What NOT to put in a pitch to DC (hint: it involves Prez)

One of them's a hardbitten adventurer who gained powers in Egypt.

The other one's an ex-president, and he's only 25!

Together they're cops, traveling the biways of America in a midnight blue Trans Am. United by Duty. Fighting for Justice. Metamorpho and Prez. The adventure continues...

image courtesy of Lars' Customs -presented by Raving Toy Maniac (toymania.com)

Thoughts on Nextwave, Pts. 1 and 2

Thoughts on Nextwave
(the comic with a theme song.)

Like a thousand other nitwits, nerds, and aesthetes, I’m a big fan of a lot of Warren Ellis’s stuff, and strangely enough, an even bigger fan of Stuart Immonen. Back when I started reading comics on the mid 90s, Stuart was drawing one of the Superman monthlies, and was one of the first artists I fell in love with. He’s an amazing artist on a lot of levels, a guy who can really flesh out the entirety of a scene, paying attention to background details that simply make everything more real. He draws great people, beautiful women, and does a great job with the character acting that makes a comic sing. When Nextwave came out, there was a good chance for me to be let down.

I wasn’t.

Nextwave is a five person superteam consisting of the Captain, Boom Boom, Captain Marvel/Photon, Machine Man, and Elsa Bloodstone. Elsa Bloodstone is a gun-toting monster hunter, an amazon who tosses out one-liners as easily as she crushes zombie skull. Machine Man is a barely-used creation of Jack Kirby, a guy with no desire to be human, and none of the logic of the typical ‘bot. Photon is an experienced hero with both phenomenal power and an average joe background. It’s too early to judge what the other 2 will be like, except that the Captain is stupid. Really stupid.

Stuart's art for Nextwave has been causing a lot of people to say, 'there's nothing this guy can't do!!' While flattering, this isn't quite true. While light years beyond his (already superb) work on Action comics, this is simply a new wrinkle on the the style developed for Superman: Secret Identity. (with Kurt Busiek, available now!) Stuart's art has a wonderful sense of lighting, three dimensional space, and solidity. The biggest change is a newfound sense of movement/flexibility that almost seems like an animation/manga influence. While I can't say what the actual influence was, I will say this: it's beautiful, and it fits Nextwave to a T.

The jokes in Ellis's script have an amazing hit/miss ratio. The characters exhibit the improv-like near-spastic fits of humor, (Dirk Anger, p. 4) as well as the sardonic verbal jabs (Elsa Bloodstone) that fans have come to expext. Nextwave isn't as funny, say, as an issue of Ren and Stimpy, but there's a point. While hilarious, this isn't a comedy book, its an action book with laughs. From start to finish, the comic vibrates with energy. Picture the opening of an action movie without any fights. People are chatting, the scenes are changing, fancy cars are driving around. Even though nothing is expoding, the pulse is picking up; the soundtrack goes from catchy, to pounding, to the roar of an engine. That's the first 8 pages of Nextwave.

From there, we get giant-monster rampaging and streetfighting robots. What more do you want? The charcters are sharp, the colors are vibrant, and the threats are menacing. The team has to save a town while they fight both Foom and their corporate sponsors. While I'm excited to see the end of the battle, I'm just as excited by Warren Ellis's plan to keep each story contained in 2 issue arcs. While I love the story as it is, I can't wait to see where the team winds up in issue 3. Good onya, Warren.

Fear Agent: Rick Remender GO!

If comics sales were a simple offshoot of the obsessions of bloggers, every comic shop would only sell three types of books.
A) Titles related to Infinite Crisis
B) Titles related to House of M
C) Books written by Grant Morrison.

I don’t generally go in for big crossovers, but the third category, the Grant Morrison books, are right up my alley. Seven Soldiers and All-Star Superman are interesting experiments in the superhero form. Both ‘events’ show different avenues of building on comic book history without being slavishly tied to it. A third book, Fear Agent, does much the same thing. I’ve struggling to find an interesting reason that Fear Agent isn’t near the top of the list of the 400 bestselling comics. Obviously, there are the three strikes of the current market: 1) creator ownership, 2) No shared universe/not Marvel-DC, and 3) the waiting-for-the-trade phenomenon. All three of these mountains are huge, but none of them is necessarily insurmountable…

Think about this…Invincible went from being merely an interesting book in the launch of Image’s sketchy superhero line, but went on to become one of the few properties to successfully cross-over with Spider-man. Spider-Man!

In the search for ideas, writers have strip-mined the history (and histories) of Marvel over and over. The same thing can be said for DC. So while ASS is a refreshing modern take that revisits silver-age Supes, it has been done before. And while the Seven soldiers has been busy dragging buckets of inspiration from the wells of DC’s past, (cosmic Kirby madness, golden age team ups, the lite-horror era of the 70s, innumerable 80 sleeper titles) at the end of the day, it is a part of the mainstream machine, and not a strange new beast altogether.

Fear Agent is about as pure of a comic as I can imagine, and it gets its inspiration from a rarer, stranger, and riskier source. EC science fiction. While EC gets a lot of credit for inspiring the adult-level-comics boom, that is possibly the most limiting way of viewing its legacy. Honestly, I have to say that EC seems more responsible for the way it rocked its readers socks off, whether they were kids, adolescents, or nerdy adults. Obviously, it has to do with storytelling innovation (After all, this is the first place where Harvey Kurtzman showed his drawing chops. Harvey Kurtzman, as close to Eisner’s equal as anyone gets!) Obviously, it also had to do with the art. EC had a great roster of artists: Joe Orlando, Dean Kamen, Johnny Craig, Graham Ingels, John and Marie Severin, Bill Elder, Al Williamson, Kurtzman, George Evans, Bernard Krigstein, Jack Davis, Al Feldstein, and Wally Wood. If you wanna know what kinda line-up makes the comic art critic drool, that was it. But the question of what truly made EC great is nothing if not a damnably frustrating one. After all, EC is still respected, even within the narrower subsets of the comicbook culture. After all, Charlton and Warren had their share of stellar artists, but are mostly regarded as intriguing footnotes in the history of the medium. But rather than continue to act like the typical blogger (affected, arty and over-ambitious) I’m going to leave the question up in the air.

What made EC great? Easy.

In a secret meeting in the fields of Conecticut, where they were first abducted by their Venusian overlords, staff belonging to the tiny EC outfit made a deal with the devil. In exchange for the national security of the United States of America, the towering brains of the second solar ring offered them genius. The true nature of this exchange can never be revealed, but in essence, it boils down to one word. Gleepnort. What was that made EC products so special? Gleepnort. Does Fear Agent contain this valuable substance?

By the truckload.