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The Dozen Comics Series' That Made Unca Cheeks Smile and Smile Most During the Last Twelve Months (Give or Take) Pt. 2
#6 The only thing keeping the estimable comics series up next for discussion from an even more exalted ranking than this one was its (comparative) absence from the scene this year, overall (i.e., fewer than six issues during the course of the calendar year).
Obviously I'm referring to the ongoing storytelling hat trick that is Kurt Busiek's ASTRO CITY. [See cover reproduction, accompanying]
Attempting to garland this intricate and intelligent series with fresh,
never- before-seen superlatives is pretty much a mug's game, frankly.
By now, every comics fan over the age of seven from here to Outer Mongolia
knows that Kurt explications of the day-in-day-out "real life" nuts and
bolts of What the World Would Really Be Like If It Had Super-Heroes
In It have meteored their way past the merely entertaining, and well into
the uppermost stratospheric reaches of the absolutely essential.
(It is -- as they say in the journalism game -- "Dog Bites Man.")
Throw in the meticulous renderings of penciler Brent Anderson
-- aided and abetted by inking crony Will Blyberg -- and, really
you're pretty much talking storytelling Nirvana, here.
Particular mention should be made (and, by golly, will be made) of both the multi-issue story arc in which the urban vigilante known as "Jack-In-the-Box" undergoes a uniquely personal "dark night of the soul," re his place in the grand, temporal scheme of things; and of the tortuous, ongoing attempts at reformation and redemption on the part of penny ante ex-supervillain "Steeljack." Both of these were -- quite simply -- as good as anything else to come out on the stands, this year.
It should be noted, in passing, that the aforementioned scarcity of
new issues of ASTRO CITY, this past year, has been anything but
the good Mr. Busiek's fault (major surgery; the joys of new parenthood;
etc., etc.)... and the smart money is on this title (barring famine; pestilence;
or nuclear armageddon) ranking all the higher, this time next year.
#5 Next to the aforementioned DESERT PEACH the singlemost underrated American comic being produced today. Period.
With the passings of both Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN and (just this
year, in fact) Matt Wagner's SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE, it is Peter
Gross' delicate (yet gut- wrenching) THE BOOKS OF MAGIC which presently
slugs it out for top honors, re the stable of DC's Vertigo titles.
(It's only competition, in fact, places but a mere two rankings higher,
on this very page; we'll be discussing that one, in just another
moment or two.)
Certainly, the quirky, multi- leveled BOOKS is a far and desperate cry from being the easiest of titles to decently summarize, in a quick, off-handed line or two. The main protagonist, however -- cynical and alienated adolescent Tim Hunter; potentially the world's most powerful and significant sorcerer (who'd very much rather he'd never even heard of the word "magic," in all honesty) -- is one of the most naturally engaging and sympathetic characters in all of mainstream comics, for all of his unrelenting sarcasm and prickly defensiveness. If he were the only thing this series had going for it, ultimately... it would still place head-and-shoulders above practically every other storytelling dog in the pack.
However:
there is also the winning and superb Molly to consider, as well.
The sardonic Tim's on-again, off- again "girlfriend" (even if neither one of them would be caught dead employing the term), Molly is that rarest and most magickal of four-color chimeras a fully-realized (and breathtakingly realistic) female protagonist, in a medium which, historically, has placed little premium (and invested damned little enough effort) in the effectual explication and/or promotion of same.
Take it from the proud (if, at times, exasperated) father of his own Little Princess, ladies and gents everything about Molly -- her theatrics in the face of Tim's habitual selfishness; her guileless stratagems; her every snide, sotto voce aside, whilst trudging along behind her bewildered beau in (vainglorious) attempt to keep him from Fouling Things Up Even Worse This Time -- is a minor miracle of execution. They are so unfailingly dead-on target as to elicit stunned, open-mouthed gapes... if not frenzied and sustained applause, outright.
I've come to utilize this title as a sort of "barometer" (if you will) of other comics readers. The ones who elect not to follow this title, I find -- "too British"; "too Vertigo"; "too 'girly-girly' " -- I can safely ignore, insofar as their own title recommendations are concerned.
It's as simple as this, really:
Either you cherish and adore flawless writing... or you don't.
