Kill or Be Killed: Volume One

Something that I’ve found myself responding to a lot in these Graphicalex notes are comics that will have a great premise that fails in the execution. This happens fairly often and it’s not surprising. Between the idea and the reality falls a shadow.

When things are reversed then it’s all the more worth remarking. This is the case with Kill or Be Killed, another pulp/noir collaboration from the team of writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips (with Elizabeth Breitweister as colorist). I thought the concept here was sub-grade, neither interesting nor credible. But somehow they managed to make a decent comic out of it.

So first here’s the pitch: Dylan is “just an average, depressed grad student” (this from the back cover) who tries to kill himself by jumping from the roof of his apartment building but is saved after getting hung up in some laundry lines on the way down. This leads to him being visited by a shadowy demon who tells him that his “second chance” comes with a price: Dylan will have to kill “bad people, people who deserve death . . . one each month” as “rent for the life you tried to throw away.” If he doesn’t, then he’ll be the one to die.

As an origin story I thought this just seemed lazy. How would Dylan know who was a bad person? How bad would they have to be to deserve death? Where had Dylan entered into any contract with the demon, and why should he even credit the existence of such a being, or his threats? In order to prove his reality the demon breaks Dylan’s arm, but I didn’t find that very convincing. I assumed the demon was some sort of psychological projection, but born of what? The whole idea just seemed a brainless way of explaining the lame premise, which is a young man adopting a double life by going on a vigilante murder spree.

Having said that, the actual story was effective once it got going. Dylan is in a moral no-man’s land, both in selecting the bad people for execution and for getting involved in a relationship with his roommate’s girlfriend. Suspense arises from wondering which of these poor life choices will blow up on him first. Phillips’s art is suitably grotty and Brubaker does his best to make Dylan at least a semi-relatable narrator-protagonist. I didn’t like all the foreshadowing, something that even Dylan admits is too much, but I could live with it. And I felt hooked enough to stick with things for another volume at least. Now that they had the rough part out of the way I felt like there were some interesting directions they might go in. So we’ll see.

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Alien: Thaw

OK, if you’ve read my notes on titles like Aliens: The Original Years, Bloodlines, Revival, and Icarus then you know how high I rate the storytelling chops on display in the Alien series. Whenever I read these comics I can’t help imagining how they would play as movies, and the answer is invariably “Much better than the actual films in the franchise played out, after Aliens.” I’ve loved reading all of them, despite not being blown away by the art (which I’d usually rate as only competent). In fact, digging into a new Alien comic is something I look forward to more than any other title or character out there.

Alien: Thaw doesn’t disappoint in this regard. And that’s remarkable given that there’s nothing all that special about the story. Talbot Engineering has a trio of employees working on the ice moon LV-695, harvesting the ice to satisfy a universal demand for water. And you’ll never guess what they find frozen in the ice! First just a normal facehugger, but then a whole bunch of adult Xenomorphs. Of course, as soon as they make this discovery the evil Weyland-Yutani corporation shows up, having immediately bought out Talbot Engineering. Things look bad for our plucky ice miners, but then the ice starts to melt and everyone’s in even deeper shit because this means the party is on. When you get a full page of an army of Xenomorphs on the march you have to laughingly start quoting Bill Paxton: “It’s game over, man. Game over!”

The story moves quickly. Very quickly. From the start of the franchise there have been questions raised about how the Xenomorph grew to such a massive size so quickly on board the Nostromo. But in this comic there’s one Xenomorph that goes from facehugger to chestburster to full-grown adult in something like an hour. How did that work? Well, because things are moving so fast there’s no time to ask questions like that. Or at least to answer them.

All the franchise touchstones are here. The facehugger glomming on to someone. A chestburster scene. A corporate heel (one of the seemingly endless descendants of Paul Reiser’s Carter Burke). Heavily armed space marines getting their asses handed to them by the Xenomorphs. A last girl. There’s even an android reveal that came as a surprise, which was something I have to give them full credit for because I knew it was coming. On the one hand, it’s pure formula by this point. But this is what an Alien story should be, without the weight of all the later mythology. And I enjoyed every page of it.

