Doctor Strange: A Separate Reality

This is the third volume in the Epic Collection series of Doctor Strange comics and it kicks off with a character who was still in flux. For one thing, he’s wearing a full black hood/mask and underneath his cloak he’s sporting conventional superhero tights that show off his generic superhero musculature. Thank goodness they realized that look wasn’t working and went back to letting him wear his usual duds. This guy gets his kicks above the neckline, sunshine. And when you have perhaps the most recognizable face in the Marvel pantheon, why pull a bag over it?

There are three main story arcs here. The first is the longest, with the good doctor taking on a series of Lovecraftian demons with names like Dagoth, Sligguth the Abominable, N’Gabthoth the Shambler from the Sea, Ebora the Dark Priestess of Evil, and Kathulos of the Eternal Lives. All of these baddies are defeated on the way to a showdown with Shuma-Gorath. That climactic issue has the title “Finally, Shuma-Gorath!” as though even the writers were getting tired of all the build-up.

This first story arc ends with the Ancient One dying, or more properly becoming one with the universe, leaving Doctor Strange as the Sorcerer Supreme. The next story has him fighting a sorcerer from the future named Sise-Neg, who is traveling through time absorbing all the magic in history so that he can recreate the Big Bang and become God. This is obviously very serious stuff, or as Dr. S. puts it “The power of Sise-Neg is the greatest threat our reality has ever known!” Which is weird because I thought Shuma-Gorath was the greatest threat our reality had ever known. After a while the inflated rhetoric runs out of places to go.

Finally, the third storyline has a villain named Silver Dagger hunting down the Doctor and killing him with his eponymous weapon. Except our hero saves himself by diving into the Orb of Agamotto and facing off with Death. Then he comes back to our world and rescues his girlfriend Clea and puts Silver Dagger in his place.

I went through this breakdown only because it illustrates a point that I think it worth drawing attention to. The thing is, both Shuma-Gorath and Sise-Neg are awesomely powerful multidimensional entities who threaten the existence of the entire universe, or at the very least “our reality” (which contains the universe). The way Doctor Strange engages them in cosmic battle is certainly dramatic and colourful, but neither is very interesting as a villain. Silver Dagger, on the other hand, is a buff old guy dressed in a silly midriff-baring halter top and with a crazy backstory that had him narrowly missing being elected Pope and then digging into the occult section of the Vatican’s library so as to learn how to become a demon hunter. He’s a fundamentalist Catholic and not at all a standard bad guy so much as someone with a monomaniacal thing for using magic to destroy magicians wherever he finds them. He’s a man with a mission, and it’s a mission that’s far more relatable than destroying the universe or becoming God. He’s humanized even to the point where Clea falls asleep listening to him tell his origin story, and he’s taken off stage at one point because he has to go to the bathroom: “Now excuse me. Nature calls.” I can’t think of another time I’ve seen a superhero excuse himself like that, and it made me laugh.

But even Doctor S has his human side here, with a different part of his nature calling when he realizes he’s “neglected” Clea “both as a man and your mentor in the mystic arts.” She can take a hint, and when he offers to instruct her in the way of the Vishanti she tells him she’ll be happy if he tells her about it later. “And with the soft, dancing flames lighting her smile, there is no doubt of her meaning . . .” When next we see Clea she’ll be on the floor “still warmed by the afterglow of love,” happily telling her pet rabbit how her lover is “so much a man . . . so much.” That was pretty risqué for a comic at the time.

Even in the Silver Dagger storyline however the emphasis is on what the back cover here calls “eldritch horrors and psychedelic threats!” Our hero is always getting sucked into different dimensions where he may meet floating skulls or man-eating plants or even a hookah-smoking caterpillar. The art of the dream dimension is “a kaleidoscopic cosmos filled with shifting shapes and colors – beyond even the imaginings of a Freud – a Dali – a Kandinsky!” Those lines come in a full-page spread by Gene Colan, who kicks things off really overloading the reader with large-format artwork. I think he averages four panels per page and has a lot of full-page and even the occasional double-page illustrations. By the end of the volume though we’re into the run of Frank Brunner and a more detailed look. But with either artist the language mirrors the visuals. We hear of how the “awesome eruption of cabalistic conjurations emblazoned the night.” Of how “dire perils” and “frightful abysses of forgotten fears and chasms of primordial horrors gape wide to destroy our world!” Of how “arcane bolts of bedevilment – flaring garishly against the surrounding pitch – leap from rigid fingers!” Nothing is too over the top for the Sorcerer Supreme!

