It’s a Saturday. The reactor that powers BoL has been idling contemplatively. We’ve attempted engaging backup systems, but as is the want of fail safes, they’ve failed. I’d like to insert a ‘Nuclear Volcano’ reference here but, well, we don’t actually have one. Yet. Most of the money went to the orbital ‘Slightly Uncomfortable’ Ray. And possibly Greek debt. That vague paranoia you feel? Oh yes, that’s us. At least a few of our assets are operational. Rest assured though, as soon as we can procure the services of some well-qualified DARPA rejects, full power will return.

Image from APEDOGS via FFFFound!

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The following is the complete list of comics I read every goddamn day… or… whenever they happened to be updated which, for some, is grievously occasional.

For each series featured, I am simply pulling whatever comic is up today, warts and all, on this – Thursday, March 11, in the year 2010 of our Lord, Rahm Emanuel.

OK, let’s get it on here.

American Elf: The Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka

By James Kochalka

Yep.  Potty training his son.  This sort of material is pretty common for American Elf.  Boy, why DO I read this comic anyway?  Well, Kochalka is, of course, a living legend of the indy comics (and rock & roll) world having created such madness as Monkey Vs. Robot and The Horrible Truth About Comics.  I think, perhaps, I respect that Kochalka is RELIGIOUS about getting a comic a day up.  These days it’s mostly something funny one of this two sons have said that day, but he’s also got a lot of self-loathing and remorse about being a jerk.  I can get down with that.

Bob the Angry Flower

By Stephen Notley

I have been reading this weekly comic since Yakra XIII turned me on to it over a decade ago.  Since then I’ve had the distinct pleasure of meeting the then Canadian, now ex-pat Mr. Notley and I gotta tell you two things about Stephen Notley:

A) he loves sushi and

B) he is turbo polite.

Proof: we invited him out for sushi and he accepted but realized he couldn’t make it and called us to tell us so. See?  Brian Bendis would just blow a guy off.  Not Notley.

Bob the Angry Flower is about a flower who is, generally, angry.  Tthe comic employs comedy staples like quantum physics, dog killing, former U.N. Secretary Kofi Annan, and/or Godzilla. A classy comic from a classy Canadian.

Gunshow

By KC Green

The newest of my daily reads, Gunshow is an absurd comic of epic proportions.  Usually random in topic and scope, the series also occasionally returns to an ongoing storyline “The Anime Club” about four teens who just want to watch anime that doesn’t suck.  It’s hilarity is only matched by its spotty updating schedule.  Green’s previous series, the psuedo-autobiographical Horribleville is also worth a look. But be warned: once you look… you may never UNlook.

Hark! A Vargrant

By Kate Beaton

Written by the recipient of one of my most savage and unruly Geek Crushes, Kate Beaton’s H!aV is rapidly becoming one of the most respected online comics.  A cavalcade of sassy literary and historical figures that you learned about in school, had you been paying attention.  A rising star, comics news and For Real news sources alike seek Beaton for just a few precious moments with the reigning queen of online comics.  Read and discover why. Holla.

Penny Arcade

By Jerry Holkins & Mike Krahulik

Oh, really? A 30-something video game player on the internet and he likes Penny Arcade? No, really? That is a shock. Shocking is what that is.  If you don’t know what Penny Arcade is, then you don’t know what the internet is, my friend.  As important for its game industry insider news as its scathing comics, increasingly, so goes Penny Arcade, so goes the video game industry. Cower.

