Reason Magazine - Topics > Comic Books

Iron Man Confidential

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:11:00 EDT

Early word on the latest Marvel Comic turned big-screen spectaculah, Iron Man? It's been updated from Vietnam to the War on Terror and is techno-riffic. From the Daily News:

Downey is Tony Stark, a millionaire arms inventor who, while giving a weapons demonstration to troops in Afghanistan, is attacked and kidnapped. Shoved in a cave by terrorists who give him a week to build a rocket from spare parts, Stark - who now has a magnetized sphere in his chest that keeps shrapnel in his body from entering his aorta - instead constructs a tank-suit that looks like the Michelin Man and boasts more goodies than a Swiss Army knife.
Back home at his L.A. mountaintop bachelor pad (which of course has a workshop General Motors would kill for), Stark experiences a true change of heart, deciding to stop making war machines. So he builds a suit of armor that flies like a jet, shoots energy blasts and helps keep his ticker going as he fights injustice.
The fact that Iron Man is a B-lister in the Marvel Comics stable doesn't stop director Jon Favreau and his writers from aiming high and generally hitting the target. Meanwhile, Stark's inner circle - including Gwyneth Paltrow (sexy and bookish) as his trusty assistant, Terrence Howard (tough and loyal) as his military connection, and Jeff Bridges (bald and menacing) as a mentor-turned-villain - lend a touch of class.
But cruising above it all is Downey. Since Iron Man's helmet has no nose and a little rectangular mouth, the smartest thing Favreau did was cast a lead who's constantly alive. The few times the red-and-yellow battle gear is front and center in "Transformers"-ish action moments, Favreau often shows his star's face inside the shell-head. As Downey pumps life into every scene, it's clear the actor, long regarded as one of the best of his generation, has not let the rust set in after his battle with drugs a decade ago.

Sexy and bookish? Bald and menacing? Tough and loyal? It sounds like they're really blazing new trails!

More here.

I salute Iron Man because he, along with the board game Monopoly, Dallas, Bruce Jenner, Jimmy Carter's cardigans, and Bobby Fischer helped us beat the Russkies when it mattered (until his death earlier this year, the insaniac former chess champ Fischer was helping us defeat Islamism by identifying as anti-Western[*]). And because Iron Man points the way to the coming age of the cyborg (or cyborg-like humans), which we're already in. Everytime you see someone with a cochlear implant (look carefully) or a pacemaker or wearing a wrist-guard for carpal tunnel syndrome, there beats the adamantium heart of Iron Man. If you can't be a full-blown mutant (thanks for nothing Mom and Dad) and are a couple standard deviations down the Bell Curve from homo superior, you might as well have microprocessors and exoskeleton-like devices up the ying-yang.

But enough with the drug-story backstory on RDJ (and Iron Man, who battled the sauce longer than he did The Mandarin, one of the last great gasps of full-blown Orientalist fantasy is post-war pop cult)! Spencer Tracy had problems—including a penchant for locking himself in hotel room bathtubs for an entire weekend while drinking and pissing himself into stupor—but you don't have to know that to enjoy Bad Day at Black Rock, do you?

All you need to know about Tony Stark--a cool exec with a heart of steel and two fistfuls of "repulsor rays"--in 22 seconds:

Bonus video: Black Sabbath asks the musical question "Can he walk and talk?,' etc. in this great home-brewed video.

[*]: Corrected spelling and life status of Fischer thanks to reader UCrawford.

Steve Gerber, R.I.P.

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:21:00 EST

In the 1970s, Steve Gerber was Marvel Comics' most consistently interesting writer. He is dead at age 60. Tom Spurgeon at his Comics Reporter site has an excellent obituary, both telling the story of Gerber's career in detail and explaining his achivements. The summation:

Steve Gerber's role as one of the best and emblematic writers of his generation can't be overstated. He was a crucial figure in comics history. Like some of the all-time great cartoonists of years past, Gerber carved a place for self-expression and meaning out of a type of comic that had no right to hold within itself so many things and moments that were that quirky and offbeat and delicately realized -- except that Gerber made it so. His Howard the Duck comics remain amusing when read today, perhaps more poignant now, laying into their broad targets in a way that communicated a kind of critical consciousness into the minds of many devoted superhero comics readers, fans that simply wouldn't have been exposed to those kinds of ideas any other way, the concept that media might lie to you, the notion of absolute self-worth in the face of a world that seems dead-set against it. Steve Gerber's superhero books were a tonic to the over-seriousness of most of their cousins, and his horror-adventure books were frequently classy and reserved in a genre that tends to reward the blunt and ugly. No creator save Jack Kirby has as a cautionary tale and a living example saved so many creators the grief of turning over their creations without reward or without realizing what they had done. Few creators in the American mainstream were as consistently fascinating as Steve Gerber. Even fewer have been as outspoken and forthright, or in that way, as admirable.

Much of Gerber's best work is still in print in wonderfully affordable black and white reprints. Start with Essential Defenders Vol 2, Essential Howard the Duck, and Essential Man-Thing, and the color reprint volume of Omega the Unknown (currently being "covered" by novelist Jonathan Lethem in a new Marvel series).

Super-Villain Team-Up: Rudy Hearts McCain

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 21:11:00 EST

It's no Dr Doom-Red Skull matchup, but pretty freakin' close: both Fox News on the televisual projection device and Time are reporting Rudy Giuliani, his pandering having failed, dropping out tomorrow to endorse seeming juggernaut John McCain. How the frontrunners have fallen; will this change any one's reliance on pre-anyone-voting national polls in future elections?

UPDATE: Rudy just got a big larf by belatedly adding Ron Paul to his list of honorable opponents he was tipping his hat to, then saying that Paul "won all the debates" if you check those (I paraphrase) "things where people call in after the debates."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Previous update done overlapping Matt Welch's blogging of same thing, above.

Bitten by a Radioactive Community Volunteer

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:33:00 EST

From the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages, a thrilling, action-packed feature about self-proclaimed superheroes:

By most observers' reckoning, between 150 and 200 real-life superheroes, or "Reals" as some call themselves, operate in the United States, with another 50 or so donning the cowl internationally. These crusaders range in age from 15 to 50 and patrol cities from Indianapolis to Cambridgeshire, England. They create heroic identities with names like Black Arrow, Green Scorpion, and Mr. Silent, and wear bright Superman spandex or black ninja suits. Almost all share two traits in common: a love of comic books and a desire to improve their communities.

Among the heroes: The Cleanser, who "strolls around picking up trash," and Direction Man, who "helps lost tourists find where they're going." And then there's Master Legend, who relates this tale of crimebusting gone wrong:

One evening when Master Legend was on patrol, he heard a woman scream and ran to investigate. But when he located the damsel in distress, she thought he was attacking her and called the cops. "They wanted to know if I was some kind of insane man, a 41-year-old man running around in a costume," he recounts. "Apparently, they had never heard of me."

Friday Mini Book Review: XXX Scumbag Party and Misery Loves Comedy

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 19:03:00 EST

The mini book review is on Friday again this week. Past mini book reviews.

XXX Scumbag Party by Johnny Ryan (Fantagraphics Books, 2007).

Misery Loves Comedy by Ivan Brunetti (Fantagraphics Books, 2007).

Leading art-comics publisher Fantagraphics' two cartoon bards of offensive trash each issued new collections of their periodicals recently. Johnny Ryan’s comic book is Angry Youth; Brunetti’s, Schizo.

Johnny Ryan’s work—um….well, I can’t even really hint at much specific about it and remain within a long city block of propriety and decency. His comics are utterly degenerate and utterly hilarious, with nearly every joke relying on the punching of sexual, excretory, religious, or racial taboos.

I’m sympathetic to those who sneer at “shock comedy” for the sake of shock, but my goodness Ryan’s stuff is just...well, it’s just really, really, really funny. It pushes transgressive buttons not with grim obviousness, but with a gleefully antic grossness, with cartooning so joyously alive (while still skilled and tight) that it doesn’t feel hateful or ugly--just bursting with life-affirming awfulness.