A final point: I wonder how much thought writers put into onomatopoeic sound effects in comics. Some of them have become iconic, like the SNIKT! of Wolverine’s claws, or the PAF! of Asterix launching a Roman centurion with a single punch. Of course sometimes you have to go with the classics. Like an explosion being some variation on KABOOM! But now ask yourself: how would you render the sound of a Xenomorph’s tail swishing through the air and decapitating someone? It’s not obvious, is it? But it should be something dramatic. I’ll let you think about it, and provide the answer in the comment thread below.

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Old Man Logan 4: Old Monsters

The previous Old Man Logan volume was set in Japan because Logan went there to find Lady Deathstrike. In this one, or at least the first part of it, he’s off to Romania to hunt for Jubilee, who has fallen under the spell of Dracula.

I liked how things kicked off. The art by Filipe Andrade has a suitably gothic flavour to it, with blood flying like mad calligraphy or musical scores turned on their head, and the vampire-hunting Howling Commandos were a lot of fun. I also enjoyed the way they disposed of Dracula at the end. But as I said in my notes on The Last Ronin, if this series is just Logan or “Old Wolverine” (as he hates being called) putting in frequent flyer miles as he jaunts about saving people then it’s not really working for me.

But then in the second part of this volume (back being drawn by Andrea Sorrentino) Logan goes even further afield, finding himself (somehow) in space, visiting an orbiting station that has been taken over by the Brood. “What madness is this?” the back cover asks. I’m not sure. Because Jean Grey is on the space station too and she’s messing with Logan’s mind. In addition, it seems like Logan is caught in some kind of spatial-temporal flux, “stuck between two places”: the station and the wastelands, where he’s confronting Hulk’s grandson, who has grown up (way up) into a green Lord Humungus.

This was all kind of weird, and the sight of Wolverine roaring away in a space suit was, perhaps unintentionally, hilarious. Nevertheless I thought both parts of the story went down well, even if the Dracula adventure was very much a standalone. And the thing is, after The Last Ronin I was pretty much ready to give up on the series but after this I wanted to read a bit more, mainly to see if Jeff Lemire was going to be able to pull all this together.

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The Vault

A mix of standard SF-horror tropes. Underwater treasure hunters find a sarcophagus containing the remains of a demon that has been sealed away for centuries, or maybe millennia. They open it up and remove the occult seal from the demon’s corpse, thus reviving it. Carnage follows as the awakened beast goes on a bloody rampage, all while a hurricane strikes.

It’s basically Carpenter’s The Thing (the alien thawing out of the block of ice) meets Alien (the demon is a close cousin to the Xenomorphs). If you want something new, it’s that the action takes place in Nova Scotia (the author, Sam Sarkar, was born in Halifax), with the divers exploring the famed Oak Island “Money Pit.” I appreciated that part, but it doesn’t really add much. I’ve never visited Oak Island, or seen the TV show they made about its treasure-seekers, but I still felt I’d been here before.

It might have worked. I really liked Plunge, another recent horror comic that riffed on 1980s deep-water monster movies. But the plot moves awkwardly, with some abrupt breaks that left me momentarily confused, and the art doesn’t sell the action or suspense. In particular, the different characters are posed like plastic action figures, unmoving over several different panels, and their faces are totally expressionless, even when they’re supposed to be freaking out, delivering lines punctuated with triple exclamation marks!!!

Normally I’d only recommend this to hardcore fans of the genre, but I think they may be the most disappointed by it. It didn’t do anything for me.

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Saga of the Swamp Thing Book One

I’d read Alan Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing titles years ago, but had remembered them, falsely, as being a standalone series or a reboot of the franchise. That’s not the case. In fact, Moore took over with issue #20, which is a direct continuation of the events that concluded Swampy’s battle with Arcane, and the latter’s death. Or “death.” That was the end of DC’s Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Volume 3 if you buy the collected editions.

After tying up the “loose ends” (the title of issue #20) to that storyline, Moore was off on his way, not really reinventing the character but subtly redefining him. It’s a new sort of origin story, being one that leaves the original in place. This is explained through the experiments of the Floronic Man on a frozen Swamp Thing in issue #21, which is a great comic and one that works well as a standalone.