Scary Go Round presents Bad Machinery

By John Allison

Not going to lie to you – probably getting towards the end of my tenure reading this series. I know KahrlZero gave up on this Englishman’s previous comic, Scary Go Round, years ago out of boredom and I may abandon ship for this comic not actually being a new comic at all but just a continuation of THAT comic which, itself, was a continuation of Allison’s first comic, Bobbins.  What keeps me coming back is the art.  Allison has a visual vernacular that is unparalleled, evolving, and unique.  Now he just needs to hire a writer.[cough]loveto[cough]

Three Panel Soul

By Matthew Boyd & Ian Mcconville

The next project by the men who brought you the comic Mac Hall, Thee Panel Soul is as equally artful and, sadly, as equally infrequent in its updating.  Tragic. Painful.  Three Panel Soul is certainly popular and successful, but in my most humblest of opinions, if its predecessor had set and kept a publish schedule, it could have buried Penny Arcade – hands down.  Well written and well drawn (sometimes UNBELIEVABLY DRAWN), Three Panel Soul can be deep and existential and light and airy.

XKCD

Are you a nerd? Here is some smart math / science / life humor. With stick men.  ENJOY!

Oh, and it is written and “drawn” by Randall Munroe, a former contractor for NASA.

Scans Daily

OK, to be fair, Scans Daily isn’t a comic but a blog with snips from classic comic books and newer comic books.  Originally designed as a slash community, you can expect a lot of gaiety *snigger* but it’s all in good fun and more importantly, it’s a great place to discover new comic serieses and older comics serieses to purchase out there in the real world.

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His experience is a perfect photograph of every experience I’ve had on an Amtrak train east of the Mississippi for the last two decades.  Right down to the bomb scare (mine was simply a large battery underneath the train catching fire at 2 a.m. in the middle of The Badlands, but hey, it was the ’90’s and Fear wasn’t in vogue yet).

Look how HARD he has to rationalize his account.  His train is stopped by a bomb scare – but it’s OK! It’s near a really quaint little town with a used bookshop! Really!  It’s alllll part of the allure of train travel in America!

Also, keep track of the number of times Doug mentions booze.  In fact, every time Doug mentions booze, take a drink because that’s how you keep face on an Amtrak trip: ANESTHETIZE!

Best part: Doug has to cut it short to FLY home because his wife goes into labor.

Oh, Doug.

Poor Doug rides trains like I ride trains: willing to take any level of bullshit because we are so enamored of old black and white pictures like this:

And it is not like that. At all.  If you think you are treated like Second Class Citizens on this nation’s domestic air flights, you have never enjoyed being a third class citizen on Amtrak. I mean,  they don’t even capitalize it, look!

Sad. Sad. Sad.

I WANT to love you, Amtrak.

[takes swig of teeny-tiny bottle of Amtrak merlot]

Why you got to make me hurt you like this?

[collapses into corner and begins sobbing]

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Ah, manga.

I suppose, after writing way too many posts about comics in a row, it may have been remiss of me not to mention it.
I’ve always viewed it a little nervously over my shoulder. Why? Because usually it’s what’s at my back when I’m trying to find a trade paperback. For several rows. Of coyly grinning lady-men reclined in draped repose. Lurid, big-eyed, cotton-candy-haired women with cat ears and maid’s outfits.
Why so much of it? Just ask former Waldenbook’s employee and thieving liability (and thank you for the spoils, SIR!), Franklin Mint: “Shit sells, son!”

In Japan, a manga is generally published serially in fat weekly editions with many other manga serials in a predominately black and white pulp form as opposed to American comics series which are generally printed monthly (this “generally” brought to you by Frank Miller, you DOPE!) in color, sometimes on glossy stock that is usually on 8.5” x 11”.

As a decidedly American-style comics fan, I’ve generally stayed away from those aisles. Don’t get me wrong, though! I certainly like me my Sandland, I buy me my one edition of Lone Wolf and Cub a year, and I certainly treasure my copy of Project X: Nissin Cup Noodle!

Hell, you shoulda seen me standing in the middle one of the biggest “boy love” manga sections in Aomori City.

Mizuki: “What is that baka gaijin, doing, Riko?”
Riko: “I don’t know. He’s just been standing there giggling like a schoolgirl for over an hour.”
Mizuki: “Should we make out?”
Riko: “OK!”

