Vague Tales

The joke is that there is nothing vague about Vague Tales. It's chock full of comics that will melt your face off. Actually, that is not true - it is more of a bunch of comics that comment about how such extreme experiences have become cliched and vacuous.

Much of Eric Haven's past work trucks with archetypal comic characters and settings, and this book is no different. The main narratives star a brooding, crystalline alien named Psylicon, an evil witch named Ruin, an apocalyptic barbarian named Pulsar, and a sorceress named Sorceress. And eventually, the stories all bleed into each other. Ruin attacks the Sorceress; Pulsar defends her; Pyslicon is mysteriously aloof but intercedes in an unexpected manner. The whole enterprise is reminiscent of old cartoons like Thundarr the Barbarian or Masters of the Universe, only skewed with a touch of absurd realism. Haven is obviously poking fun at these story and character conventions, but it is also apparent that he also enjoys them and takes great joy in casting his own stories using them.

 

Thinking, in the Mighty Marvel Manner!

And if this book were simply comprised of those adventures, I'd simply say it was some sort of parody or homage to that genre of comics. But there is also the hulking, angry blonde man featured on the cover, whose presence is almost entirely unrelated to the way-out adventures. This guy mostly stands or sits around his house, gazes out the window, or knocks back some drinks, until a weird thing happens toward the end of the book that places him directly in the action. I am not going to spoil it, but they change the tone of the story and make it more of a commentary on contemporary fandom and/or media.

In the end, I feel that this story is more an exploration of the constant drive for bigger, better, and more extreme experiences that abound in popular culture (in the USA anyhow). The culture is driven by more intricate and complex special effects, blockbuster movies, and innovative video games. The net result, I am extrapolating from Haven's tales here, is that each amped up moment in the end leaves people empty. Or maybe it is the nature of such escapism to leave people unfulfilled. Mostly, stuff gets blown up just for the hell of having a big explosion, narrative be damned. What is clear is that those grand moments lose any kind of nuance or impact, forgotten in short order. All is spectacle, and the chase for such experiences is ultimately fruitless. Or maybe that is the more intellectual way of looking at the book, and I should just appreciate it for being a bunch of fun, crazy stories and not look for anything deeper.

That I got this much out of a relatively short 75 pages is noteworthy in itself, speaking to the great craft that went into these various narratives. This book is beguiling, silly, confusing, thrilling, and fantastic. Like much of Haven's prior work, it is also impactful and unforgettable.

I have been a fan of Haven's for a while. I have read all of his works, including the series Tales to Demolish and his books The Aviatrix and Ur, which was nominated for an Eisner Award. His comics are short, distilled, potent pieces of storytelling. They are weird, provocative, and delightful. His art style here reminds me of a combination of Fletcher Hanks, Herr Seele, and Jim Starlin, full of wonder and weirdness. Also of note, aside from making comics he was a producer for the popular show Mythbusters, which may account for his relatively sparse publication record. Haven sheds much insight into his work in this interview.

I had a hard time locating any reviews of this book, but the one I did find was laudatory and thoughtful. Rob Clough wrote that these stories amount to "images of a man-child, and it seems that Haven is satirizing that tendency toward indulging this sort of infantile fantasy as much as he is celebrating it."

Vague Tales was published by Fantagraphics, and they have a preview and more information about it here.

Fante Bukowski

Fante Bukowski is funny and profane, a great send-up of a pretentious 23-year-old who quit his daddy's law firm to move into a cheap hotel, drink heavily, pick up women, and become a writer. However, he is more interested in living the writerly life than actually improving on his craft. Ungifted by talent and armed with a pen name portmanteau of his two favorite authors, he attempts to navigate the world of publishing, poetry readings, and being a literary genius while bumming checks from his mom. The fruits of his struggle are pretty hilarious.

The first time I read this relatively short book, I was incredulous. The second time through, I was frequently tickled at the multiple disastrous forays into serious literature. In part I was amused to see a Holden Caulfield-style parody in action, all full of rage toward the "jocks" of the world but ultimately clueless. 

