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Reviews and commentary by Tony Isabella
"America's Most Beloved Comic-Book Writer & Columnist"
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TONY'S ONLINE TIPS
for Thursday, May 22, 2008
From Comics Buyer's Guide #1642
Every man's memory is his private literature.
- Aldous Huxley
Yahoo's Timely-Atlas-Comics group is one of my favorite online hangouts, filled as it is with knowledgeable comics historians who honestly love comics. Always searching for that undiscovered fact or credit, its members are often frustrated by the poor memories of some of the creators they study.
In a recent discussion of whether or not Stan Lee had written for Martin Goodman's pulp magazine, my good friend Nick Caputo made this very wise comment:
While those of us who like to dissect the history of the medium look under every rock for clues, it's understandable that many of the participants involved in those everyday, usually mundane events have forgotten most of the details.
I posted a brief response:
Quite right, Nick. Working in comics in the 1970s was a much bigger deal for me than it was for Stan in the 1940s. But even I can't recall every detail of this or that.
Besides the natural lack of retention by comics creators, the historian also has to contend with creators who honestly remember things as happening differently than do other creators. Throughout the recently-published Kirby: King of Comics, author Mark Evanier took great pains to be fair to all the involved parties. He let Kirby have his say, entirely proper for a book of this nature, but he also allowed for the possibility that his friend and mentor might have filtered memory through emotion.
As we all do.
A few years ago, Trevor Von Eeden, the artist of my original Black Lightning series, and I had a long conversation about which of us had designed the super-hero's costume. I have a very strong memory of having jotted down some notes before meeting with Trevor in the DC Comics offices, looking over his shoulder as he drew, and describing the costume as if he were a police sketch artist. But, that's not how Trevor recalls it.
Trevor's recall of the costume design has him coming into the meeting with several costume designs, including one very close to what we ended up going with. He even has these original drawings, which certainly gives credence to his memories. Since I don't have my costume notes, I'm inclined to believe Trevor's memories over my own...with a bit of tweaking.
Black Lightning's Afro-mask was suggested by Bob Rozakis, who was, at one point, going to be the book's editor. I thought that was a pretty clever idea, though I never much liked that the mask itself was white. Some comics folks mock the Afro-mask these days, but it was certainly in keeping with the 1970s.
If Trevor hadn't already drawn lightning bolt designs on the arms, chest, and legs of our hero, I probably would have asked him to add them because I love that crazy look. Apparently, so did the costume designer of Earthquake, a 1974 movie in which actor Richard Roundtree's stunt motorcyclist character wears a costume not unlike Black Lightning's. I've no memory of seeing that movie before it showed up on TV several years after its theatrical run and no one at DC noticed/remembered the similarity while we were designing the Black Lightning costume. In fact, it was just within the past year that a reader pointed out the similarity to me. See what I mean about uncertain memory?
This is probably where I should point out that, when I created Black Lightning, his super-hero name was just about the last thing I came up with. It was years later that someone reminded me it was also the name of the western hero Johnny Thunder's horse.
Can you stand another digression? It was just recently that Trevor learned and informed me that "Black Lightning" was also one of the nicknames given to boxer Joe Louis.
Getting back to the Black Lightning sewing bee...
It was DC Editorial Director Joe Orlando who asked that Trevor open up Black Lightning's shirt a bit more than in Trevor's first drawings. Joe liked that "V" look. When Joe and I were fiddling with the Challengers of the Unknown garb prior to their Super-Team Family debut, he wanted a similar look. On that occasion, I talked him into keeping the classic cut of Jack Kirby's original design. On Black Lightning, my first creation in what I'd thought was going to be a long partnership (not work-for-hire) with DC, I was happy to have the input of an artist and storyteller I admired as much as I admired Joe.
One more element of the original Black Lightning costume was definitely mine. I remember asking Trevor to give him the "Captain America boots."
Who designed the original Black Lightning costume? Looking at what I'm sure of, what Trevor is sure of, and the visual evidence, I consider Trevor the main designer...with input from Bob Rozakis, Joe Orlando, and myself. I'll have to be satisfied with creating everything else of the character.
Kirby: King of Comics by Mark Evanier [Abrams; $40] is a glorious celebration of the greatest comic-book artist of them all. It's the "civilian" edition of the Kirby biography Evanier has been writing for over a decade. But even those of us serving in the Kirby army, those of us who will cherish every page of the - I'm guessing - thousand pages Evanier will include in his ultimate Kirby biography, will find enormous value in this lesser-only-by-comparison work.
The cover of this 12.5 by 9.5-inch book proclaims the power of its subject with certainty and conviction. You need not clear your coffee table to make room for it. Any other book currently there will take one look at the cover and flee for a safer place to rest its pages. Perhaps that end table over there.