[hot girl-on-girl snogging]

Keep in mind, this was the same day that I gifted my host family’s 10-year-old son with a copy of Batman #608. I was told that he was a big fan of comics and, as it turns out, he was decidedly not thrilled by my hokey, dinky 30 pages of glossy left-to-right American bullshit. I mean, come ON, that was the first episode of the Hush series! Jeff Loeb writing, Jim Lee drawing – are you kidding me? Come on, kid, that’s the best we GOT! Come on! COME ON!

Well, it’s pretty understandable, really: manga it ain’t, and manga he loved. Well, he liked it. There are people in Japan who LOVE their comics. And I think this is one of the reasons that America, by and large, views manga a bit… askance.

Love, it seems, turns to obsession very quickly in Japan. Obsession is certainly one point where I think American comics and Japanese comics vary but I think it’s because Japan is just more obsession friendly. For every subculture and fad from America, there is a vibrant revitalization of it in Japan by people who apparently have a lot of money, a lot of free time, and also, not a lot of inhibition.
Manga has the Otaku, an entire subculture of men (mostly) that even Japanese accuse of “living in mom’s basement and having racy sexual obsessions.” They eat, breathe, and sleep manga, anime, and similar hoohah. At the same time, there’s the cosplayers, women (mostly) who dress up in elaborate and labor-intensive handmade costumes of their favorite manga characters. How can a society so terrified of “losing face in public” be so willing to dress up as a prepubescent-cat-schoolgirl-hooker-witch and pose for the camera phones of horny pervs? A mystery!

One interesting point that Manga Mad brings up is that western comics are often a counter-culture while manga is very much in the mainstream in Japan and that there is a genre and style for everyone from little kid to a teenager who wants to see a motherfucker get chopped in half with a katana to a businessman. A businessman who might work all week long. With no family. And not real time for dating. Who has… needs.
Enter the tentacles.
Manga, as a medium, has a much more liberal stance on what would be considered pornography -nay, child pornography– than here in Da States. These porno/erotic comics known vaguely as “eros comics” come in every shade of the rainbow and so to lump them all in with tentacle rape, well, that would just be unconscionable.

I think, if there were one sticking point in the craw of the western comics reader, it is the kiddie porn aspect of manga. The 12 year old schoolgirl shit. Yeah. We’ve got… a… a thing… about that stuff  ’round these here parts. And apparently the Japanese have a thing for it too… a big, throbbing, turgid… thing.

It does occur to a ‘body who is mulling over this eros manga thing: considering the popularity of cos-play, it’s  ironic that you’ve got a nation full of women demanding to be fetishized and a nation full of men wanting to festishize them… what’s the problem here folks?

Now, look, fair’s fair: American comics have a, shall we say, skewed, view of women as well.

However, over here we have the common decency to simply KILL THEM AND STUFF THEM IN REFRIGERATORS OH GOD WHAT IS WRONG WITH US WE HAVE NO WAY OF COPING WITH OUR INNER MISOGYNIST!

[ahem]

Now, one of the main points of Manga Mad is that there is a huge gap in what the Japanese are holding inside and their actual behavior and by venting their violent or sexually voracious and/or deviant tendencies “into” manga, they keep it out of society at large and thus keep their crime rate down.

To quote KahrlZero: “Maaayyyybe. Protection from the real world is big medicine over there.”

Says who? Says this guy pitchin’ a book on The Daily Show yesterday, serendipity:

There is no mention, of course, in Manga Mad of Japan’s stupendous suicide rate.

But, all this hooting and hollerin’ aside, at the end of the day? Manga? It’s OK. I’ve personally got no really beef with it. I don’t read Superman comics, I don’t read Naruto. I don’t read Spiderman, I don’t read Binbou Shimai Monogatari. It’s no big political issue with me; it’s just not my cup of tea with a tentacle shaped like a penis in it.

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Noted painter, long-time friend of BoL, and general Ubermensch-about-town Neill Ewing-Wegmann has put together a new series entitled “Mills” that will be premiering at the Playhouse Gallery, running from February 5th through the 21st.