Moore’s great theme in all his work is that of a powerful mind becoming unhinged, and he gets to indulge that a lot with the various characters  introduced here (Swamp Thing, the Floronic Man, Matt Cable . . . Jason Blood is already nutty). His writing is also in good form, with “plump, warm summer rain that covers the sidewalk with leopard spots,” and how “clouds like plugs of blooded cotton wool dab ineffectually at the slashed wrists of the sky.” I don’t want to go all in on comic writers being great poets because it’s a different game, but there are levels and Moore was usually operating at a higher one than most who have played it.

The crowded panels of Stephen Bissette and John Totleben’s artwork goes well with melting characters, wavy hair and mossy tendrils. There are also several glorious full-page drawings that are quite effective, especially since page layout is such a big part of the visual delight of the series. Nearly every page here is shattered in an interesting way.

I’m not a fan of all of Moore’s stuff, or even all of his Swamp Thing work, but as things kick off here you can tell why this has been recognized as a comic-book classic. Moore took an already established character and while keeping him very much the same in most important ways also made him his own.

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Daredevil: Dark Art

Dark Art. How dark? Very dark!

Dark Art is superhero title that reads a lot like a horror comic. Daredevil and Blindspot are on the trail of a serial/mass killer who makes grotesque art out of his victims. Like a giant wall mural painted with the blood of over a hundred different people, or a tableau of the bodies of individuals transformed via the Terrigen mist into bastard Inhumans and then into props. These atrocities have been perpetrated by a figure who calls himself the Muse, a clear descendant of the Joker villain tree. (I see he calls himself the Muse. The press has dubbed him Vincent Van Gore.) The Muse walks the walk and talks the talk of a rebel street artist. Meaning he says things like “Do you think the symbolism here is too overt?” and wears combat boots, a knit skullcap, and suspenders without a shirt. Plus he has a very punchable face, even with his bleeding eye sockets.

This series marked the debut of the Muse and though I was left unclear as to the nature of his powers, aside from having really quick reflexes, I was getting into the horror vibe. And the story just kept getting darker, with the climactic issue taking place in the Muse’s atelier, which is decorated with various corpses and body parts (heads, brains, hearts, etc.). Then (spoiler alert, sort of) things end up with the Muse gouging out Blindspot’s eyes! That just ain’t right.

I’d had mixed feelings on Charles Soule’s Back in Black Daredevil run before this. The Chinatown volume was good but I thought Supersonic was a big step back. I’m happy to say that things got back on track here though, as this was a tight story that was creepy and involving, without too many distractions. Among these: Matt Murdock’s new job as a D.A. isn’t going well, making me wonder why he was even bothering. Can’t he make a living doing something else, perhaps making surreptitious use of some of his powers? There’s a trip to New Attilan to try to enlist the help of the Inhumans in tracking down the Muse but that doesn’t go very far, and I can’t say I was too happy with their taking jurisdiction at the end. And finally Ron Garney’s art, while it has its own atmosphere that goes well with this version of DD, isn’t growing on me.

It gives these comics a distinctive look, which I give Garney credit for. The generic Marvel house style drives me crazy. You could replace it now, and probably for the better, with something done by AI. And Garney’s art does fit with the horror angle. But it’s not my thing.

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Crime and Punishment

There is a point in updating the classics. Sure we can make the argument, and a good argument too, that Shakespeare is our contemporary. But that isn’t always easy for everyone to grasp, which means there’s nothing wrong with adapting Shakespeare, or any author, into modern forms like film or the graphic novel. It’s not that different from just putting Shakespeare on stage in modern dress.

This is a subtly modernized adaptation of Crime and Punishment. We’re in Putin’s Russia, but we only know that because we can see Putin’s face on TV or in portraits in the police station. And that’s not jarring because Putin sees himself so much as a “new tsar.” Then there are ‘80s-style punks in the street of St. Petersburg and they don’t seem out of place either because if Dostoyevsky was writing at a period when Imperial Russia was in decline you could see that historical moment rhyming with the Soviet Empire’s final days.