This volume features lots of Ryan’s EveryScumbag Loady McGee and hapless sidekick Sinus O’Gynus; the adventures of two sensitive cartoonists who just weren’t made for these times trying to out-old-timey each other; an “art movie” featuring (among the only barely mentionable elements) mustard that makes you horny and a robot prostitute powered by liquid baby sent on a mission to give the Moon a venereal disease; and over a hundred pages of gut-busting offensiveness. Pre-caveat: for anyone who reads it and finds any part of it unutterably beyond the pale: I didn’t laugh at that part. Just, um, most of the other parts.

Brunetti is more serious about his offensiveness. He’s got no antic glee, just anhedonic and troubled self-hatred. Most of the pages star a grotesquely detailed figure of himself spewing bile (figuratively and literally), and stabbing out at everything about civilization, humanity, and himself he despises, including his marriage and office job.

While piece by piece not clearly intended to be “funny” per se he’s got that Celine/Notes From Underground classic lit-misanthropy thing going sharply and efficiently, but his cartoon avatar is a more feckless "character" than Bardamu or even Dostoevsky's underground man. Brunetti's misery is purely internalized and poured only into meticulous cartooning.

Sure, it's relentless and repetitive; "I can see all my flaws, magnified into monuments, surrounded by floodlights. I'm a crumbling edifice of frustation, every mistake etches onto me in a garish bas-relief. I'm overwhelmed by every stimulus, so I retreat into introversion and sink into a spiral of suicidal 'logic.' Zen nihilism. All is one, and that one is a pile of shit." That's about what he has to say, for all hundred plus pages. But still, he says it in a surprisingly entertaining way. If you are in the mood for bottomless self- and world-hatred expressed through bilous, vertiginous cartooning, Brunetti's unstoppable.

Ryan, at worst you’ll find grossly silly and perhaps feel it your duty as a humanist to be offended; Brunetti can seriously bum you out if you've ever found yourself feeling anything close to what he claims to feel every second of his life. Both of them are excellent cartoonists and together provide opportunity for fun evenings spent (preferably alone) giggling (sometimes nervously) at the abyss.

Silencing the Cat

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 10:32:00 EST

Friday fun link: Someone at Truth and Beauty Bombs has an epiphany: "if you remove all the text of Garfield's speech, or thoughts, or whatever that is...it becomes an oddly surrealist comic." A horde of contributors prove him right.

Sometimes the results aren't surreal so much as they're sad. This one makes Chris Ware look like a bubbly optimist:

Sad, very sad...yet somehow much funnier than any Garfield strip you'll ever find in the morning paper.

Yes, I'm nearly two years late in noticing this site, but Friday fun knows no statute of limitations!

[Via Wondermark.]

Friday Fun Link: Hatin' on Rob Liefeld

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 17:22:00 EST

Attention all: this is one of those comic book fan things; if you aren't interested, feel free to not click on the link. But I think any fan of comedic invective might enjoy this very long and very funny extended attack on 40 bad drawings by superstar and supercrappy '90s comic book artist sensation Rob Liefeld.

Some excerpts:

If you asked Rob Liefeld to draw a diagram of the uterus he'd put on a pair of gauntlets and punch the shit out of your chalkboard.....I don't want you looking at the stuff he's drawing and think he's a conscious adult male with a creative job who can and has influenced the minds of young artists. The man is a pair of blue jeans with a face. He has on a backwards cap, and when he turns it around, it's still backwards.
.........
Any time he draws anyone running ANYWHERE, they always have their arms held straight out to their sides. Like, I understand that you have to create the illusion of movement but I think what is more important is the illusion of me not hating you.
...........
If I had a nickel for every time Liefeld had his characters standing behind something so he didn’t have to draw their feet, I would still not have nearly as much money as Rob Liefeld.
..................
Rob Liefeld cannot grasp the basic concept of how the blade of a sword sits on the hilt. Or hey, maybe he just doesn’t give a shit. Here you see the blade kind of resting diagonally or almost perpendicular to the hilt, probably because he used a ruler to draw the blade and then was like “Hey I used a tool to make sure that line was straight, now kiss my ass, PHYSICS.”

Hat tip: Douglas Wolk.

