did. None of these temporal paradoxes make sense.

Having said all that, the strength of the multiverse, and precisely what made it so popular at this time, is its ability to spin tired franchises off in strange new directions, which it does again here. The result is something different, and a pretty good comic in its own right.

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