May 15th, 2008 John
I will freely admit that many Minx books are sooooooo not meant for a 42-year-old guy and they do present moments where I feel like I’m peering into a MySpace blog that I had no business looking at. This is less a criticism than a qualification — I understand I am not the target audience of any of the Minx line. This is also said with the understanding that teen-agers aren’t writing these things, but playing to that audience. That brings up a strange line to walk — as adults writing for kids, I imagine you want to speak to the kids of their own lives, though it can get kind of icky when you pander. There is a degree to which — at least I think — adults do owe it to their teen audience to set some sort of example of decorum — not the stiff kind, but just, you know, set an example in some way and maybe even offer some seasoned advice in the entertainment. Maybe it’s because I’m a parent that I think this.
The first new release by Minx this year, “Burnout” by Rebecca Donner and drawn by Inaki Miranda, grabs your attention fairly well without being anything special character-wise. Danni is a teenage girl who moves with her mother from the city to the middle of nowhere — bummer, nothing to do, as well all know — after her father bolts on them. Mom ends up in the arms of an abusive lout while Danni ends up starry-eyed for her future step-brother. Meanwhile, her outrageous rock and roll best friend — is there any other type in these books? — feels their friendship is slipping.
Oh, add in there some intrigue involving eco-terrorism.
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May 14th, 2008 John
Joann Sfar returns to the world of Algierian Rabbi Sfar and his cat in “The Rabbi’s Cat 2,” an incredible follow-up to 2005’s complex and charming collection of short stories.
In the first book, over three short stories, Sfar told how the cat won and lost its power to speak, how the rabbi’s daughter met the man she would marry and what happened when the rabbi visited Paris. In this new volume, Sfar adds two more stories to the cycle — in “Heaven on Earth,” we learn more about the rabbi’s cousin, Malka of the Lions, a legendary, desert-wandering lady heart throb who travels with his own pet lion, and in “Africa’s Jerusalem,” the rabbi makes a new Russian friend and begins an adventure across Africa.
As seen through the eyes of the family cat, everyone’s motives are known – after all, no one hides much from an animal — but the interpretations of this openness is saddled to the cat’s limited experience with the breadth of human emotion, as well as the cat’s own desires in life. In perfect feline form, the cat can be haughty and act on extreme displeasure, and yet the proper attention, vigorous stroking and a warm body to curl up with at night is enough — its a sensual creature and its reality is defined by those standards. At the same time, the cat drops all sorts of insight to the rabbi, his daughter and all the other characters that swirl through the stories.
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May 5th, 2008 John
Charles Burns’ “Black Hole,” recently re-released in paperback, is a horror novel of a different kind — one where the monsters are ourselves, but where the horror will be temporary if only we can survive it.
The best horror stories all riff from something real and honest and take it to a nightmarish extreme — works like “Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “Frankenstein,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” all examine common human themes — alienation, rage, responsibility, conformity and the price of knowledge — and extricate them from their everyday trappings with supernatural and/or science fiction circumstances.
In “Black Hole,” Burns presents a mysterious conundrum — teens all over Seattle in the 1970s are falling prey to a bizarre disease that mutates their appearances, turns them into monsters and outcasts. Unlike your typical zombie movie, though, the beasts don’t maraud — they hide out in shame. How do they become monsters? Through sex — and not necessarily careless sex. Each teen is faced with temptation and the call to explore that side of life — resigned to the disease and what follows, each teen sees it as the price they pay for something that is just part of animal growth.
The novel follows two stories that often intertwine — Keith, an amiable doofus, and the object of his crush, Chris, whose clever and popular veneer mask a dissatisfaction with everyday life. Chris’ escape, as with so many teenagers, is to dive into the danger of an intense relationship with Rob Facincanni, who she describes as “dark and sexy.” Certainly different from Keith, a boy she barely notices, but who keeps popping up at various points to save the day in some kindhearted way.
Keith spends his time scoring pot with his friends, biding their time hoping that confidence will someday fill their chests as easily the smoke from the joints they roll. An awkward afternoon at a dealer’s house leads Keith to meet Eliza, bohemian and flirty, with her own hint of danger and — as Keith notices — a tail. In Eliza, the mutation has not become grotesque, but cute, and Eliza’s comfort with it accentuates the idea that the disease sweeping the teenagers may not be entirely bad and, in fact, manifests itself in different ways in different people. This reveals what is different about Burns’ take on coming of age as opposed to so many others — adulthood is presented as a challenge, as the result of what you make of it mixed with the luck of the draw. Some people end up with melty faces, others with cute little waggy tales. Just like real life.