It all makes for a fun series of adventures, with the dread Dormmamu put on hold so that the Doctor can fight new faces of evil with helpful allies (it’s always fun to have Namor pop by for a cameo) and old stand-bys like the Eye of Agamotto, the Vapors of Valtorr, the Shield of the Seraphim, and the Crimson Crystals of Cyttorak. All of these Epic Collections are substantial volumes, running around 450 pages, but I was entertained throughout this one. Even being weird and strange can become stale after a while, but by mixing up writers and artists and looking to grow the Doctor Strange universe with new characters they did a great job in these early days keeping things fresh and creative.

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Daredevil: Identity

At the end of the previous Daredevil volume, Dark Art, poor Blindspot had been blinded. Specifically, he’d had his eyes gouged out by the mad artist known as the Muse. So now, as if Matt Murdock didn’t have enough good ol’ Catholic guilt already weighing him down (the cover art to issue #15 is an homage to the classic Born Again cover by David Mazzucchelli), he also has to live with blaming himself for what’s happened to his protégé. He’s so down he’s even pursuing a kind of death wish by putting a bounty on his own head as Daredevil.

It all sets up a story arc whose main purpose is to provide the backstory for why everyone in the world forgot that Matt Murdock was Daredevil. This is related by Matt in the confessional to a muscular priest (he’s a member of the Ordo Draconum) who absolves him by sending him on his way to go back to fighting crime. I won’t go into the details of the mass amnesia event, but it involves the Purple Man, who has built a machine that, along with his purple brood of kids, allows him to amplify his powers and control the minds of every human on the planet. Who knew this B-lister baddie would go on to have such an impact?

This plot device was criticized at the time, and fairly so. It’s all ridiculous, even for a superhero comic. And it’s most of what you get here. So the Back in Black series by Charles Soule continues its up-and-down progress. Chinatown good. Supersonic bad. Dark Art good. Identity bad. My hopes are up for the next instalment!

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Alien: The Illustrated Story

This is, on the face of it, the graphic novel version of Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien, but there’s some backstory that has to be added to that.

It was published (after parts of it previewed in Heavy Metal magazine) at the same time as the movie’s release, and the writer (Archie Goodwin) and illustrator (Walter Simonson) hadn’t had a chance to see the film. Goodwin was working from the shooting script while Simonson had seen production stills and a rough cut. This helps explain the sense one has reading it that it’s something the same but different from the movie. The biggest difference I was struck by is the use of colour, which isn’t at all like the palette Scott was using. That giant emerald green spaceship, for example. Or the sickly shade of yellow of the facehugger.

It was a huge hit, becoming the first comic to appear on the New York Times bestseller list, and has gone on to be recognized as a classic in the genre of comic adaptations. I think it’s wonderful. The change-ups made to the paneling in the page layouts particularly stand out, though it’s hard to find fault with anything. Maybe the narrative voice, which they may have felt was necessary to explain things to an audience that didn’t already know the story cold. But that said, I don’t think any movie franchise has been better served, for so long, by its comics. And it all started here.

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Gideon Falls Volume 6: The End

I began my review of the previous Gideon Falls volume, Wicked Worlds, with the précis “Sheer chaos.” Well, I hadn’t seen anything yet!

In this final part of the story reality comes even more undone, exploding into a barrage of double-page spreads that make you turn the book upside-down to read, or that shatter the page layout or invoke the stairways of Piranesi, or that finally dissolve into ALL WHITE. NOTHING. That latter being the text description from the script for the comic that’s included in this edition as a bonus.

Also included is a visual essay by Andrea Sorrentino on “The Inner Workings of Gideon Falls.” I was hoping this would explain the comic’s multidimensional geography (or “Gideonverse”) a little better, as it even comes with maps that look borrowed from academic editions of Dante’s Comedy, but I ended up being just as confused after looking at them. I doubt there’s any way of explaining what’s going on adequately.

Which means there’s no way I can summarize things here. I’m not sure what happens or why. Our heroes dive into the evil half of the cosmos, confront the Bug God, and destroy the Pentoculus. This action turns out to be of more consequence than blowing up the Black Barn, which can always be rebuilt. And maybe the Pentoculus gets rebuilt too, since we get an inevitable, irritating final panel that suggests there’s no way of putting things right.

I did like this series, mainly as a showcase for Sorrentino’s art. But in The End I thought that art had taken over too much, shoving the story to one side and not bringing things together in a way I found very satisfying. I thought the story as it originally started out had more potential than this. To be honest, it felt like Lemire had checked out by this point and told Sorrentino to just draw anything before turning the lights out when he was done.