Neill’s work always has a tremendous amount of vitality to it, and this new set looks to be an extension of that. Just going by a few of the preview pieces I’ve seen, it seems a bit more stylized, and as a result, more impactful. Not to mention that the chosen subject matter is necessarily dear to my own heart.

It’s not unlike viewing images of the ruins of Detroit. Those once-great bastions of Industry now lying fallow. Maine itself is rife with abandoned history, and I adore how Neill’s work hearkens back to some of the elements we all come across (but perhaps don’t see) on a regular basis while retaining his unfettered enthusiasm.

The show opens Feb. 5th from 5pm-7pm. The Old Port Playhouse is located at 19 Temple st. in Portland. If you’re anywhere in the Greater Portland environs, come out, stop by, and stay and chat for a while. We’ll be there, and Neill always does seem to have the most enjoyable openings.

How does he do that?

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You’ve done your homework and now it’s time to cut loose.  Let’s pick up some dumb fun.  Then, we’ll check in with my comic collecting compatriots and see what comics they’ve enjoyed in the past and in the present!

But I know what you’re saying: “I was led believe there would be a man wrestling a squid.”

Well, here ya go, ya punk!

BAM! Page 1 of this week’s comics selection:

The Umbrella Academy: The Apocalypse Suite

Written by Gerard “Yes, the guy from My Chemical Romance, JEEZ, let it GO!” Way

Illustrated by Gabriel Bá

This fine trade paperback collects The Umbrella Academy’s first six-issue run.  The front and back of it: mysteriously, a group of women around the globe gives birth to babies at the same time.  A mysterious globe-trotting genius,  Sir Reginald Hargreeves a.k.a. “The Monocle,” manages to collect seven of them.  The babies each seem to have a strange power and Hargreeves raises them at The Umbrella Academy to be a superhero team bent on protecting the world from destruction.

Cut to…

Hargreaves’s death reunites the estranged and embittered former pupils of The Umbrella Academy for the first time in a very, very long time.  Each has their own life (save for the one that is dead) and their own axes to grind.  The reunion enacts a deceased enemy’s team of death-dealing robots but something far more sinister has begun than simple slap-happy psycho-droids.  Time travel. Music of the damned.  Pseudo insect.  All that jive.

Not enough?!

FINE!

The Umbrella Academy: Dallas

More time traveling. More angry monuments.  More Kennedy-Must-Die action. The second six-issue arc of Umbrella Academy features sugar high, time traveling hitmen (more than just a little bit based on Vincent and Jules), Hazel and Cha-Cha.

They like pie. A LOT.  This edition also features a completely out-of-left-field romp through Vietnam. Yes, that Vietnam.  While the story may not be screwed on as tight as the first series (I am very, very, very picky when it comes to time travel, folks… honestly, if your last name isn’t “Spielberg,” don’t even bother) Dallas just as entertaining as its predecessor.

As charming as it is random, much of the series is about what it means to be a family and all that mush.  Winner of an Eisner, it is one of the best and easiest to pick up serieseseses I’ve ever read. And if you get super-hooked don’t worry: word on the street is that there is a good chance for a third series in the pipe.  So grab these anywhere you normally find trade paperbacks.

And now for a segment I like to call…

WHAT’S GOOD, SON?!

Etruscan

” Cash asked me to contribute a blurb to this week’s column as to what I specific titles I’d been into recently, so I sat down in good faith to make a list and basically realized I’m only reading things at the moment written by Warren Ellis. Damn. No wonder I can’t sleep at night.

Still though Ellis, Neil Gaiman, Brian Wood, Robert Kirkman; these are the ones who can make the Apocalypse, in whatever flavor you’d like (Mine’s pistachio.) seem simultaneously hideous, beautiful, strange, and unendingly human, and all with more points and barbs than an oil drum full of fish hooks. And the artwork is truly top-notch. You can’t do this kind of thing with CGI, no matter how many times LA falls into the ocean (and I put that scene on repeat).