Is Raskolnikov our contemporary though? The night before I wrote up these notes I was at dinner with friends and the subject came up as to whether having a conscience was something that was in decline. At one point in the evolution of our species a conscience probably served a purpose, but in more atomized societies like our own, where our most prominent and successful role models (individual and corporate) are psychopaths, it may be that a conscience is the psychological equivalent of a tailbone. Meanwhile, narcissism is seen as a superpower as often as it’s described as a plague.

All of this is sort of by the way though in discussing this graphic novel version of Crime and Punishment because it’s not really interested in Raskolnikov’s tortured conversion. In fact, I wasn’t even sure he had experienced a conversion. He’s flattened out quite a bit here by Alain Korkos, with spiky hair and hollowed-out or whirlpool eyes being made to do a lot of work in representing his madness. Snippets of his theory of the man who has risen above conscience get dropped into the mix, but I don’t think David Zane Mairowitz, who wrote the adaptation, wanted to go into that too deeply either.

Where I think this version of the story is strongest is in the presentation of some of the supporting characters. Raskolnikov’s sister Dunya is a fresh-faced hotty and we can feel there’s something more than a family attachment in some of the drawings. Luzhin is an ‘80s pimp in a three-piece suit, aviator shades, and a cigarette dangling from his lip. Svidrigailov is a cultured sugar daddy. Sonya is a goth pauper-princess. About the only interpretation I didn’t agree with was the police investigator Porfiry, who is a goateed fellow with round sunglasses. He looks threatening, but without any of the depth or humour that readers of the novel will recognize.

Of course reducing a brick of a novel into a 120-page comic necessarily means you’re losing a lot. What’s left is coherent in terms of the story and I think relatively faithful to the original, but it isn’t close to being a substitute or even a summary. Nor, despite the modern setting, does it have much of a new spin to put on things. Was Raskolnikov the equivalent of a punk? The kind of guy to have a Sex Pistols poster hanging in his room? Or was he more intellectual than that? It’s an interesting question to entertain, but it’s also a kind of dead end that I don’t think leads us any further into the sort of ideas Dostoyevsky was digging into. Or maybe we just live in a less serious time.

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Swinging MAD

This MAD pocketbook was published in 1977 and I think all of the content is drawn from stuff that had previously appeared in the magazine in the 1970s. So we’re in a world where a mock publication called Occult Magazine looks forward prophetically to 1989, hippies weren’t a long-distant source of fun but a clear and present source of fun, and the tunes of songs like “Bless ‘Em All,” “On Wisconsin!” and “Stouthearted Men” were assumed to be so well known that readers would be able to sing along with parody versions. For the record, I know none of those songs but apparently they were very popular once upon a time. And I suppose “On Wisconsin!” is still familiar to Badgers.

This is a grab-bag collection with no one theme. Instead there’s just a little bit of everything that made MAD what it was. There’s the Don Martin Department. There are funny advertisements. There are two Dave Berg “Lighter Side of . . .” instalments. There’s a Spy vs. Spy cartoon (White Spy wins this one). And it all wraps up with one of MAD’s justly celebrated movie parodies, as drawn by the unforgettable Mort Drucker. What a line-up of talent MAD had during these years. It makes me wonder if a magazine like this would even be possible today. Since MAD itself isn’t possible today (they’ve stopped print publication) I think we know the answer to that. I’m not in love with the ‘70s, but for magazine culture you could look back on it as the end of a golden age.

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Ant-Man/Giant-Man: The Man in the Ant Hill

This was a pleasant surprise. Ant-Man, or Giant-Man (a role he grew into, later taking the name Goliath), has never been one of my favourite superheroes and I wasn’t expecting much from this collection of his first appearances in Marvel’s Tales to Astonish. (Most of the early Marvel superheroes didn’t start out with their own comics, so Iron-Man, as he then was, could be found in Tales of Suspense, Thor in Journey into Mystery, Doctor Strange in Strange Tales, etc.) But I had a great time tracking the very silly evolution of the character, and his sidekick “the wonderful Wasp.”