Wednesday Mini Book Reviews: Popeye: "I Yam What I Yam!" and The Complete Peanuts: 1961-1962

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 21:24:00 EST

See past mini book reviews here.

Popeye: "I Yam What I Yam!" by E.C. Segar (Fantagraphics Books, 2006).

The Complete Peanuts 1961-1962 by Charles M. Schulz (Fantagraphics Books, 2006).

I'm behind in my reading on both these ongoing series of comic strip collections from Fantagraphics, with later volumes already out--another wonderful sign of the absurdly bountiful cultural wonders of modernity. (Don't even ask about all the Marvel Essentials and DC Showcase volumes piling up.)

I pre-cheered the Popeye volume before finishing it, and my affection and wonder at it only grew as I read it, a week or so of strips per day. As a physical object it's gorgeous, unnaturally tall and solid and colorful with the dailies in clear black and white and the Sundays in a lovely muted color. The stories within are a-burst with comedy, absurdity, adventure, and charm. The sequence where Castor Oyl feels he must call it quits with "old 'blow me down'" in a tiff over a dame is sweet and sad as can be. Still, the two stalwarts' deep affection, the galumphing but noble id of Popeye yoked to Castor's failed attempts to function as his weak-kneed superego, have plenty of crime-solving, jail-escaping, and Sea Hag-bedeviling behind and ahead of them. Both of their irreplacable voices are alive and well after all these years. Not to mention the magical whiffle hen. No one who loves comic strips should miss this chance to get all this stuff in such a lovely and convenient package.

No one needs me to tell them how great Peanuts was, I suppose--its size on our cultural landscape has been far larger than Popeye's (which helped shape Schulz as a cartoonist in his youth) for the past few generations. But if the TV specials and merchandise have blinded you to how great the strip was in its heyday, this early 1960s volume of Fantagraphics' godsend ongoing series of complete Peanuts reprints is a great place to leap in.

It has many of the strip's classic engines purring at optimal efficiency and effect: Both Lucy and Miss Othmar trying to rid Linus of his blanket habit (and, in manic physical comedy, Snoopy's attempts to steal it); Charlie Brown's attempts to use his nonexistent managing skills to turn his misfit baseball squad into winners (in one sequence, the team realizes their field chatter is hypocritical, since they don't in fact believe that Charlie Brown can strike out anyone--they all come up with more honest substitutes, with Patty's: "C'mon Charlie Brown we're not really expecting much, but we can hope!"); Lucy's bits of invented wisdom and angry outbursts ("Have you ever seen an X-ray of a hiccup?"), Frieda and her naturally curly hair arrive on the scene to harness Snoopy into her rabbit-chasing schemes; and sprinkled throughout many nifty week-long sequences, including Lucy's deciding she can stomp germs to death by having people cough on the sidewalk in front of her, and Charlie Brown attempting to get Lucy, who is having none of it, to confront the terror of nuclear disaster hanging over their generation's heads. Both collections make great gifts for comics fans or anyone you want to turn into a comics fan--it doesn't get much better than Segar's Popeye and early '60s Peanuts.

Give Thanks for Charlie Brown!

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:04:00 EST

...

Peter Bagge Alert: Apocalypse Nerd #6 is Out

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 01:28:00 EDT

reason's own graphic journalist Peter Bagge treats us on Hallowe'en to the release of the scary (for real) final sixth issue of his series Apocalypse Nerd, which continues its hideously compelling slide from light comedy about post-nuclear life to heavy, but still somehow funny, horror about that same sunny topic.

And another bonus batch of Ye Olde Historical Bagge's Founding Father Funnies, this time starring Thomas Jefferson finally quitting the Washington administration and Paul Revere and John Singleton-Copley arguing over the artists life vs. that of the mere artisan.

For those who missed Apocalypse Nerd as it was published in six issues of a comic book, the graphic novel version collecting them all will be out in in April, available for pre-order from Amazon now.

Bagge's reason archives.

Friday Fun Links: Geek Culture Edition

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:00:00 EDT

1. The Batman version of Crime and Punishment. Weird and hilarious. It originally appeared in the art-comics anthology Drawn and Quarterly 3, which also includes some lovely reprints of Frank King's Gasoline Alley Sunday strips of the '20s and '30s.