Burns’ portrayal of these mutations are all the more affecting thanks to his investigation of the teen years. He captures that age perfectly and unapologetically, allowing his characters to act as if there were no adult in view. This honesty creates some cringe-worthy moments as well sweet ones from the perspective of an adult reading the book, long past even the point of embracing or rejecting the particular circumstances of his own mutation. The scenes are so deft in their portrayal of a world three decades ago that they may seem like etchings from your own personal memory. Equally, Burns’ high contrast black and white style, at times seeming more like fluid wood carvings than illustrations, gives the story an atmosphere of displacement that matches the inner workings of the characters he follows.
With “Black Hole,” Burns has achieved something monumental, crafting a complicated tale of horror that draws not only draws from the real world, but transposes itself on top it in such a way that his horrors might overtake your own memories. In many ways, that’s what “Black Hole” is about — as the characters descend into moments of nightmarish surrealism in which their unconsciousness collides with unspoken societal fear of growing up, it becomes clear that the mutated bodies they suffer from are really something imposed upon them. The sickening transformation of their bodies is something their former naivete never considered would be unleashed, as they did nothing more radical than live their lives.
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May 2nd, 2008 John
In Kazu Kibuisi’s “Amulet: The Stonekeeper,” a science fantasy epic graphic novel for kids is kicked off with echoes of Japanese animation master Hiyao Miyazake and a bit of steam punk, as well as some Tolkien thrown in.
Emily and her brother Navin — along with their mother — work to move past a family tragedy in a new home, a creepy old mansion that is held in the family. It’s former resident, Silas Charnon, is the kids’ great grandfather, who went missing some years before after locking himself inside the house. Silas was noted as a puzzlemaker, but his puzzles resembled machines more than the traditional fare.
While cleaning the house, Emily stumbles upon a necklace, from which the titular amulet hangs — or perhaps I should call it the titular talking amulet, as it immediately begins warning Emily of some kind of impending doom for her family.
What follows is an exciting romp through a secret world in the bowels of the mansion, in which Emily and Navin are pitted against all kinds of oogly monsters and allied with a number of unusual robots — as well as faced with family secrets and a universal pressure to save everything and everybody.
It all culminates in a frantic but fun cliffhanger that leads directly into the second book of the series.
Kibuisi’s realization of his story flows beautifully thanks to his artwork — he’s wonderful at matching his character’s simple, wide-eyed, Manga-style appearances with painterly, gorgeous backdrops. Furthermore, his mastery moves between well-constructed dialogue and subtle silent scenes, whether capturing character moments or all-out action.
Further, Kibuishi’s meshing of genre styles is well-utilized for a tender tale of coming of age in a literary era where coming of age fantasies are a dime a dozen — unlike so many where kids wake up on the edge of puberty to find that they’re actually special, Emily and Navin wake up to find the challenges of the wider world are demanding that they prove they are special — or perhaps just capable. It’s a classic situation that any of us run up against — family mysteries rearing their ugly head — and it’s that challenge that makes the truths of Kibuishi’s story more universal. Many of Kibuishi’s readers will be facing similar, though smaller, issues and Kibuishi gives them reason to find light in the darkness without an in-your-face presentation of issues that diverts from a well-told story.
It’s a must for anyone who loves well-crafted fantasy or robots.
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April 30th, 2008 John
Howard Cruse lives around the corner from me in North Adams and our first encounters with each other were striking in that I don’t think either of us expected to find another person with a comics background holed up in this slowly growing arts community. But here we were.
Howard began his comic book career in the world of underground comics, most notably “Barefootz.” He also edited the anthology series “Gay Comix” and did the regular strip “Wendel” for the Advocate (the national gay-oriented news magazine). In the 1990s, he broke ground with his graphic novel “Stuck Rubber Baby,” which he did for an imprint of DC Comics.
More recently, Howard financed the first issue of the North County Perp, a zine format anthology of local writers and artists that hearkens back to the days of do-it-yourself comic books — the undergrounds of the 1970s and the self-publishing movement of the 1990s. It was Howard’s idea that he could draw upon the creative lessons of yesteryear and apply them to his current home in a scrappy way.
It was always my intention to sit down and do a comprehensive article on Howard and the dawn of the Perp gave me that reason — but as interesting as the Perp is, I really wanted to explore Howard’s long career in a world that the majority of his neighbors are entirely unfamiliar with, but which I could serve as some sort of guide due to my experience in it.
Here, for the first time, is the complete interview with Howard.
SB: When did you first want to be a cartoonist?
HC: I had ambitions to be a cartoonist from the age of seven. I also wanted to be a writer. I pity the poor editors of national publications who got my submissions when I was 9 years old. I was sending humorous verse to the New Yorker and things like that, I had totally unrealistic visions of how quickly I would be embraced as a major talent. I did get in the habit of going through all those rituals of submitting and getting rejected and all that quite early and I submitted several comic strips for newspaper syndication in the course of my teenage years and college years.
