"Between the two of us, we've lost a complete Tony Isabella."
- Former CBG columnist Mark Evanier to current CBG columnist Peter David at Comic-Con International's "Quick Draw" competition. They were discussing their respective weight losses.
The 2007 Comic-Con International, four-and-a-half days of fun and frustration, is several months in the past as you read this, days as I write it. What can you say about a convention that brought together over a hundred thousand people? Maybe a better question might be...what wasn't said about it?
I'm exhausted and I wasn't even at the con. I made an initial effort to read the Comic-Con news and blogs posted online, but it was just too much for me. All the major comics companies and many of the minor ones were making announcements at the show. Hollywood had its assorted presentations and previews. There were hundreds of panels and programs. There were probably thousands of writers, artists, and editors from comic books past and present. There were costumes, collectibles, action figures, anime, video games, actors and entrepreneurs, not to mention horror stories about the hotels, the restaurants, the traveling, and the convention itself. All too much for me to absorb, even if I'd spent a month sitting in front of my computer trying to read it all.
Is there a publisher out there who wants to get fifty bucks of my money, year in and year out? All you have to do is publish some sort of "Comic-Con Yearbook" boiling down the news, the panels, the whole fabulous event to the equivalent of a mid-sized Harry Potter book. With lots of photos...preferably of people in costumes, but photos of comics creators, celebrities, booths, retailers, and the fans would also be mighty keen. I'd pay a hundred bucks if I could get such a book within a month of Comic-Con.
Because I do care about what happened at Comic-Con. I would like to know what was announced and think about what, if anything, it means to me as a fan and industry professional. Whatever flaws I or anyone else might see in Comic-Con, it remains the single most important gathering in American comics.
As noted above, I didn't attend Comic-Con this year. Nor did my pal Jim Guida. Commiserating about this via e-mail, I ended one exchange with "Next year in San Diego!" It was my silly take on "Next year in Jerusalem," the prayer of Jews, regardless of where they were born, to visit their homeland.
However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized the truth in my facetious prayer. I do long to be part of Comic-Con. Even with all the hassles, even with all the not-quite-comics stuff that sometimes threatens to overwhelm what I'm really interested in at the convention, it's still Comic-Con.
My wise friend Mark Evanier has opined that anyone can have a wonderful time at Comic-Con if they make the effort to find the con they want to attend. You can go to the "Hollywood" con within the con. You can relish the high-tech toys and video games. You can spend your life's savings with the comics vendors. You can hang on every announcement, every panel featuring current comics creators and publishers. You can expand your knowledge of comics history by attending panels about and meeting the pioneers of comics. You can spend time in Artists Alley where the past, present, and future of comics are side-by-side.
"What interests you is probably in there somewhere," says the eternally sagacious Evanier, "but you have to go looking for it. It won't find you."
Next year in San Diego.
52 by Greg Cox [Ace Books; $15] is the prose retelling of the DC Comics series which chronicled the eventful year after Infinite Crisis. It was a year without Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, but not, as the comics and this novelization make clear, a year without heroes.
Cox focuses on a mere handful of the characters and stories we saw in the weekly series, but his choices are dead on. There's the Booster Gold and Rip Hunter story - without which "52" is just the number of weeks in a year - and an epic tale of tragedy and triumph starring the Black Adam Family, Renee Montoya, the new Batwoman, the Question, the brutal Bruno Mannheim, and a complement of crazed criminal geniuses in their island-sized mad lab. Cox went right to the heart and soul of 52.
Quick digression. Cox's major omissions are the Ralph Dibny, "lost in space" heroes, and Lex Luthor's Everyman Project stories. The Ralph Dibny tale worked in the comic, but it was too heavy with DCU continuity for a mainstream audience. The "lost heroes" story didn't entertain me in the comic, so I certainly didn't miss it in the novelization.
The Everyman Project? It would have crowded the stories that were included in this novel. But, if DC's looking for Cox's next book, having him expand that struggle between Luthor and John Henry Irons would be an excellent choice. It's a story that could carry its own novel. End digression.