#4 There's an especially pernicious breed of mutton-headed fanboy "snobbery" (if you will) making the online rounds, of late.
Perhaps you've encountered it yourselves. It goes something rather like this:
"The only BATMAN comic I read anymore is BATMAN GOTHAM ADVENTURES. It's the only "real" BATMAN book DC publishes, anymore. All the rest of 'em are just plain old, garden variety crap."
Unfailingly -- so often, in fact, that your eternally patient and forbearing
Unca Cheeks has taken to setting his watch to 'em, in point of
fact -- these selfsame nose-in-the-air know-nothings, when questioned,
take a peculiar (if inexplicable) amount of pride in not actually having
read any other BATMAN comics since...
oh, say... 1978, or thereabouts.
Of this much, you may rest well and truly assured theymost certainly have not been following the year-long extended story arc presently taking place under the umbrella title of No Man's Land. [See cover reproduction, accompanying]
It is a source of no little amusement to your long- memoried Unca Cheeks that -- before so much as Page One of this audacious storytelling experiment had even made its way to the printers, in plain point of fact -- the "all-Batman- comics-not- looking-like-a- syndicated- cartoon-stink" bunch was all over the various online fannish forums, noisily Nostradamus-izing to the effect that this "No Man's Land" business would be remembered, ultimately, as the absolute storytelling nadir of DC Comics' sixty-years-plus comics franchise; that the books would all but redefine the term "meretricious"; and that "Bat"-editor Dennis O'Neil would go down in history as The Only Man More Clueless, Bat-Wise, Than Joel Schumacher.
... and then the books actually hit the stands.
And promptly sold out.
Through repeated PRINTINGS.
... but, then again what would some talentless hack like Dennis O'Neil
-- who only rescued DC's "Bat"-franchise from sales oblivion, single-
handedly, back in the 1960s (welllll... maybe artist Neal Adams
helped out a little...) know about telling a whacking good BATMAN
tale, anyway...?
I won't insult the intelligence of anyone reading these words, re a summation of the central storytelling conceit underlying No Man's Land. Even naked aboriginal children, half a world away, have been clued in to the 4-1-1 by this point Gotham City has been devastated by the Grand Mal Seizure of all earthquakes; and has -- as a result -- been transformed into something most closely resembling the "Cursed Earth" of the old JUDGE DREDD comic books.
Just take Unca Cheeks' word for it on this one, campers:
This'un is the Cool Mack Daddy of all BATMAN stories.
A city gerrymandered into frightened, perpetually turf-warring duchies by various and sundry Arkham Asylum residents; a desperate (and increasingly fragmented, along moral and political lines) Gotham City Police Force, attempting to win said city back, one block at a time...
... and The Batman. As hag-ridden and resolute and coldly brilliant as you've ever seen him.
When the self-appointed fanboy "experts" are wrong... they're wrong
with a bloody vengeance, aren't they...?
(... and, oh, yes, yes, yesyesyes Unca Cheeks likes GOTHAM ADVENTURES just fine, thank you. It's just that he's jolly well old enough to realize that there's more than one legitimate storytelling means by which one may skin a bat, is all.
(As they say in the supermarket newspaper ads "Shop and Compare.")
#3 Beating
out the aforementioned THE BOOKS OF MAGIC in the "Waycoolest Vertigo
Comic" swimsuit competition... if only by a nose.
There really is no describing THE INVISIBLES, sans recourse to obscene finger puppets, or recreational pharmaceuticals.
Right away, then we know we're squarely in Grant Morrison territory.
Take the following characters:
*** one studiedly (if not out-and-out fanatically) anarchistic, sex-and-drugs- fueled young tough with a prodigious talent for extreme violence [King Mob];
*** a transgendered, transvestite bruja priest/priestess with an over-inflamed libido [Lord Fanny];
*** a facepaint-wearing young woman whose past is shrouded in mystery, and who is a world-class adept at tantric "sex magick" [Ragged Robin];
*** a female African-American ex-cop, with unresolved "issues" all the way out to here [Boy];
*** ... and an angry, terminally disenfranchised Brit street punk who may (or may not) be the predestined avatar of all High Sorcery[Jack].
Mix well. Bake at regular, self-contained twelve-issue intervals.
Serves the entire family, by golly!