I managed to break ground in our college literary magazine which had never even considered running a comic strip format before I did a four-page comic book story satirizing John Birchism, somewhere in the mid ’60s. They were so timid, so afraid that the board of trustees of Birmingham Southern would get upset that they ran little disclaimers saying that this is not really about any real organization, this is just about a state of mind. But they still let me publish the comic strip.
I got diverted while in college into theater, which has a lot in common with writing comics, particularly play writing and directing. I was under the influence of a very important artistic mentor, who was head of the drama department there, and he became my friend, we stayed friends long after I left college until he died. He changed my ideas about what art was all about and I lost interest in doing the newspaper comic strip because, in general, you had so little creative freedom. I had pretty much given up on comic books until the underground movement came along. I thought I was going to be an academic theater director like my role model and I got a play writing fellowship to Penn State University, when I finished college in 68, but I really hated grad school. Nothing wrong with Penn State, they had a perfectly good drama department and all, but I allowed myself to be propelled along by the expectations of other people that had pushed me onto grad school. I was dissatisfied, I didn’t feel that I knew myself, I didn’t know how to write plays that had any originality.
I got in a funk and left college and moved to New York and lived with my hippie friends in the hippie, 1969 environment in New York City. I did that for about a year and I was freaking out from no income, so I moved back to Alabama, where I got a job working for this local television station and also, there was an editor for a paper that’s disappeared now, it was the better of the two dailies in Birmingham, it was called the Birmingham Post Herald. This editor decided that I was a youngster who needed to be given a chance. I think he knew my father, which probably affected his decision, but he let me do this little comic panel for the paper and that got me back into comics. It was an earlier version of “Squirrel.”
I discovered underground comics and Denis Kitchen opened doors for me. That became a passion for a number of years.
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April 25th, 2008 John
In Josh Simmons’ “Jessica Farm” a girl named Jessica Farm who lives on a farm wanders around a house filled with surreal creatures and psychological fury in an attempt to escape the wrath of her father on Christmas morning.
That’s a gross simplification of the story, which piles on the weird for weird’s sake incidents — a talking monkey figurine, a troll-like closet guardian, a tiny jazz band, and others — and mixes things up with a kind of juvenile sexuality, which includes an extended shower scene and a weird creature who sticks his testicles in people’s food to spice it up.
Unfortunately, these bits of surrealism don’t add up to much and part of the reason is the format. It’s Simmons’ plan to create a page a month of the story and then release a book each time he reaches 96 pages. This means that this current book was created from 2000 through 2007 and that the next book will not see the light of day until 2016?
The first problem there is that you’d think that seven years and 96 pages would be enough to give the reader something, anything, that resemble a plot or a progression — unfortunately, the book just seems like a series of weird events strung together. In that way, it’s all set-up, but with so little established that there’s no sense that the reader should expect anything further than what’s gone on before. In other words, there’s nothing resembling a story that grabs you and Simmons’ storytelling skills as demonstrated here aren’t so dynamic or depthful that you’ll forgive the lack of story just to see the mind at work.
The other problem is that it’s an awful large leap of faith to believe that most books would keep people hanging for eight years to read what happens next — it’s a gargantuan one when the story being stretched out is one that nothing really seems to happen of any logical consequence.
I appreciate what Simmons is attempting to do here, but in meeting the challenge, I don’t think the work rises above what it needs to be. Of course, further volumes on through the last in 2050 might indeed change my attitude about the whole venture and I could be taught a very valuable lesson about judging a story midstream. I just wish I felt Simmons had any more of an idea of where he is going than I do — taking seven years to essentially whistle dixie for 96 pages doesn’t give me hope. And I’m not so sure I’m going to be interested in enough in 2016 to try and change my mind.
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April 25th, 2008 John
Kaput and Zosky are aliens of the worst kind, with only three things on their minds — killing, killing and killing. Aside from that fixation, their only real goal is to dominate a world — any world — and their only real preference is to do so in the most violent, painful, awful way possible. If this doesn’t sound like it’s necessarily cheery fodder for a kid’s comic, in the hands of French cartoonist Lewis Trondheim, it’s entirely the domain of children. In fact, Kaput and Zosky might speak most vividly to kids, who will perhaps find humor in the pair’s sub-childish behavior. Really, these two could make a reader of any young age definitely feel like the mature one in the relationship.
Their lot in life is to wander around the universe, happen upon a planet that they are certain they can conquer and then be foiled in some way, usually having to do with the fact that they’re nowhere near as vicious as they pass themselves off as. In fact, they aren’t very bright and, as Trondheim illustrates again and again, brains are preferable to brawn in the game of war. It’s a lesson that countries have learned and forgotten over and over again — it’s no wonder two dim-witted aliens with itchy fingers on their laser guns are behind in that area of study.