While reading the novel, I never tried to compare it to the comic book. It had to succeed on its own merits as a novel, and it did. Cox got nicely into the heads and hearts of his stars. He kept the story moving and kept it exciting. He threw in enough cookies, such as a cameo appearance by Fireman Farrell, to delight long-time DC readers. Yes, I screamed when the book misspelled the name of Superman's co-creator - "Schuster Avenue" - but the blooper was early enough in the novel that I got over it...though it still bugs me enough to mention it here.
Cox's 52 was an enjoyable and well-written novel. It earns an impressive four out of five Tonys.
Edward Sorel is one of our country's most accomplished artists and illustrators. A regular contributor to The Atlantic and New Yorker - 41 covers and counting - he has also "covered" Harpers, Fortune, Forbes, Nation, Esquire, American Heritage and The New York Times Magazine. He's illustrated many children's books while writing a few himself. More germane to CBG, he's a cartoonist whose cynical, satirical, wonderful comic strips have appeared in The Village Voice and elsewhere.
Fantagraphics has collected some of the best Sorel cartoons of the past three decades in JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT THINGS COULDN'T GET WORSE [$18.95]. Religion, politics, business, life, and artists of all stripes are captured by his calligraphic pen, their stupidities revealed to our mutual delight and disgust.
This is an amazing collection of work. There is a fair bit of repetition - some of Sorel's biggest, most persistent targets have never learned from history - but, more often, the artist finds new points of entry for his sharp insights, twisting his rapier wit to make his displeasure fully known.
Among my favorite pieces in this book are Sorel's double-page scenes of people discussing taxes, vacations, autumn, and Mother's Day, and the double-page fold-outs on his Bar Mitzvah and "Famous Geezers in World History." But the strips I love best are those in which he turns his pen on himself; his self-deprecating humor has a bemused, begrudging reality I suspect is very familiar to artists and writers who bring anything of ourselves to our work.
Fantagraphics has done its usual magnificent job of designing a book worthy of its subject. The reproduction of Sorel's cartoons are flawless, the colors vibrant without being distracting. They do nice work up there in Seattle.
I am ashamed to admit I have a history of underestimating Jack Kirby. I didn't care for the first issue I read of Fantastic Four, though, to my meager credit, it only took a few more issues for me to realize he and Stan Lee were revolutionizing super-hero comics. Likewise, it took me a bit to appreciate the sheer wonderfulness of Kamandi, The Eternals, and Devil Dinosaur. When I was offered the job of developing and writing Satan's Six for Topps Comics, I only took it because it was created by Jack. But once I started working on the feature, I realized the King had created a big, bawdy stage upon which I could direct terrific characters in morality plays of satire and salvation. In my 35 years in this business, I've rarely had more fun writing comics.
This brings us to JACK KIRBY'S SILVER STAR, VOLUME 1 [Image; $34.99]. This hardcover collection reprints all six issues of the 1983 series published by Pacific Comics. When I read these comics back then, I thought they were awful. Reading a issue every other month, I didn't think the storyline was holding together very well. Kirby's rather esoteric dialogue threatened to make my eyes bleed. It didn't help that, as a comic-shop owner, I'd ordered heavily on the initial issues, only to see my customers greet them with nigh-total disinterest. But this new volume - the hardcover heft, the bright and bold interior colors, the obvious reverence Image Comics had for the material - demanded I take another look at Kirby's tale of "Homo-Geneticus."
Mea culpa. I was wrong about Silver Star. Maybe not as wrong as I was with Fantastic Four in my youth, but wrong nonetheless.
There are some astonishing characters, concepts, and sequences here. The bond between Silver Star and the eternal child Tracy who can communicate with the hero only in a world created by his mind. Our introduction to Morgan Miller, throwing a tank on a Vietnamese battlefield. Scientist Bradford Miller whose "genetic package" is his desperate attempt to ensure the survival of mankind beyond our species, and who shares the gift with unborn children who we might rightfully consider as "at risk." The many different reactions the new men and women have to their superhuman abilities, ranging from the desire to earn a decent living to the mad dream of obliterating the world as we know it.