That dude is a total jock, I am sure.

Such a figure is pretty low hanging fruit, and it is difficult for me to say that he goes through any real growth or change (though the ending sort of points to perhaps the next step in his evolution). Ultimately I still found I really enjoyed this book because of its situational comedy and the actual "literary pieces," which are most enjoyable in and of themselves. They are fun to read, and I bet they were a hoot to make up as well. Overall, I loved the send up of an overblown literary scene, replete with conniving agents, hangers-on, and the obligatory Dave Eggers cameo.

This biting lampoon is the product of Noah Van Sciver, author of the graphic novels The Hypo: The Melancholic Young Lincoln and Saint Cole. He is also known for his many mini-comics (some collected here) and the series Blammo. He also has a Tumblr page where he first posted episodes of Fante Bukoswki. He speaks about  the book in this interview and more about his various works in this Comics Alternative Interview (Hi, Andy!).

All the reviews I have read of this book have been positive. Spencer Hicks called "a complicated and very funny new comic." Benn Ray called it "an excellent study in the self-deluding nature of artists and an immediate Van Sciver classic." Tom Murphy praised Van Sciver for "delivering caustic satire while still maintaining a degree of empathy for its flawed characters."

Fante Bukowski was published by Fantagraphics, and they have a preview and much more available here. Because of the language and sexual situations, I suggest this book for readers mature enough to handle both.

Happy Will Eisner Week, Day 6: Superbitch! Volume One

Today, I review another graphic novel funded via Kickstarter for Will Eisner Week.

Superbitch! is a superhero story turned on its head, a commentary on hero worship, celebrity, popular culture, and capitalism. Superbitch used to be a run of the mill superheroine, but she decided that charity work was for suckers and that she should get paid for her services. She is petty, materialistic, drinks maybe a little too much, and solves her problems by punching them dead in the face. The two main members of SB's supporting cast, who try their best to ground her, are Art Hobo, a childhood friend who has a bachelor's degree in art and a lot of debt, and Quinn, a smart computer expert who keeps her up to date with technology and pitches in as needed.

I think this collection is full of fun action sequences, clever situations, and laughs. At the start of this book, most of the comics are sketchier, one-off gags that frequently have pop culture references like this one:

But after a few pages, you can see a distinct and cleaner art style evolve. Also, there are more sustained storylines, where Superbitch runs for mayor, deals with a jerk of an ex-boyfriend, and assists Art Hobo when a super-powered debt collector comes a-calling.

I really enjoyed these comics, particularly how they play with and ridicule the often ludicrous conventions of superhero comics.

Superbitch! creator Kennedy Cooke-Garza is a recent graduate from the Savannah College of Art and Design. She has an online portfolio of her artwork and various projects here. For those interested, she talks about "comics, superheroes and creativity" in this interview.

I was only able to locate a couple of reviews for this book, and they were both positive. Brian Cronin had these positive words for the comic, "Cooke-Garza is a talented draftswoman, and her work has only gotten better as the series has gone along." Deborah Markus wrote on Goodreads, "It's ridiculously over-the-top wrong, and it kills."

If you are interesting in buying this book or following her continuing adventures, Superbitch! is regularly updated here. Also, as you can see from the title and the sample pages, there are frequent profanities and adult situations, so this book is recommended for those mature enough to handle both.

To serve and protect.

Happy Will Eisner Week, Day 3: Sexcastle

Will Eisner Week is rolling along to day 3, where I am reviewing a graphic novel funded in part by Kickstarter, a new-fangled, crowd-sourced method of gathering money to bring a project to fruition.

Sexcastle is a hilarious parody/satire/homage/tribute to 1980s action movies. It's main character is Shane Sexcastle, formerly the world's most dangerous assassin. He looks a lot like Snake Plissken, and the story begins when he is released from prison. Well, actually, the story starts here:

Which gives you a sense of the timing and humor in this book. Anyhow, once Shane is a free man, he decides he wants a quiet life as a florist. Things are going well until one day the local muscle comes by the shop looking for "insurance money."