What I mean by silly is the way a hand keeps getting waved at any questions that might be raised as we go along. Explanations are trotted out, but they’re so flimsy you just have to shake your head. Scientist Hank Pym invents a potion, later made into a pill, that allows him to almost instantly shrink to the size of an ant. I mean instantly in that he seems to just disappear. You don’t see him get smaller. I wondered how that worked. But then I wondered about a lot of things. Luckily, the explanations keep coming. How does his costume change sizes along with his physical transformations? An editor’s note: “Clothes composed of unstable molecules are able to stretch and contract as the wearer’s own body does!” How does Ant-Man send and receive messages to all the ants everywhere all over the city? He has antennae on his helmet that can transmit, receive, and “decode” the electronic impulses that all ants use to communicate. And by “communicate” I mean they can even send live video! How does he travel instantly to any place he has to be? He has a catapult that fires him wherever he wants to go, and when he gets there his ant buddies form a cushion to give him a soft landing. How does he fight bad guys when he’s the size of an ant? He keeps the same strength he had as a full-size human even when he shrinks. But then when he learns how to make himself bigger, for some reason he maxes out at 12 feet and after that he gets weaker. I’ve no idea why that happens, but here’s the explanation they give: “It’s like a sculptor rolling the clay figure of a man between his hands until it grows longer and longer! But the longer it grows the weaker it becomes, until it finally snaps!” Uh-huh.

You get the feeling in all of this that they just needed a set of rules for Ant-Man/Giant-Man to operate by, and that they weren’t too concerned that readers would stop to ask too many questions. So when the whole idea of popping a pill to grow or shrink got a bit too awkward they simply had Hank come up with a modification to his helmet that allows him to change size by controlling his “mental energy” in “mentally activated cybernetic impulses.” In other words, he just has to think about getting bigger or smaller! And not only that, he can make the Wasp bigger or smaller with the same helmet (though otherwise he has to still rely on the pills).

This final point underlines what is perhaps the most jarring thing about these comics. Coming out during the height of the Cold War (1962-64), the bad guys are often looped into the Red menace. The commies even apparently killed Hank Pym’s first wife, a story quickly told in flashback. None of that dates the action as much though as the gender roles in the relationship between Hank and Janet van Dyne (who becomes the Wasp in part to avenge her father). Hank is protective of Janet, which is something she rejects in a pseudo-feminist way. “He treats me like a scatterbrained little girl,” she protests to herself, “and I want him to think of me as a full-fledged woman . . . a woman in love!” After all, “He may go for all that adventure jazz, but I go for big, wonderful, dreamy him!” This is awful stuff, and it’s everywhere. Even when Ant-Man and the Wasp discuss matters of international importance with a room full of officials her thought bubble off to the side only reveals “Mmmm, if there’s one thing I like, it’s being in a room full of men!”

There is a lot of this, and it’s representative of a real weak spot in Marvel’s imagining of female characters at the time, which I guess goes back to Stan Lee. Lee’s stories are wonderfully inventive and a lot of fun, but he had trouble with women and imagining real relationships. For all her feistiness, Janet is a throwback to a stereotypical female model. Even after becoming a superhero she revels in a role as fashion icon, and the Wasp with her “dainty wings” and “tiny, delicate antennae” is a modern-day Tinkerbell. The fact that Hank can control her size changes by his helmet, and that she can’t grow big but only smaller, reinforces this. He’s also the brains as well the brawn, and when he gives her an air-compressor weapon that he’s invented so she’ll have a bit more firepower it’s like he’s giving a toy to a child.

So that’s the downside here. What I loved is the way the reduced scale, at least of the early stories, gave us simpler stories that were all the more effective for not being about fighting wildly powerful archvillains. Sure there are some aliens and transdimensional interlopers here, but the guys I enjoyed more are the bitter losers with a grudge against the world, like Egghead (who even retires to a flophouse after first being bested by Ant-Man), the Human Top, Trago (“the man with the magic trumpet”), and the Porcupine. I was curious whatever happened to these guys, and wasn’t too surprised that (at least in these earlier iterations) both Egghead and the Porcupine died in action in later years, while the Human Top turned into Whirlwind. They’re B-listers, after all, but no less fun for all that.