2. Prisoner-era Doctor Who. Or, strictly speaking, some Doctor Who that came out a year before The Prisoner but obviously was part of the same ~~acid trip~~ cultural gestalt. It's pretty awful, and I say that as a Prisoner fan with a high tolerance for '60s sci-fi camp. But if you enjoy pop surrealism you should check it out anyway.

3. New England and the Bavarian Illuminati. You'll find no sunken cities, talking gorillas, or anarchist submarines here. Just the classic account of the Illuminati panic of the late eighteenth century, when prominent Federalists accused the Jeffersonians of being pawns of the secret order. Originally published in 1918, the book is now in the public domain and can be downloaded for free from the Internet Archive.

The Radical Von Mises

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 09:27:00 EDT

Ever feel like a square for digging stuffy Old European economist Ludwig Von Mises? Why, that very name seems to drip aristocratic spider webs. Well, don't, says philosopher Roderick Long, echoing and recasting the arguments of Mises disciple Murray Rothbard from 1981. Mises was radical, man.

Long judges Mises radicalism along three distinct dimensions: the gradal, "extreme or thoroughgoing as opposed to wishy-washy"; the ideological, "opposed to conservative, politically or culturally"; and the dialectical, "an orientation that considers phenomena not in isolation but in their interconnections with other elements in a systemic totality."

He points out, among other things, Mises' alarm over marriage's effects on individuality, his belief in free immigration, his disdain for colonialism, his awareness of the historical piracy behind most large land holdings. Long provides a smart and nuanced tracing of the extent to which Mises sometimes did, and sometimes didn't, seem to believe in a "thick" libertarianism, in which political liberty must or ought be embedded within a wider set of moral, social, or personal values.

I largely agree with the Rothbard/Long thesis, and appreciate its nuances. Why do you think my history of the modern American libertarian movement, in which Mises plays a prominent role, is called Radicals for Capitalism?

UPDATE: Back in 1998, I wrote about the time that no less a radical dude than the Batman came to the defense of Ludwig von Mises stolen papers in a bizarre DC Comic written and drawn by superbrilliant comic artist Paul Pope. As Pope had his "Berlin Batman" sum up Mises: "Von Mises' anti-authoritarian ideas were first a threat to the Nazis, then the Soviets, and to all increasingly regulatory governments in our own times. He was against socialism in all its many forms. He was an advocate of individual liberty, free speech, and free thinking..."

And here I am from May 1997 on the true story of Mises long-missing papers.

That Burger Looks Suspiciously Like a Shish Kabob

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 12:08:00 EDT

In his latest tract, the gloriously mad evangelist-cartoonist Jack Chick explains what really happened to the dinosaurs.

For the whole theory -- sorry, Biblically proven fact -- go here. I'd like to see some fancy-pants biologist answer that one.

Peter Bagge's Apocalypse Nerd #5 Out Today

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 22:19:00 EDT

Most true nerds will know that Wednesday is New Comics Day every week. And a rare and glorious New Comics Day it is today, with a fresh Peter Bagge comic hitting the stands.

Apocalypse Nerd, Peter's ever-more-harrowing tale of post-apocalyptic life in these here United States, has its fifth issue out today, and it just keeps getting more and more horrible, in a better and better way. And backing it up are more of his fascinating explorations of the lives and machinations of Peter's craziest characters yet--America's Founding Fathers.

Available at a comic shoppe near you!

Peter's reason archives. The Washington Post sings Peter's praises. His own web site.

Friday Mini Book Review: Reading Comics

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 17:06:00 EDT

Yes, the former Wednesday Mini Book Review is now on Friday. Who knows where we'll find it next? An archive of past Hit and Run mini book reviews.

Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, by Douglas Wolk (Da Capo, 2007). Douglas Wolk’s new book does for comics what New Yorker critic Pauline Kael did for film. That is, provide an extended defense of a sometimes derided pop art form and deliver detailed specific criticism of some of its more interesting works. To some, the attempt to reframe comics—often thought of as childish junk—as a respectable art will bring to mind a New Yorker cartoon that Wolk himself references: “Now I have to pretend to like graphic novels too?”