Amazingly, Evanier manages to chronicle all the highs and lows of Kirby's life and career into a mere 224 pages and also includes dozens of pages showcasing the incredible range and vitality of the King's mastery of the comics art form. The text is smooth as silk, clear, concise, and often eloquent. The illustrations are lovingly presented no matter how humble their origins.
Evanier doesn't shy away from the controversies surrounding a number of events in Kirby's life. Yet he approaches them with the integrity of the true historian and, as noted in my opening, allows the possibility that strong emotion and the passage of time might have clouded Kirby's recollections. The book is scrupulously fair, which makes it one of the most honest and valuable comics histories of them all.
It drives my CBG editors nuts when I make them crack open the emergency supply of floating Isabella heads, but when a book like Kirby: King of Comics comes along, you have to break the rules. It earns six out of five Tonys.
The Comic Eye [Blind Bat Press; $12.95] earned points with me from the get-go. How could I not be favorably inclined toward an anthology about comics?
Publisher and editor Mark Innes gathered 50 creators and told them to create comics - autobiographical, biographical, fictional - about comics. Some did comics about their favorite artists and/or comic books. Some did comics about making comics. Some did comics that defied easy categorizing. As with any anthology of this size - 176 pages - and variety, there are a few clunkers throughout the book. But the gems are shiny, indeed.
Some of my personal favorites:
Fred Hembeck's remembrance of the day he learned Steve Ditko was leaving Spider-Man;
John Migliore (with artist Larry Blake) on the history of his comics collection;
Ron Kasman's unnerving "Kalobogie Jake;"
"Li'l Jimmy" by Jim Siergey;
Mike Cherkas' "Spring Cleaning;"
the great Silver Age memories found in Earl Geier's "The Fly, the Jaguar, and Me;"
"Feast or Famine?" by James Waley and Steve LeBlanc, and,
"The Secret of T.M. Maple" by Russ Maheras.
Even the clunkers in The Comic Eye are clearly labors of love. That's why this anthology earns a perfectly respectable three out of five Tonys. I'd love to see a second volume.
Suitable for all, Franklin Richards: Collected Chaos by Chris Eliopoulos and Marc Sumerak [Marvel; $8.99] stars the son of Reed and Sue Richards of Fantastic Four renown. This manga-format paperback reprints four issues from 2007 and 2008.
Remember Bill Watterson's great Calvin and Hobbes comic strip? Eliopoulos and Sumerak have pretty much lifted Watterson's visual style for this book. Though H.E.R.B.I.E., the robot companion to young Richards, doesn't look like the tiger Hobbes, Franklin could stunt-double for Calvin. Collected Chaos is like a bizarre What If: "What If Calvin's Parents Were Super-Heroes?" And, of course, that's the difference between the two lads.
Calvin's incredible world was the product of his imagination. Franklin's world is real, at least in the sense that we willingly suspend our disbelief when we read Fantastic Four and this slapstick-y sidebar to the Marvel Universe.
Franklin can't match the mad genius and oft-touching poignancy that was Calvin and Hobbes, but his adventures are good, goofy fun. In the hands of Franklin, any of his father's inventions can be a disaster waiting to happen. Guest appearances by the Hulk and the Inhumans are delightfully silly. H.E.R.B.I.E., so despised in his previous cartoon and comic-book appearances, works brilliantly in this context. In fact, he's the best character in this book. The robot has come into his own as the straight man for his creator's demented offspring. I love that.
Franklin Richards: Collected Chaos would make a good gift for any young reader, even young readers my age. It earns three out of five Tonys.
Rick Geary's comics adaptation of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens [$9.95] was a great choice to kick off Papercutz's classy hardcover reprints of the Classic Illustrated series done by First Comics in the 1990s. It's been four decades since I read the original novel, but, in Geary's masterful pages, I am reacquainted with the troubled Pip, whose expectations of a higher station will vex him so dearly. I again meet the fascinating people who guide and sometimes mislead Pip. I again know the gloom of the marshlands and the clamor of the great city of London, key destinations for a young man in search of his place in the England of the 1800s. As when First originally published this work, I am amazed at how well Geary succeeded in retelling this Dickens classic in just 44 pages of comics. My timeworn paperback copy of the novel runs well over 500 pages. Perhaps a picture - with accompanying captions and word balloons - really can be worth a thousand words.
This Papercutz edition of Geary's adaptation is a fine-looking hardcover book whose 6.5" by 9" size makes it fit comfortably in a reader's hands. The coloring is vibrant throughout. My complaints are few and small.
The book has an editorial by Jim Salicrup and a short history of Classics Illustrated. Neither belongs in this book. The pages would have been better filled with information about Dickens, this novel, and the time and places in which both lived. At their best, the Classics Illustrated comics were educational adventures, an exciting entry into great literature. I'd like to see this new series free of such comic-book conventions as editorial pages and letters pages and the like.