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Simpsons Comics Colossal Compendium: Volume One

I do like the Simpsons’ comics, a lot, and these Colossal Compendiums offer a selection of their best stories so they’re usually quite enjoyable. That said, I didn’t think this volume was all that great. None of the stories were particularly funny and the weird ones were only slightly off-kilter, unlike the really creative (and demented) stuff in the Treehouse of Horrors collections. There are a lot of good ideas here, like the characters transformed into different digital avatars in MMORPGs, a full-length “official movie adaptation” of the Radioactive Man movie, and a trip to a Simpsons Museum in the future that explains how they saved (and then doomed) humanity. But there aren’t a lot of good gags and I didn’t feel the writing was as sharp or as smart as it usually is.

There’s lots of Professor Frink though, if that’s your jam. And only a brief appearance by Ned Flanders, if he isn’t.

As a bonus, each Colossal Compendium comes with a little cut-paper project of a Springfield building that you can fold together. Volume One has The Android’s Dungeon comic and baseball card shop.

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Chew Volume Two: International Flavor

Great stuff. I had my hopes up high after Chew Volume One: Taster’s Choice and International Flavor exceeded all expectations.

There is a self-contained story here sending F.D.A. agent Tony Chu to an island in the Pacific called Yamapalu that grows a kind of fruit (it’s called a gallsaberry, or gallus sapadillo) that tastes like chicken. This is important because, as you’ll remember, chicken is now a black market delicacy after an outbreak of bird flu. While on Yamapalu there is a sort of revolution or civil war that Tony gets caught in the middle of, alongside his partner John Colby (now out of the hospital with his face rebuilt after half of it got hacked off with a cleaver), his brother (invited to the island as a celebrity chef), and his sort-of girlfriend, the food columnist Amelia Mintz.

It’s zany action from start to finish, and introduces a number of new plot points (like an ersatz vampire who’s really an evil cibopath), while dropping hints to storylines that are still being developed (the massacre at the Russian observatory, the missing Mason Savoy, the crime boss Montero and his horny frogs). Meanwhile, Tony’s boss Applebee is still being a jerk and Amelia remains just out of reach.

It’s fun keeping track of all these different threads and characters because nothing is random. Even Yamapalu’s governor had a cameo appearance in Taster’s Choice that you’ll likely remember. Which makes you figure that we probably haven’t seen the last of the corrupt police chief Raymond Kulolo, though I’m afraid the super-sexy U.S.D.A. agent is good and dead.

More good writing from John Layman and great art from Rob Guillory, who delivers “pure aesthetic zing.” I really love what they’ve built here and can’t wait for the next course.

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Titans Vol. 3: A Judas Among Us

The title of this Titans story arc refers to an insight that Omen gets while interrogating Psimon, who is being held in prison on Rikers Island. It seems one member of the Titans is going to betray the team. So who, we’re left to wonder when this information gets out, is the Judas?

Such a plot hook lets the series once again dwell on how important it is that the Titans are a team of superfriends, whose loyalty to each other is a special bond. Though some of the them are more than ready to take things from being friends to the next level. Garth/Tempest is in love with Lilith/Omen. Roy/Arsenal is in love with Donna Troy, but she may have a crush on Wally/Flash. Karen/Bumblebee needs to get her memory back (it’s been stolen by H.I.V.E. but luckily downloaded onto a flash drive) so that she can remember that she’s in love with Mal/Vox. “My, it’s like a soap opera,” Psimon says to Omen. “You’re not a hero, Lilith. You’re a counselor for a group of maladjusted young adults.” And he’s not wrong.

Anyway, they string things along for a few issues and several possible Judas scenarios, before (spoiler alert) it turns out Donna is the enemy within. But it’s not really Donna, but Donna-from-the-future, where she’s adopted the name Troia and has taken a heel turn. This Troia enters our world through a dimensional portal (yawn) and transforms Psimon, Vox, Gnarrk, the Key, and Mr. Twister into ramped-up villain avatars before taking on the Titans in a battle royale.

I didn’t get into any of this. Perhaps because there were so many different characters. Perhaps because the fighting was so generic, with no interesting strategies or twists. Wally West dies (because of the damage to his heart that he got in the fight against Deathstroke), but is then brought back to life because it turns out he was just frozen in the speed force. Happens to superheroes all the time. And Donna defeats Troia with a double-page punch that launches her right back to whatever dimension she broke out of. No messy clean up! We’re left with the certainty that everybody’s going to be enjoying pizza and pop back at Titans Tower, while holding hands with their new sweethearts and stealing kisses when they’re alone with their crushes.

A pull quote on the cover announces this is “Everything a Titans fan wants and more.” And that may be right. But for a non-fan like me it was less, and I don’t imagine I’ll be coming back this way again.