So here’s a freebie for you: Ellis’s Freakangels is available online for your comicular edification. Eat up now.”

Cash Money

“Me again.  Right now I am having a real good time reading the ongoing Deadpool series.  Deadpool is about the pinnacle of dumb-fun, fourth-wall breaking comics.  He is a red-masked mercenary who used to be a Cable villain.  Then they had a team up series.  Recently, many writers have doubled-down on the Merc With A Mouth being super-silly. I like my Deadpool two (2) parts bastard to one (1) part crazy and the predominant trend seems to be two (2) parts silly to one (1) part bad-ass.  There is a difference, true believers.  I am also giving Deadpool: Team-Up a fair shake.  Deadpool has been getting a crazy push from Marvel Comics thanks in part to the recent Wolverine movie of which Deadpool was a part.  Considering I don’t think he’s had a series that went beyond number 60, it is pretty impressive that he currently has THREE ongoing monthly serieseseses (I do not endorse the third title, Deadpool: Merc with a Mouth).   This craze will peter out soon, I assure you.

Otherwise, I am reading Secret Six which is written by perhaps my favorite writer of comics working today, Gail Simone.  Simone has had her turns at Deadpool and is the first woman to ever write the Wonder Woman ongoing series (which is sad…  she only took over in 2007!).  Everything Simone touches turns to gold – pure comedic, chatty Cathy comic gold!  If you see the name “Gail Simone” on a comic, go ahead and pick it up, no matter the title; you won’t be disappointed. [sigh] She’s the ginchiest! Secret Six is about six (!) super villains who have left off trying to take over the world or dunk superheroes in vats of acid in favor of making a buck by hiring themselves out to the highest bidder, no questions asked.  It is some of the best team-dynamic writing I’ve ever seen. Terrible people try hard come to grips with how terrible they are (and fail) and many a foe are punched in the goddamn face (and fail).  I approve.

Meanwhile, I have already written a lengthy yap on Unknown Soldier by Joshua Dysart and Alberto Ponticelli.  It continued to be mind-blowingly violent and poignant.  Go get it. NOW! I already tol’ you once!

Finally, and perhaps closest to my heart, Rob Schrab’s immortal ’90’s classic, Scud: The Disposable Assassin. After leaving the series unfinished for over a decade, Schrab finally picked up the pen and really brought the sucker home with four final issues that showed his -and also his reader’s!- growth.  We’ve also been blessed (read: “FUCKING FINALLY!”) with a collected omnibus of the series, Scud: The Disposable Assassin – The Whole Shebang. Get it!

OK, I’m done, I swear.

Oh, crap! Hellboy! Crap, Sam & Max!

OK. For real. Honest. Done.”

TUNE IN NEXT TIME WHEN YOU HEAR YOU SAY:

“…”

“Hello?  Hey… where’d you go?  Wait, there’s a note here. Let’s see what this says here.

‘Dear Cash: Gone to get comics.  Back in a bit. Don’t eat the orange chicken in the fridge, I’m saving that for lunch.’

Hm. There’s orange chicken in the fridge?”

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Like this.

But it’s not all like that. Yes, sadly, much of comicbookery is very smart and very interesting and very, very well illustrated.  Many comics have won prestigious literary awards and run the gamut of subject matter including social commentary, political commentary, and sexual commentary (and the boobs implied therein) – yes, comics have it all.  It’s not all about men in tights and improbably proportioned women.

That said, comics featuring these men and women can be used to express the same high-falutin’, literary, socio-political drama.  And, apparently, they can be made in using gouache.  This is perhaps most true in my second recommendation:

Kingdom Come

Written by Mark Waid, Esq.

Illustrated by the Rt. Hon. Alex Ross

I didn’t know what gouache was before this book.  It’s paint sort of like water-colors but generally more viscous and more heavily pigmented.