Silver Star's world is far more brutal than Kirby's Apokolips because it's our own Earth, not some distant world. Darius Drumm's zealotry and mass murders are frightening enough, but, after all, he's the villain of the piece. What was truly shocking to me this second go-round were the extreme measures Big Masai, the "Goliath of the Ghetto," takes to rid his neighborhood of the criminals who hold it in thrall. Finally, when Drumm becomes a literal angel of death, Kirby delivers some of the scariest moments of his career, horror big enough for the biggest of screens. I wasn't surprised to learn Silver Star was originally written as a screen treatment. Visually, it would have been amazing.
My new-found appreciation for Silver Star does not change my opinion of its dialogue. It's monumentally awful. And, doubtless because the title was coming to a premature end, the resolution of the Darius Drumm story seems truncated and not nearly as satisfying as it should have been. But, even with substantial shortcomings such as those, there is much excitement and goodness to be found in this volume. Image deserves kudos for getting these forgotten comic books back in print and doing it in such a handsome fashion. I extend a hearty "well done" to the company.
Mark Crilley's Akiko is one of my favorite comics ever, which made MIKI FALLS: SPRING [Harper Teen; $7.99] a book I had to read. That's my gain, as, right from the start of this four-book graphic novel series, Miki Yoshida proves to be as engaging and as likeable a heroine as Akiko.
Beautifully written and drawn, Spring nonetheless threw me a curve as I started reading it. You've got Miki, starting her last year of high school and determined to make it her best year ever. She's not particularly interested in the boys she's grown up with, but a new student - naturally, he's handsome and mysterious - gets her attention. He's a loner, sticks to himself to the point of being anti-social, and she falls for him. In short, Crilley's newest seemed to be a typical "schoolgirl in love with unattainable guy" manga-style story. Silly me.
By the end of the first book, with the reveal of why handsome Hiro shuns the company of Miki and others, Miki Falls is revealed to be a modern mythology with a delicious romantic center. The nature of this mythology demands I tiptoe around plot elements. Don't let my silence dissuade you from checking out a brilliant new series by one of comicdom's best storytellers.
From Classic Media's Toho Master Collection comes MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA [$19.93]. As with the others in this series, you get two films on the one disc, the Japanese version and the U.S. version, released in 1964 as Godzilla Vs. The Thing. The special features include entertaining, informative audio commentary by Godzilla experts extraordinaire Ed Godziszewski and Steve Ryfle, a slide show of movie posters, the original Japanese trailer, and a biography of legendary composer Akira Ifukube.
Mothra Vs. Godzilla is considered by many fans to be the finest of the Godzilla sequels and, if we're talking about the original series of films, I'd be one of that many. Godzilla is not the star of the movie; he's one of the villains. The heroes are Mothra, Mothra's offspring, the Infant Island fairies, and a trio of plucky humans. After this, Godzilla was more often a member of an ensemble cast of creatures, but he did get his occasional star turn, such as in the wacky and wonderful Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster.
Mothra is an amazing creation in both his butterfly and larval forms, a triumph of Toho's special effects department. His battles with Godzilla are among the best the series ever saw.
Godzilla is very much a force of nature in this movie, albeit willfully malevolent on occasion. Some of the destruction that he causes is accidental, such as his tail getting caught in a tower or concrete giving away beneath his weight. Other times, he's just plain nasty. In a nice twist, the army, assisted by an American missile attack shot especially for the U.S. version, holds its own against the Big G.
The human players add a lot to the movie. The plot is driven by unscrupulous entrepreneurs who buy Mothra's giant egg, cheating the fishermen who found it before becoming the architects of their own bad ends. When these characters first appear, they are almost amusing. When they are revealed to be much darker, it's shocking and a credit to the abilities of actors Yoshifumi Tajima and Kenji Sahara.