Even if your interest in comics arises from a weary desire to stay au courant, Wolk’s book will prove painlessly entertaining. He’s no highbrow aesthete who thinks only the likes of, say, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a Pulitzer-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust (in which Jews are portrayed as mice, Nazis as cats) are worthy of attention.

He dedicates chapters to creators such as Spiegelman, Charles Burns (Black Hole), and Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Boy on Earth). All three of them are published by respectable literary New York trade houses. But he also writes chapters on such seemingly lowbrow subject matter as Steve Ditko (the artist who co-created Spider-Man), and Marvel Comics’ cosmic ‘70s superhero Warlock. He loves not only comics that are clearly respectable and arty, but also those he admits are “cheap and vulgar and exciting.”

In attempting to define what comics do and how they do it, he concludes that the art of cartooning is “a metaphor for the subjectivity of perception,” but that’s as hoity-toity as he gets. Readers will breathe a sigh of relief when Wolk tells us in the first sentence of chapter two that “the comics form has a long and distinguished history, and I would like to propose temporarily ignoring a lot of it.”

Freed of any burden to trace comics history back to the Bayeux Tapestry, Wolk wittily and perceptively examines the modern comics scene’s many sides, the peculiar fan culture surrounding it, and gives detailed analyses of a wide-ranging sample of specific comic works.

While he’s a confirmed comics geek (one hilarious sequence recounts how he fooled and infuriated fellow geeks on a comics website by writing knowing reviews of some awful comics in the voice of a young woman supposedly new to the field), he’s not afraid to step boldly off the fan reservation. He says of Will Eisner, venerated as the father of the graphic novel (the putting-on-airs term for extended, serious comic book narratives) that “his ironies are cheap and his attempts at profundity aren’t very deep at all.”

While those fresh to comics can enjoy the book, those already enmeshed in comics fandom will love it—even if only for the pleasurable arguments it will generate. This book has the wide-ranging virtues of its subject: it’s fun and feisty, smart and subjective, able to guide readers into the most absurd cosmic hugger-mugger and into shadowy recesses of the human heart—remaining breezily entertaining all the while.

Peter Bagge Art Opening in Los Angeles--Tonight!

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 11:01:00 EDT

Fans of our own comics journalist Peter Bagge (and let the Washington Post tell you how great he is) in the greater Los Angeles area should show up for a gen-u-ine art opening starring the drawings and paintings of Mr. Bagge.

It's tonight, August 10, at the comic book shoppe Secret Headquarters, located in the groovy Silver Lake neighborhood, at 3817 West Sunset Blvd.

Runs from 8 to 10 pm. You can bet I'll be there, and I hope that doesn't hurt attendence....

Bagge's reason archive.

A new book entirely dedicated to Peter's work--buy it on Amazon.

Doherty at San Diego ComicCon Today

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 10:49:00 EDT

If you are going to be one of the ten gajillion people at San Diego's ComicCon today, come check out a live on-stage interview/dialogue I'm conducting with comic book great Joe Matt of the Peepshow comic book, and the new graphic novel Spent.

It's at 11:30 a.m. local pacific time in Room 3. It'll be my proudest comic book related moment since being portrayed by that other comic book great Jaime Hernandez as a mohawk-sporting anarchist punk. Anyone who says hello before or after gets a gratis copy of the Aug-Sept. reason, with cover and great comics from yet another comic book great Peter Bagge.

The Washington Post and Peter Bagge, Sittin' In a Tree

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 13:30:00 EDT

The Washington Post's Peter Carlson spews big love over our own Peter Bagge's form of unique cartoon journalism in a profile today. Some excerpts:

Reason is a libertarian magazine and Bagge is a libertarian cartoonist, always eager to satirize the war on drugs or gun control laws or other governmental restrictions on personal freedom. But he doesn't just sit around drawing cartoons. He goes out and covers events like a reporter, jotting down quotes and sketching in his notebook. Then he turns his observations into multi-page comic-strip essays that are funny and smart and surprisingly nuanced.
"I call it cartoon journalism," Bagge, 49, said in a phone interview from his home in Seattle. "I don't know what else to call it."
Over the past six years, Bagge has covered political campaigns, protest marches and, in one hilarious piece, a very earnest convention of polygamists, swingers, sadomasochists and transsexuals, where a panel discussion on legal issues inspired a rather dumpy woman to ask this question: "If I adopt my live-in lovers, would I be violating incest laws?"
..........
In the current Reason, the one with his hideous self-portrait on the cover, Bagge travels to a gun show, interviews people on both sides of the gun control issue and ultimately concludes that, yes, an American should be able to own a bazooka: "If I don't hurt, threaten or disturb anyone with it, then why can't I own one?"
His reasoning failed to convince me, but I enjoyed the piece anyway. Arguing with Bagge is part of the fun of reading Bagge. As libertarian polemicists go, he's a lot more fun than, say, Ayn Rand.

Check out our Bagge archives and bow before the wonder of our own cartoon journalist. And visit Peter's personal site. And to tie today together into a neat bow, yes, Peter used to draw Bat Boy for the dearly departed Weekly World News.

Hey Kids! Comics! Hey! Hey!! Kids, Get Back Here! Comics! Uh, Little Overpriced Pamphlets Filled With a Combination of Words and....Oh, Forget It.

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 20:55:00 EDT

For those who miss our former Web editor Tim Cavanaugh around these parts as much as I do, check out his typically stylish meditation on the endless life and lingering death of the American comic book at the LA Times.

Here's me from reason in May 2001 on the bizarre dominance of the superhero in the comic book field.

Death Trap in Iran!

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 14:58:00 EDT

Jingoist 1952 comic book worth reconsidering in a modern context, or, as Boing-Boing puts it, "1952 Comic Predicts Bush/Cheney Iran Policy."

A bit of a stretch, maybe, but an extraordinary cultural document all the same. "Take it up with Washington, kiddo! And see how far you get!" I know what you mean, Agent Trask!

Here's the cover to the comic book that Boing-Boing excerpts, T-Man: World Wide Crime-Buster #3. It avers that it's "an authentic case based on the files of the U.S Treasury Department!" God help us all, I almost believe them.

[UPDATE: The honor of early '50s U.S. treasury agents in comic books is saved! While this is indeed the genuine page, comment thread skeptics were correct there was a hidden plot twist---that wasn't Trask himself, but a commie double! I looked up Trask in some of my comic book histories, and all was revealed in the nifty book Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America by Bradford W. Wright. And god bless Google books for the page link. I had read Wright's book when it was new, and goodness knows how I had forgotten the detail that it was a commie spy who threw the pig at the Iranian diplomat. Apologies for traducing Trask--he was a good liberal Cold Warrior, not a sinister pirate.]

Cancel That Tux Reservation for the Bloomberg Inaugural

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 16:07:00 EDT

Ryan Sager runs the numbers and finds current presidential support for New York's answer to Lex Luthor , Michael Bloomberg, to be unimpressive so far--and this despite Bloomberg having, believe it or not, slightly higher name recognition than Mitt Romney. (It warms my heart that after months of active "all presidential campaign all the time" news coverage, only 62 percent of polled Americans even know who Romney is):

Only 9% of poll respondents say there would be a "good chance" they'd vote for [Bloomberg]. Some 23% say there's "some chance." Now, that's not to say $150 million could change things, but...
Combining Mr. Bloomberg's "some" and "good" chance numbers, he's got 32%. It's not fair to compare him to the frontrunners, but how does this compare with some of the non-candidates and the back-of-the-pack real candidates?
Fred Thompson is at 47%. Newt Gingrich is at 30%. Al Gore is at 46%. Joe Biden is at 30%. Tommy Thompson's at 28%.

Wednesday Mini Book Review: Sloth

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 16:11:00 EDT

The revived tradition continues :

Sloth, by Gilbert Hernandez (Vertigo Books, 2006). If ranking in an art form is a simple function of quality times quantity, then Gilbert Hernandez is nearly unchallengeable as the greatest comic book artist of his time (with only his brother Jaime, with whom he has produced the comic periodical Love and Rockets in a couple of formats for 25 years now, on and off, as serious competition).