My meager complaints aside, Geary's Great Expectations remains an exceptional work of comics art and so earns the full five out of five Tonys.
I read it, I returned to it a couple times since, and I'm still not sure how I feel about Monsters 101, Book One by M. Rasheed [Second Sight Graphic; $15]. Its protagonist is Willy Pugg, a vicious bully who preys on smaller kids at his school and whose driving ambition is to become an actual monster. This is pretty dark fare and it's made all the more unsettling by Rasheed's pleasant style of cartooning. It's a traditional comic-strip style that shocks when turned to violence.
Pugg is a well-crafted protagonist, but he's almost impossible to like. Rasheed does offer some mitigating circumstances for the boy's behavior, but he never hesitates to show Pugg's failings and the consequences of those failings, especially when Pugg agrees to supply kids meals - as in actual kids - to the trio of monsters who have moved into his neighborhood.
I am sure Rasheed is a most promising storyteller. This book was a page-turner, even when I was fairly certain I wouldn't like what I'd see when I turned the page. His writing and art have a good panel-to-panel and page-to-page flow. I'm looking forward to reading more of his work.
Monsters 101, Book One earns a solid three Tonys.
Marvel Comics let the continuity geeks out for its Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe A To Z Vol. 1 [$24.99] and, Lord help me, this hardcover is a thing of geeky beauty. Obsessive and minutely-detailed beauty, but beauty nonetheless.
I don't like ponderous attention to continuity bogging down my stories. I like stories that tell the readers what we need to keep up with the events of the story, but which don't feel compelled to show all of the math in getting to those events. However, from the moment I laid eyes on the Marvel handbooks created and championed by the late Mark Gruenwald, I was hooked. Huey, Dewey, and Louie had the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook, that repository of all human knowledge. We Merry Marvel Marchers have our handbooks.
Head writer/coordinator Jeff Christiansen and nearly two dozen other writers have packed the 240 pages of this first of 12 volumes with so much information that adjectives like "mind-boggling" and "senses-shattering" are insufficient to describe the sheer blessed geekiness the book inspires in me.
Disclaimer. I have not read this book cover-to-cover. That would be madness. I'm savoring it, reading a few entries each day. Way back when, I'd use the original Gruenwald-edited handbooks for a creative exercise, selecting an entry at random and giving myself an hour to devise a story involving the entry's subject. This new series inspires me to do the same.
Clearly, the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe A To Z Vol. 1 is not for the casual reader and not for anyone who's not a bonafide Marvel maniac. But I have loved the Marvel Universe since my youth and, though my affections have been tested by time and occasional bone-headed editorial decisions, that love endures. This book earns the full five out of five Tonys.
******
ADDENDUM
I finally finished reading the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe A To Z Vol. 1. My admiration for the book and those who worked on it hasn't changed, but reading some of the more complicated entries made my head spin. Marvel writers keep adding more and more back story to characters and, in doing so, they often lose the essence of those characters.
Case in point: the Angel. At his core, Warren Worthington is a handsome rich guy with wings who tries to use his wealth and his power to benefit others. From that relative simplicity, terrific stories can flow like water off the Niagara. Yet it takes several pages for the Handbook to document all the extraneous crap added to the character over the years. It's like breaking a perfectly good arm so you can reset it.
The X-Men of the 1990s bored me. I can't even recall when I stopped reading them. Were I writing/editing the franchise today, I'd probably ignore just about everything that happened during that decade and then some.
Not retcon it. Just ignore it.
That would be my take on continuity for any character or title entrusted to me. Tell great stories and ignore the dumb bits left behind by others.
That's not to say there isn't room for the trivia-obsessed in comics. They have their place. Which I think should be in online blogs and message boards...and not in actual comic books.
******
BLOGGY BITS
There was no "Tony's Online Tips" column yesterday, not even a place-holder. Something came up, triggering one of my blessedly rare bouts of depression. It's personal, I'm dealing with it, and you needn't worry about your Tipster.
But I will use this forum to state once again that depression is nothing to ignore. It's a serious illness and, however a person chooses to deal with it, he or she should not neglect it. If you think the "blues" are hitting you too frequently and too intensely, don't put off getting a medical opinion. You owe it to yourself. You owe to those who love you.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't make your own decisions when it comes to treating depression. No doctor's license comes with a guarantee of infallibility. But the more you know, the better you will be equipped to deal with depression.
TOT cares.
******
COMICS IN THE COMICS
We're featuring Batman all week long. For today, we have this quartet of Dark Knight guest appearances in Mike Peters' Mother Goose and Grimm.
The strips ran on January 28, March 8, May 31, and July 19 of 2007...and there's more Bat-fun to come.
Thanks for spending a part of your day with me. I'll be back tomorrow with more stuff.
Tony Isabella
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THE "TONY" SCALE
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:
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