I got the “complete black and white collection” of Scott McCloud’s Zot! a couple of years ago from my friend Chris as a birthday present, and I finally got around to reading it over the past couple days.
McCloud is primarily known for his brilliant Understanding Comics(as well as its two underrated sequels Reinventing Comics and Making Comics), but few (including myself, until recently) have read much of Zot!, his pre-UC superhero series. This book, which collects issues 11-36 (the first ten issues were originally in color, and 11 was meant as a sort of reboot), chronicles his maturation into the master formalist most are familiar with from his analytical work. There’s some clunky storytelling early on, but by the half-way point, McCloud had developed into a brilliant cartoonist.
The story itself begins as a bit of an Astro Boy knock-off (McCloud was one of the first American comic artists to take a heavy influence from manga), but quickly develops into a book of surprising depth. Zot is a superhero from a near-perfect alternate version of Earth who befriends Jenny, a mopey teenager from our own world. McCloud abandons the whole high concept conciet of the book in issue 28, when Jenny and Zot are trapped in Jenny’s reality, and the book becomes one of the better depictions of high school seen in comics.
Zot! reminded me a lot of books like Cerebus and Strangers in Paradise, series which made radical left turns at the creators’ own whims, and (for the most part) were all the better for it. McCloud’s extensive commentary on each story is self-deprecating, funny, and always insighful. Now I need to hunt down those first ten issues.
Saga #1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
Brian Vaughan is clearly the most influential mainstream comic book writer of the past decade, even if he was conspicuously absent for much of the second half of it. After getting a job writing for Lost during its third season, Vaughan wrapped up his brilliant Marvel book Runaways, and allowed schedules to slow on both of his well known landmarks, Y: the Last Man and Ex Machina. He’s been absent in comics (and television; he left Lost after season five) since the end of Ex Machina, so I don’t think I’ve ever had higher expectations for a comic book than I have for his much vaunted space opera Saga.
It was clear within pages that Vaughan had not disappointed. Saga #1 is a 44-page comic, but it still has a lot of character introductions and world building to accomplish even for that double-sized length. Here, Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples have taken the Star Wars concept of a “used universe” and stretched it even further, putting spaceships and interplanetary war side by side with school buses and iPhone (or whatever its equivalent) applications.
Marco and Alana are members of two warring races who went the classic Romeo and Juliet route—minus the suicide—and have now had a child named Hazel. Saga is narrated by that child, still an infant in this first issue, after she’s grown up. Vaughan and Staples use this device pretty cleverly, with Staples hand lettering Hazel’s narration without any enclosing boxes surrounding the text. This is one of the more unique uses of lettering in a mainstream comic this side of Sandman.
Staples’s art is at least as impressive as Vaughan’s predictably impeccable pacing. Her art has the looseness of Eddie Campbell and the coolness of Becky Cloonan. Its a style which complements Vaughan’s writing more than perhaps any of his previous collaborators. Her storytelling is fluid and her characters’ “acting” expresses a full range of emotion without wasting a line. This mirrors Vaughan’s florid and quick dialogue and the depth of his plotting and characterization.
There are many obvious reference points when trying to describe Saga—Star Wars, Romeo and Juliet, Game of Thrones—and I’ve thankfully only made offhand references to two of those (shit—now all three). Regardless of whatever its influences may be, Saga’s universe is wholly original. Sex robots with televisions for heads seem only to be the tip of this galaxy’s iceberg of the bizarre, and I’ll certainly be there to unveil more and more of it every month.
2011 in review
2011 was a year in which I consumed a lot less film, comics, television, and music than I have in years past. I made no real attempt to “catch up” in the last few weeks, so as a result, the following lists may have an incomplete feeling. Regardless, these were my favorites.
note: I only read one 2011 book in 2011 (Supergods by Grant Morrison—it’s good), so that explains the lack of a book section.
FILM
1. Hugo (dir. Martin Scorsese)
2. Midnight in Paris (dir. Woody Allen)
3. Tabloid (dir. Errol Morris)
4. Drive (dir. Nicholas Winding Refn)
5. Rise of the Planet of the Apes (dir. Rupert Wyatt)
Honorable Mentions- The Adventures of Tintin, Super 8, Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, The Captains, The Muppets, Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
Worst movie of the year- Larry Crowne (dir. Tom Hanks)
COMICS
1. The Unwritten by Mike Carey and Peter Gross
2. Batman, Inc. by Grant Morrison, Chris Burnham, et al.
3. Hellblazer by Peter Milligan, Giuseppe Camuncoli, et al.
4. Echo/Rachel Rising by Terry Moore
5. Daredevil by Mark Waid, Paolo Rivera, and Marcos Martin
Honorable Mentions- Action Comics, Spaceman, iZombie, Morning Glories, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Wolverine and the X-Men, Usagi Yojimbo, RASL, Justice League Dark, X-Men: Schism, FF, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Faith, Planet of the Apes
Worst Comic of the Year- Fear Itself by Matt Fraction and Stuart Immonen (feel my disdain in three different posts!)
TELEVISION
1. Community
4. Beavis and Butt-head
5. Curb Your Enthusiasm
Honorable mentions- 30 Rock, The Simpsons (These are the only seven shows I watched with any regularity, though I’d heartily recommend this past season of all of them.)