THE INVISIBLES is the weirdest, wildest balls- out thrill ride available in comics today; a gleefully blood- drenched and (let's not mince words, shall we?) obscene Alice B. Toklas brownie of a book, chock full of centuries-old alien conspiracies; inscrutably Machiavellian socio-political maneuverings that would baffle the high council of the Bavarian Illuminati; lesbianic voodoo cults; "secret alphabets" known only to pan-sexual interdimensional beings; orgasm-propelled time travel; and... and...
... well and pretty much anything and everything that might bring
back dear, fond memories of Unca Cheeks' high school senior year, really.
Unca Cheeks devours each and every successive issue of Grant Morrison's
THE INVISIBLES like they were so many peanut-coated M&M's... and just
look at him, by cracky!
#2 The
fact that he is the dominant creative force behind two of The Three Best
Comic Books In the Whole Entire Universe, As Of This Writing, is all the
reason I need to crown Grant Morrison as the medium's leading visionary
and auteur.
Given that Grant's epochal, nonpareil star "turn" on DC's JLA pretty much outsells every other comic book out there without the letter "X" somewhere in its title... I'm going to work with the assumption that I needn't regale you all yet again with what a seamless, streamlined marvel of a comic this is, really. The line-up is (pretty much) as God and Gardner Fox always intended it to be (primary focus on the "big guns" of the DCU, always; with a smattering of second-tier characters on hand to serve as storytelling "mortar," as required); the threats are never anything less than the cosmos-shattering sort which would make the existence of a JLA necessary in the first place; the pacing is appropriately breakneck...
... and -- O, Jesus! Best-best-bestest of all! -- the reader
isn't strongarmed into laughing at (or pitying) the characters
anymore.
I'm sorry... but if you aren't reading this comic book... then
you're Evil and Wrong.
#1 Okay. New Rule, here at Casa del Cheeks:
Nobody's allowed anywhere within one hundred yards of the complimentary
wet bar, without showing an issue of Terry Moore's incomparable
STRANGERS IN PARADISE to one of the elite ninja guards, first.
Ohmigawd... where to even decently begin with this one...?
Well, now there are these two girls, see? Francine (the somewhat, ummmm, "Ruebenesque" brunette) suffers from a chronic case of the most gargantuan case of low self-esteem in all of recorded meta-fictive history, due to her having pretty much the same sort of luck with the opposite sex that fabled pilot "Wrong Way" Corrigan was reputed to have with the average service station road map. Francine is all but worshipped by Katchoo (the short, feisty blonde with artistic aspirations and a genuine talent for crippling hand-to-hand combat), who wants sweet Francine so gosh-darned badly, she practically leaves a trail of saliva in her wake when she walks.
... but, wait it gets even better.
Throw sincere and bespectacled writer wannabe (and committed Christian)
David into the mix -- whose silent, slavish devotion to the lesbian
Katchoo is very nearly a palpable thing -- and you've got all the
makings for one sweet little Eternal Triangle
... especially when you consider the fact that the seriously repressed and conflicted Francine is by no means certain whether she regards implacable Katchoo as a best friend; mentor; or (*gasp*) potential romantic interest.
This would all be so much simpler for all involved, of course,
if not for Katchoo's seamy, violent past as a high-priced call girl and
political blackmailer.
No... no; it's no good this way, you see. Attempting a straightforward and unblemished re-telling of the various and labyrinthine plot points and/or character interactions in STRANGERS just makes the whole thing sound like a mid-'70's episode of ALL MY CHILDREN. Which doesn't even come with several city blocks of what this book is -- really and truly -- all about.
It's all about loneliness, I supose... and all the myriad of silly, stupid, selfish and self-destructive ways in which we -- all of us -- attempt, daily, to extricate ourselves from same...
... except that it's falling-down funny, you see.
In a bleak, pitiless and despairing sort of way, I mean.
Look if I had to -- and I mean absolutely had to -- winnow my monthly comics purchases down to one and only one title per month...
... STRANGERS IN PARADISE would be that one.
... and I wouldn't even think twice about it, either.
Which -- come to think -- I guess pretty much says it all right there,
doesn't it...?
Be back here in seven, gang.
"MORE COMIC BOOKS," YOU SAY...?
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