The heroes are equally well played. News Reporter Ichiro Sakai (Akira Takarada) might be cynical and sarcastic, but it's his plea for brotherhood and forgiveness that enlists Mothra's aid against Godzilla. Photographer 'Yoka' Nakanishi (Yuriko Hoshi) represents the wide-eyed wonderment of the audience. Professor Miura (Hiroshi Koizumi) is a dedicated and responsible scientist, though I have to wonder about a guy who has radiation decontamination booths at the entrance to his lab.
The special features are pretty spiffy, too, though I'll warn you that getting to the Godziszewski/Ryfle commentary track isn't as easy as it should be. I thought I had a defective copy of this DVD until my pal Jeff Kapalka explained it to me:
"Assuming they haven't come up with a corrected disc, all the copies have the same glitch. After choosing to watch the film with the commentary track, you have to go in and manually switch to the second audio. It took a couple of tries for me to get it right, but I finally got there."
Mothra Vs. Godzilla is unfailingly clever and exciting with an extremely satisfying ending. I'll generously overlook the glitch with the audio commentary and award this Classic Media release the full five Tonys.
******
ADDENDUM
Next year in San Diego? It's looking doubtful.
When I wrote the above column last August, I was determined to attend Comic-Con International. But as I work the numbers for such a trip, what with the rates for convenient, comfortable hotel rooms rising to absurd levels, it becomes less and less likely that I'll be able to make the San Diego scene in 2008.
Obviously, it's still early. If the convention itself were to bring me in, if some publisher were to foot my expenses, if I were to hit the lottery big time, then my attendance at the event would be close to certainty. Alas, at this point in time, none of those options is more than a very distant hope.
I attended only two conventions in 2007. I was a guest at the wonderful Syracuse Heroes Expo in October...
...and at Mid-Ohio-Con, the best convention ever, in November. I wrote about both shows for CBG and you'll be seeing those comments here in a week or two.
I want to attend more conventions this year. I ask shows for five things: hotel expenses, travel expenses, decent promotion, a place to sign for my fans, and a schedule that allows me to take a break between panels and signings. I fully appreciate that I'm not the biggest name around, but the above reflects the realities of my means. I'm an entertaining and friendly guest...and I promote the heck out of my appearances in this column and in the other venues available to me. If you're an interested show owner/operator, you can start the ball rolling by e-mailing me at:
That's all for now. Thanks for spending part of your day with me. I'll be back tomorrow with more stuff.
I review The Amazing Adventures of Nate Banks #1: Secret Identity Crisis, Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America and The Walking Dead Volume 2: Miles Behind Us.
ZERO: Burn your money before buying any comic receiving this rating. It doesn't *necessarily* mean there's absolutely nothing of value here - though it *could* - but whatever value it might possess shrinks into insignificance before its overall awfulness.
ONE: Buy something else. Maybe I found something which wasn't completely dreadful in the item, but not enough for me to recommend it when there are better comics available. I only want what's best for you, my children.
TWO: Basic judgment call. I found some value, but not enough to recommend it. My review should give you enough info to decide if you want to take a chance on it. Are you feeling lucky today, punk? Well, are you?
THREE: This denotes something I find perfectly respectable. There are better books out there, but I wouldn't regret buying this item. Based on my review, you should be able to determine if it's of interest to you. Let the Force guide you.
FOUR: I recommend anything earning this rating. Unless you don't like the genre, subject matter, or past work of the creators, I believe you'll enjoy this item. Isn't it uncanny how I can look right into your soul that way?
FIVE: Anything getting this rating is among the best comicdom has to offer. You should buy/read this, even if the genre/subject matter doesn't appeal to you. It's for your own good. Me, I live for comics and books this good...but not in a pathetic "Comic-Book Guy" sort of way.
Please send material you would like me to review to:
Anything Goes Trivia