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Saga of the Swamp Thing Book Two

Love him or hate him, and over the years I’ve done a bit of both, you can’t deny Alan Moore always does his own thing. And he was doing it again as he took over Saga of the Swamp Thing and made the title his own. In this one volume there’s a journey to hell that mixes Dante with Dr. Strange, a tribute to Walt Kelly’s Pogo stuffed with wordplay that’s sounds more like James Joyce than swamp-speak, and a full issue that’s nothing but psychedelic sex between Swampy and Abigail Arcane. Or, as Neil Gaiman puts it in his Foreword, “an hallucinogenic consummation between a seven-foot-high mound of vegetation and an expatriate Balkan.” For some fans this issue has always been a favourite but I just give them credit for pulling it off. I can’t say I really enjoy it.

As always, Moore is guilty of sins of excess. He gets out over his skis and takes a tumble. I liked the return of Arcane in the form of Matt Cable, but all the stuff about a great uprising of evil centered on the bayou that’s even visible from space was too much. Rebranding the comic (however temporarily) as “Sophisticated Suspense” was spot on, but the sophistication only works as long as it doesn’t get pretentious. If there was another hint of foreboding here I’d flag the character of Swamp Thing himself, who is just passive and glum most of the time. His rage at Arcane, which even pushes him into red speech bubbles, is the sole exception. The rest of the time he seems mostly content to sink back into the swamp and vegetate, making the drama dependent on supporting players, and of course Moore’s poetic flights of fancy.

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The Raven

Who doesn’t love pop-up books? I always got a kick out of them as a kid, and today, while I don’t have the same sense of wonder I had back then, I think I appreciate the skill and imagination that goes into their design even more.

And who doesn’t love Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven”? Well, maybe not as many people as love pop-up books. But as I noted in an earlier review, it’s a poem I grew up with. So two childhood favourites came together for me here.

I wasn’t disappointed! There are seven spreads in total here, with the text of the poem concealed behind flaps. I actually took some pictures but when I looked at them they didn’t do the 3-D effect of the designs jumping out from the page justice. They looked flattened.

The art is by David Pelham (the design of the paper work) and Christopher Wormell (the drawing). They work really well together and they’ve chosen moments from the poem that rhyme with the action of the paper models popping up at you. So there’s the opening of a door, or a window, or a hand (to reveal a cameo of that rare and radiant maiden named Lenore). The wings of the raven also open up in a way that in a couple of spreads mimics the action in a sort of visual onomatopoeia.

Another thing I really liked about the art is its range. It goes from the close-up, like the aforementioned cameo, to the super-sized in the book’s final spread of the narrator’s castle. And actually that final spread mixes both, as you’re drawn into the model of the castle to peer deeper into the one room that’s lit, which you can (if you squint hard) peek inside to see the narrator lying on the floor with the shadow of the raven falling over him. Great stuff!

I don’t know how popular pop-up books are these days, or how many are being produced, but if there’s work of this quality being done I hope it’s a form we don’t lose.  You can’t put something like this on an e-reader, that’s for sure.

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Kill or Be Killed: Volume Four

A better end to this series than I was expecting. Not because it wraps everything up and answers all my questions, because it doesn’t, but because it went places I didn’t think it would go. I like surprises, especially when I’m not sold in the first place on a story’s trajectory.

As things kick off here Dylan, the red-masked avenger, is cooling his heels in a mental hospital. He seems to have escaped his demon, whatever the hell it was, and as things progress he’s come to accept the fact that he’s just a violent vigilante. Now where all that came from is anyone’s guess, because it doesn’t appear to be part of any family history. He does have family mental health issues but they seem mostly to be associated with depression. My own expert analysis is that he’s just a young man who’s angry at all the exploitation and injustice in the world. That gives him enough of a reason to raise hell.

Anyway, his murderous proclivities don’t go into abeyance in the hospital and soon he’s plotting the murder of a staffer who is sexually assaulting the patients. Meanwhile, on the outside, a copycat killer is at work, Dylan’s girlfriend Kira is still pining over him, and both the detective who has been hunting him and the Russian mob who want revenge are closing in.

There’s a bloody climax and then a bit of a twist at the end that provides a whimsical and not very satisfying answer as to how Dylan has been functioning as a narrator the way he has throughout the series. But by this point I don’t think a satisfying answer on that count was possible. Still, I thought Brubaker did his best, and Phillips came through with some nice snowy effects that give the mental hospital scenes a suitably muffled and wintery feel, a correlative to Dylan’s confused mental state. Another plus was the fact that Kira doesn’t feature as much in this volume except at the end, where she’s made to carry too much weight with regard to the vigilante theme. This seems to arise naturally from a decayed urban environment that summons and I guess empowers what are personal demons.

An interesting series then, but one I didn’t love because of the unbelievable and unlikeable main character, the just as unbelievable love interest, and the strained plot machinery, which really creaks throughout. It’s quite readable though and the action is well handled in all regards. I’ve heard rumours it may be made into a cable series, which sounds about right. It might even work better that way.

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