My favorite line in the whole book.

Needless to say, Shane makes short work of the goons, but the local crime boss decides to sic the team of assassins Shane used to head on him.

If you watched any movies from the 1980s at all, you recognize most of these faces.

So the rest of the book is basically the same plot as Road House, only with way more jokes and way less of Patrick Swayze's abs. There is a whole lot of mindless violence in this book, but it is also played mostly for laughs, and there are a few scenes that are surprisingly heartfelt. I am super impressed by how fun and raucous this book was. I would also say impressed, but Kyle Starks' last book The Legend of Ricky Thunder is one of my all time favorites. After my experiences with all of his books and mini-comics, I am pretty much set to buy anything he creates sight unseen. The man is a masterful entertainer, humorist, and comics maker.

All of the reviews I have read about this book have been extremely positive. Rich Barrett wrote, "This is a laugh-out-loud comic from a real rising talent." Kyle Overkill added that it "provides a lush experience whether it be the humor, the action, plot, characters or a man befriending a polar bear." Matthew Meylikhov lauded, "It’s fun, it’s incredibly funny and it has a surprising amount of heart at the center of it." And if you are interested, Starks speaks more about his work on Sexcastle in this interview.

Sexcastle is published by Image Comics. There are profane language and violence throughout, so I recommend this book to readers mature enough to handle both.

Sulk

As Top Shelf Month begins, we dive into a series from an established talent.

Sulk is a one-man anthology by Jeffrey Brown. Brown is a prolific comics creator known for his intimate autobiographical works, such as Clumsy, as well as far ranging parodies/homages like The Incredible Change-Bots. His art style is distinctive, a mix between cartoon and realism, and here he has grown ever more capable with his writing voice. This series tends to be more toward the parody/homage spectrum of his work, and thus far there are three compact volumes.

 

Bighead and Friends

Volume 1 follows the adventures of Bighead, a superhero in the vein of 1970s Marvel Comics, with dramatic cliffhangers, stories that reference each other, insane villains, and bombastic action. Some of the stories chronicle his early crime-fighting days as Little Bighead. In his mature adventures, he confronts adversaries like the Claw, the Grapplers, the Bowler, the Beefy Hipster, and even himself. Over the course of these stories, of course he dies, meets the Devil, Jesus, and Buddha, and has to fight his way through demons to be reborn. It is apparent that these adventures are outrageous, overblown, and surprisingly silly, but there is also a sincere affection for these superheroic conventions. Brown at once parodies these adventures while also capturing their joyful parts.

Sean T. Collins called it "a funny, intelligently drawn superhero humor comic."

Deadly Awesome

The second volume is more like a manga, with one MMA fight comprising the totality of the book's plot. Brown stages the action with great detail and attention, and his visual storytelling is quite excellent. What puts this story over the top is its crazily intense and intricate dialogue (both external and internal) that lends an inappropriately undue amount of gravity to the proceedings. The fight is a formulaic one, the up-and-coming brawler Eldark Garprub versus the cagey veteran Haruki Rabasaku, but Brown's artfulness keeps things interesting, fresh, and exciting. This parody cleaves closely to its source material, but its love for fight stories shines through even as they are exposed as overinflated bags of wind. The net effect: I really got into this story, snickering at its pomposity but also wondering in suspense who would win.

J. Caleb Mozzocco wrote about it, "The story is more or less all sports story cliché, but Brown livens it up with a lot of extremely weird touches, and a wild use of various layouts that give the book a surprisingly fluid look."

The Kind of Strength that Comes from Madness!