Thanks to a timely hand-off of a Kingdom Come hardcover courtesy of Mr. Dave Olsher, I gained some much-needed points with my college watercolor teacher and was able to half-ass it the rest of the semester until 9-11 and then I was able to use that to half-ass it the rest of the way.  Apparently, he showed it all around the art department and they were all aghast that such competant art was being wasted on such frivolity.  Fruitcakes.

Wait… where was I? Oh! Kingdom Come, right!

Originally a 4 issue mini-series launched in 1996, Kingdom Come can now be found in handsome trade paperback editions where ever Glenn Beck books are marked down 30% and a bagel is marked up 30%.  It is also a fine entrance to the world of DC Superheroes if you are of the “headfirst into the deep end” school of education as EVERY DC HERO EVER CREATED IS IN IT including a few that Ross came up with when he was but a boy with a pack of dried-out K-Mart markers.  That, to me, screams class.

“CLASS!”

A more hackneyed writer would have begun Kingdom Come with a big “30 years later…” sign but it wasn’t so they didn’t.  Superman has hung up his reds and blues.  The children of today’s superheroes are running amuck in the streets with no real purpose or credo other than “kick the crap out of other teams of super-powered people,” each one sitting on a presipace in the rain grimly staring at their fist harder and more angst-ridden than the next.

One band of these yahoos hunts down a reformed supervillian in rural Kansas and, in a terrible accident, causes a thermonuclear explosion that chars and irradiates most of the state.  The gray-templed heroes of yore -Wonderwoman, Green Lantern, and others- decide that it’s time to give this new breed of super persons a choice: shape up or ship out.  Factions are drawn up, ideologies are challenged.  Old (no, really) friends turn into new enemies, and some old enemies seem to be on the side of Right and Superman – a creature whose world has always been parsed through a clear, “Real America” Kansas horse-sense Black & White – is forced Back Into The Saddle (perhaps my favorite literary motif) to contend with a world that now contains many more shades of gray than he cares to remember.

Kingdom Come is probably the first “Elseworlds” story I ever read.

Elseworlds is “publication imprint for a group of comic books produced by DC Comics that take place outside the company’s canon.” That is, many of the characters you’ve come to know and love in different settings.  Lovecraftian Batman.  Soviet Superman.  Marvel Comics has similar titles as well, most notably 1602, which features an Elizabethan version of the Marvel Universe’s biggest heroes and villains arriving in the New World.

Comic or no, Kingdom Come was probably the most pessimistic, cynical, and truthful thing I’d read in a while — it was just about what I was looking for at the Right Time.  Oh, and the art is to die for, if I haven’t made that clear yet.

I heartily recommend this piece to anyone feeling a little let down by society and whose ideals simply can’t be met.  If you’re not that into superheroes, you might be a little overwhelmed but most of the collected editions have special sections in the back with big lists of who is in which shots and it can be fun spotting Zan of the Superfriends’ Wonder Twins in the same bar with Lobo and Rorschach.   But it’s no lie: them’s a lot of capes.  The important characters are, of course, identified in the course of the story, but there are countless other heroes and villians running around who occasionally get name-dropped.

This is where I unviel my Getting Into Comics Tip #2:

Wikipedia.

Duh.

I sometimes find the authenticity and reliability of its articles suspect, but I know I can always count on Wikipedia 100% for two things: complex physics equations and an extensive detailing of Deadpool’s back story.

For some reason, the most articulately composed and meticulously collected articles on Wikipedia are about comics and, most notably, superheroes.

The Large Hadron Collider, the device “expected [to] address the most fundamental questions of physics, hopefully allowing progress in understanding the deepest laws of nature?” Its entry, with bibliography, is 13 pages long.  Spiderman’s entry? 15 pages.  Welcome to Wikipedia!

If you like Kingdom Come, you might also like these comics (but don’t take my word for it):

TUNE IN NEXT TIME WHEN YOU HEAR YOU SAY: “But, Cash, there’s no real science or craft to making comics, is there?” “…were you dropped on your head as an infant?”

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