While we are lucky to get even 40 pages every couple of years from some of our greatest comic book artists working in the non-superhero realm, Hernandez is unfailingly prolific on a variety of projects. This, Sloth, is his first standalone "graphic novel" produced without earlier serialiation in a comic book, done for DC Comics' "adult" imprint, Vertigo.

Sloth isn't among his best work--which is done with the cast of characters and their relatives living in or from the fictional Central American city of Palomar that he's been developing lovingly and elaborately for decades in the pages of Love and Rockets and other comic book series' for the indie publisher Fantagraphics--but it's still impressive.

It's both dizzying in its conceptual tricks and twists and deeply humane. It tells the story of a teenage rock band in a town troubled by waves of bordeom and ennui, said boredom becoming mysteriously reified in the form of year-long comas that come to touch the lives of the three central characters, bandmates involved in a love triangle of sorts.

Sloth is constantly switching up our sense of what is "really" happening; not in the service of random mindfuck bewilderment but always giving further insight onto the nature of the three lovable central characters and the meanings, both surface and mythic, of their relationships.

Hernandez's black and white pages contribute complete clarity and vividness to a world of mystery; he's especially gifted in facial expressions and body language and unfailingly creates a visual world that's clean and elegant while still vivid and quirky. Not a place to start with him, necessarily, but another impressive contribution to an important and wonderful body of work.

Why Canadian Superheroes Are Hosers

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 09:22:00 EDT

Time after time, Canadian publishers conjured up superheroes that supposedly embodied the national spirit. Aside from Johnny Canuck, there is Nelvana of the Northern Lights (a white goddess in a mini-dress who protected the Arctic from "Kablunets, Nazi allies armed with Thormite Rays"), Captain Jack (an all-round athlete who battled Nazi saboteurs), Northern Light (a science fiction hero whose enemies were space aliens), Captain Canuck (who also fought space monsters as well as complex international banking conspiracies) and the similarly monikered Captain Canada (originally known as Captain Newfoundland, he defended the royal family from giant Japanese robots).
All these characters have their goofy charm, but let's face reality: none of them is a superhero of the first rank. They are not fit to hold the cape of Superman or Batman. They don't even have what it takes to be a sidekick to Wonder Woman or Captain America. Creating a Canadian superhero is rather like growing bananas in Nunavut. With enough ingenuity and willpower you can do it, but is it worth doing?
There is something about Canada that resists superheroes....

More here.

Brian Doherty looked at the persistence of the costumed do-gooder here and I made mine Marvel here.

Hat Tip: Arts & Letters Daily

When Coinages Clash!, or: This Quarter, This Surfer

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 30 May 2007 17:31:00 EDT

The Franklin Mint (not, despite rumors, named after Reed and Sue Richards' firstborn son) tries to inject 40,000 specially altered actual U.S. quarters into the economy with the obverse (formerly the special California state quarter) turned into an image of the Silver Surfer as a promotion for the forthcoming Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer flick.

Alas, the U.S. Mint, reacting in the usual blind rage and anger humans aim at that which they don't understand, says them nay, although the deed is already done. The AP story doesn't specify what penalty the guilty parties may face, if any. Franklin Mint spokesperson says they are very mindful of the glories of legal tender laws and intended merely to "enhance" the coins with Norrin Radd's sleek alien form.

Friday Fun Link: Outbursts of Everett True

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 11 May 2007 16:24:00 EDT

From the "I Love Comics" site, a smattering of repros of one of the most amazing comic strips of all time, "Outbursts of Everett True," an early 20th century ~~British~~ [nope--my mistake--American as rhubarb pie] creation. As accurately described at the beginning of the thread:

The plot:

Panel 1: Someone yells at, bugs, bothers, or generally inconveniences Mr. True in some way.

Panel 2: Everett responds by beating the living shit out of him and screaming (unless it's his wife, in which case she beats the living shit out of him).

Would that reprints of this should replace "Love Is... " in classified sections across the globe. For a larger collection of Everett True links (most of poorer repro quality) go here.