MUSIC
1. Watch the Throne by Jay-Z and Kanye West
2. Alone III: The Pinkerton Years by Rivers Cuomo
3. Belong by The Pains of Being Pure At Heart
4. EP/Camp by Childish Gambino
5. The King is Dead by The Decemberists
Honorable mentions- Milk by The Lunatic, Hey, There’s Tommy! Hey, Tommy… Where’s Mom and Dad? by Humming Bird, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds (self-titled), Castor, The Twin by Dessa, Take Care by Drake, Suck it and See by Arctic Monkeys, Submarine by Alex Turner
Sebastian O by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell (Vertigo; 1993)
The back cover synopsis for the trade paperback collection of Sebastian O gives the reader a pretty good idea what they’re in for:
“Gentle reader, we implore your indulgence! Do you dare deny yourselves the opportunity to amaze your jaded sensibilities in a manner to which—we dare fancy—they have never before been thrilled? Stay but a moment, and discover between these covers a tale of dandyism, vice, and revenge unique in the annals of graphical entertainments: SEBASTIAN O, a Romance unequaled in wit and espirit, with enough decadent asides to generate the most agreeable of frissons in every civilized peruser!
Buy quickly, now! And repair to your scented boudoirs, newly armed with this volume of madness and mauve, there to enjoy its sweet diversions in surroundings befitting your unquestionably high status and shameful criminal appetites. Be assured that the actions set forth herein by Messrs. GRANT MORRISON and STEVE YEOWELL are without equal in both originality and craftsmanship, and that the perverse narrative machinations from which they spring are incontrovertibly the flowering of a morbid and Plutonian genius.
God save the Queen… for someone must!”
Sebastian O is perhaps Grant Morrison’s first in a long line of work celebrating the hedonism he became legendary for through much of the ’90s. It’s an obvious precursor to The Invisibles (which also features the art of Steve Yeowell), especially that series second storyline “Arcadia.”
The book takes place in a technologically (but not culturally) advanced Victorian England. Sebastian O has long been imprisoned for a great many charges of indecency as the founder of the secret sex society known as the Club de Paradis Artifieiel, a haven for those who relish in false pleasures, those created out of boredom or wealth. When Sebastian breaks out of prison, he hunts down the other members of the club to figure out why he alone had been severely punished when the club was discovered and dissolved by the authorities.
Sebastian’s old colleagues include a helpful lesbian named George, the kindly, but still deplorable pedophile Abbe, and his suspected nemesis, Lord Theo Lavender. Sebastian himself is a pretty loathsome character, but like all Morrison protagonists from this period, he’s pretty charming and likable, despite his perversions and selfishness.
For a largely minor work, Sebastian O surprisingly predicts all of Morrison’s fascinations with the nature of reality, Victorian dandies, odd sexual proclivities, and righteous amorality found in much of his work in the ’90s and early ’00s. A slight, but satisfying work for Morrison die-hards like myself.
New promotional image from Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’s upcoming ongoing series, Saga. Cannot wait.
pages from Sandman #56 by Neil Gaiman and Gary Amaro
My super slow re-read of Sandman sped up considerably in the last few days, during which I devoured the entirety of the second and third absolute editions (those cover the storylines Season of Mists, A Game of You, Brief Lives, and World’s End, as well as several one shots previously collected as Fables and Reflections). I had forgotten about this sequence from the final chapter of World’s End, a storyline I had remembered as fairly insignificant within the primary narrative of the series (it’s a Canterbury Tales styled short story collection), in which Dream’s eventual fate in The Kindly Ones is presaged. It’s interesting to see how much more planned and structured The Sandman seems on each revisit. This is my fourth time through the series (once in 2003, once a couple years later, and once as the absolute editions came out from 2006-2008), and stories I never particularly loved are now some of my favorites (A Game of You) and and my previous favorites are revealing even more depth (Season of Mists, Brief Lives).
I enjoy most of Neil Gaiman’s novels, but I’d kill to see him return to an ongoing, monthly comic book series. He is truly one of the masters of the form, and his short dabblings in superheroes over the last ten years (Marvel 1602, Eternals, Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?), while fun, aren’t nearly as satisfying.
Batman Incorporated #8- “Nightmares in Numberland” by Grant Morrison and Scott Clark
In Grant Morrison’s latest issue of Batman Incorporated, we see the new “Internet 3.0” technology Bruce Wayne has developed. This tech is essentially virtual reality. Viruses are supervillains, and Bruce sends virtual Batmen to fight them (“Batman Incorporated Anti-Viral Software”).
Bruce is showing off the new internet to some potential investors, and a supervillain shows up in the form of the old internet, who doesn’t want to be forgotten.
Morrison is so far beyond his peers at Marvel and DC, it’s almost depressing. He consistantly comes up with completely new ideas (or fascinating twists on old ones), and you can tell it makes no difference to him whether he’s writing Batman or King Mob from The Invisibles. He has a strong personal vision, and this story is a perfect example of that. It’s a story about the way we live, acceleration, and being left behind, not to mention the nerve racking cliffhanger which will drive me crazy for months.
Batman Incorporated is coming to a close with a double-sized special later this year, thus ending Morrison’s third Batman epoch before he follows it up with his supposed “final word” on the character in Batman: Leviathan in 2012. His Batman stories have been one of the few consistently excellent things going on in superhero comics for the past five years. That, not to mention his classic Arkham Asylum, makes it hard to see him leave the character behind.