Along with this goon squad we get a lot of low-tech action that’s also the perfect foil for today’s bloated cosmic, multiverse nonsense. On two different occasions first Ant-Man and then the Wasp tie the bad guy’s shoelaces together to make him trip! At another point Ant-Man unstrings a pearl necklace and rolls the pearls across the floor to send the Protector for a tumble. Then, when the Protector sucks Ant-Man up into a vacuum bag, our hero cuts his way free and uses a fan to blow the dust from the bag into the Protector’s face, blinding him and making him sneeze (“My eyes!! I can’t see!! Ah – Ah – Chooo!!!”). That’s good enough to allow the police to capture him and take him away.

Trying to catch Ant-Man leads the not-so-supervillains to some similarly modest stratagems. I just mentioned the vacuum cleaner. Fly paper? Sure. And here’s something really nasty: take away his growth pills and toss him in a half-full bathtub! How is he going to get out of that? Or, most devious of all, how about hunting him down with . . . an anteater! Now that’s playing dirty pool! And even that’s one-upped by the Magician, who has a killer bunny! “Only the Magician could have trained a rabbit to be an obedient beast of prey! Go, my pet . . . catch those two fools for your master!” That’s not quite Monty Python level of funny, but it’s getting close.

I hope that all gives some idea of the highs and lows in this volume. Like I say, it’s silly stuff but for the most part makes a refreshing change of pace from the later excesses of the Marvel multiverse. The 1960s shouldn’t seem so long ago, but much has changed, and in these pages you can really feel some of the distance between then and now.

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Alien: Icarus

All of these Alien comics present self-contained storylines that ran for 5 or 6 issues. There’s a sort-of through line that’s covered in the opening to each, but it’s not necessary to read them in order. For what it’s worth, this volume is a sequel of sorts to Alien: Revival, as the events of that series are briefly mentioned here. But this is a wholly separate adventure. And like all of the Alien comics (at least all the ones I’ve read) it’s another interesting and original story that reimagines the familiar monsters in a new setting.

For reasons not worth getting into a team of super-synth soldiers are sent to a radiated planet overrun by Xenomorphs in order to retrieve a Xenomorph egg that contains an experimental genetic modification that the United Systems (that would be the U.S. government, rivals of the Weyland-Yutani Corp.) believes contains an antidote to radioactivity.

So it’s off to Tobler-9 and it looks like the Xenos actually have an opponent in their own weight class, since the synths are all trained mercenaries who use their plasma rifles, bows and arrows, and samurai swords to go toe-to-toe (or claw, or whatever) with the evil critters. One synth even tears a Xenomorph’s head off with his bare hands. And you don’t have to worry about the synths getting bred in the usual way since the Xenos can’t use them for that. Alas, there are only five synths in the team and as usual an unending supply of Xenomorphs to kill, including a giant Queen and then later an insect-human-Xenomorph hybrid thing.

So that’s something a bit new, though it had been foreshadowed in one of the stories in Aliens: The Original Years. And I thought there was a higher gross-out and gore level here than in previous comics. But like I say, I found the story compelling and original. Writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson also entertains a couple of ideas that I had to think about, even if I ended up rejecting both of them. First there’s the notion that the synths can be more human (meaning, they display more empathy and altruism) than the humans. Would that be the result of their programming? Something to make them a more effective team? Or are they evolving on their own? Then, speaking of evolution, there’s the way the Xenomorphs seem to take biological cues from their hosts, at least under lab circumstances. This is what leads to the insect-human-Xenomorph hybrid. I found myself wondering how much of this was Weyland-Yutani’s efforts to create a new bioweapon and how much was “natural.” Because why would the Xenomorphs evolve when they’re already perfect killing machines?

So great fun for fans, delivering on lots of brutal action and plenty more of what you came for. There’s a simple but effective story with all the usual elements worked in effectively alongside a couple of new wrinkles. There’s been no end of criticism of the Alien film franchise, and for good reason, but readers of the comics have had nothing to complain about.

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