This third volume of Sulk is less of coherent whole than it is a survey of caffeinated science fiction and fantasy stories. Pirates, college students with huge, remote controlled robots, and long-haired martial artists populate these pages. There are vampires fighting unicorns, giant lizards terrorizing cities, and astronauts taking substances to augment their abilities. Things often end poorly for those involved, transforming the clever twist endings of Twilight Zone episodes or formulaic Silver Age monster comics into something like a blunt object. These stories wink at those past tales in part in admiration, letting us know we are in on a joke, but they are also pretty brutal in their execution. Except for its ending with a jokey story about time-traveling babies, I felt this book was very dark in comparison with the others.

This volume is probably the one I have seen least positively reviewed, mostly, I feel, because of what Sean T. Collins observes, that "the anchor point in The Kind of Strength That Comes from Madness is much harder to locate." It is a satire about pretty wide genre conventions.

The series as a whole seems to me very well received. The reviewer at Avoid the Future wrote about these three volumes, "the stories in Sulk are nothing if not concise, and, like most good short fiction, waste nothing in their construction. Every panel and word is valuable, and consequently, it’s difficult not to feel absorbed whilst reading it." It is difficult to read these books and not conclude that Brown is very good at making comics of many varieties.

Top Shelf provides lots of information and previews for each volume in this series (click the links to see more about volumes 1, 2, and 3). 

Incredible Change-Bots

 

The Incredible Change-Bots books are an intriguing mixture of parody, homage, satire, and action-adventure stories. Author Jeffrey Brown obviously has a lot of experience with Transformers in various media, and his love for them shows. What he adds is a sense of the ridiculous that comes with following the adventures of anthropomorphic, shape-changing robots. His stories have parodied, senseless violence tossed in, but what makes them charming are the clever robot names, the wonderful sound effects he includes, and the snappy verbal banter that occurs between characters. Brown's tongue is earnestly in cheek throughout these adventures.

In book 1, we meet the cast and their social system. As the two party government of Awesomebots and Fantasticons devolves into bickering, combat, and the destruction of their home world of Electronocybercircuitron, the robots decide to board a rocket and find a new place to live. Along the way they accidentally land on Earth and decide to try to live under the radar. Of course, their boorish and egotistical interactions do not allow that to happen for long. Soon humans become aware of these robots and the US military becomes interested in the destructive potential of these warriors. A huge battle ends the story, and one robot is left behind for dead as the rest of his compatriots leave Earth to find an uninhabited world they can call their own.

In book 2, we find Shootertron, the megalomaniac leader of the Fantasticons, was not killed after all. Stranded on Earth and unaware of who he is, he is taken in by a kindly couple of farmers who befriend him and try to raise him as a good person. Much of this part of the story is told via an ironic and hilarious set of journal entries handwritten by the robot in a spiral bound notebook. Somehow, he comes to the attention of a scheming general who kidnaps Shootertron to either recruit the robot or dissect him to figure out how he works. Also, somehow all the other change-bots end up back on Earth, and of course another series of battles and bickering ensue.

These books' creator Jeffrey Brown is best known for his autobiographical, independent comics work. His works, such as Funny Misshapen Body, Clumsy, and Every Girl is the End of the World for Me are very open, confessional kinds of tales that focus on his past relationships, his upbringing, and his life. Other of his works, including Bighead and Sulk, are more action-oriented, fictional stories that are not quite superhero stories. I have always found his art style charming, deceivingly simplistic, and emotionally charged. He speaks more about his work on the Change-Bots books in this interview at Topless Robot.

Reviews I have read about these books have been largely positive, appreciating the parody/homage quality, with some preferring these books to Michael Bay's Transformers movies. yo go re wrote about the first one, "The writing is what really makes this book, though, whether it's the subtle G1 nods or the broad comedy." Michael May praised the second book, "not only are the jokes even better, but the story’s more touching too." Aaron Block summed up his review of both books, "Jeffrey Brown proves that you can create something new with those memories, and that sometimes it’s okay to find that box of old toys in the attic and, piece by piece, remember how they work."

Previews, reviews, and more about books 1 and 2 are available from the books' publisher, Top Shelf.
There is also an animated video trailer for book 1 on YouTube. Check it out!