If all this bloodlust seems a bit much for a kid’s comic, it’s a good idea to look at the philosophy behind it. It’s very well-stated in this comment from Kaput in one of the last stories in the book: “For me, there’s no paradise without misery.” That’s a profound statement for a slapstick comic about two aliens. You could line up artists and scientists and philosophers and many would agree that pain is the great universal constant. Everything in the universe is born of some sort of violence and survival is condition result from conflict and blood. All Kaput is stating is the truth — there is no other life but the one where dog eats dog. Rather than rising above it, he and Zosky have given into it.
This idea is accentuated in “The Cosmonaut,” a series of silent one-pagers that follows the adventures of an earthling in outer space. The gag is always the same — it always revolves around the quaint idea that the man is on a voyage of discovery in the universe but with each wonder he encounters, he kills it. This is almost always countered with the punchline that he is going to be killed by an alien on the same journey.
This makes Trondheim’s work both exalted and wacky. As with all good comedy, he takes something dark and uses it for laughs — in doing so, he creates a common ground between kid and adult. Either could read and crack up at this stuff, because it’s just too funny. For a kid, Trondheim’s universal view will be a peak at the horrible realizations of being a grown-up and the call to not let it overwhelm you — for a parent, the same outlook will cause a chuckle, thanks to the understanding that amidst all the horribleness, you’ve got to laugh.
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April 24th, 2008 John
In “Jack and the Beanstalk,” a boy reached the sky via a giant vegetable plant and a world of human-centric wonder was revealed. “The Clouds Above” skews all that , with a mysterious junky staircase leading a cat named Jack and a boy named Simon (who’s hardly simple) to another world of wonder, but this time filled with actual denizens of the sky, clouds and birds.
Simon is late for school and rather than face the wrath of his wretched teacher Mrs. Poe, he heads for the roof of the school, where he finds — amongst a load of junk — his entrance to the world of the clouds. Together they encounter the sorts of cloud-centric adventures you would expect — thunder storms and a great difficulty seeing where they’re going because all the clouds are blocking their view — as well as some more fantastic ones, including a talking cloud invigorated by a newfound freedom and a group of very rude birds.
What Simon and Jack end up discovering is that there a multiple implications to being in charge of your own life — there’s good and bad — but also learn a great deal about not only teamwork, but the power of mobs against oppressive bodies. In fact, the most potent lesson is brought about by the mean birds and that in itself is a triumph of wisdom — I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything in a book aimed to kids that even hints at the idea that even your enemies might offer useful tips worth noting. If the original problem is Mrs. Poe and the prime intent is to overcome her glee for tyranny, there is something in that struggle that becomes applicable to the dangers at hand. Conflict teaches and that is a valuable lesson for a kid.
Writer/artist Jordan Crane allows his tale to unfold a page at a time. Rather than lay it out as a traditional comic book with several panels on a page, there is one per, a format that insists the book be called a page-turner — you have no choice. As the excitement of the adventure builds, you find yourself flipping pages faster and faster, trying your best to keep up with the action while still attempting to take a moment to appreciate Crane’s animated and colorful panels. If at times it feels like you are indulging in one of the most gorgeous flip books imaginable, that only adds to the immediacy of the tale. This is a fantastic graphic novel for kids and adults alike.
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April 23rd, 2008 John
Here’s an idea that never occurred to me before: Easy reader comics. Toon Books has arrived to plant that idea in everybody’s head, however, and wash away any opportunity to use that sort of stunned opening sentence in a review ever again. As evidenced through their inaugural title, “Benny and Penny in Just Pretend” by Geoffrey Hayes, they’re well on their way to doing just that, with the mantra from editorial director Francoise Mouly: “Comics, they are not just for adults anymore,” as she said in a recent interview with the Horn Book.
If you have never heard of Mouly, now is the time to learn. As art editor of the New Yorker, she has defined the feel of the magazine for 15 years, taking the traditional look of the covers and adding an updated, distinct style to them. Part of the unique quality of her stewardship has been her connection to the comic book world, through her years publishing and editing the RAW imprint with her husband, Art Spiegelman. In 2000, she and Spiegelman started the RAW Jr. line, with the Little Lit series, a triumphant anthology of comic book tales for kids featuring work by top line writers and artists like Paul Auster, Dan Clowes, William Joyce and others.
Mouly’s formula has been simple, yet revolutionary. Whereas comics are often an afterthought to many publishers — and creators in the comic book world not necessarily well-regarded — Mouly saw a hot bed of originality in the comic pool and, with a discriminating editorial eye, sought to use these basic materials to give attention to the comic book form, to nurture the output for quality.
The result of this forward movement is the Toon Books line, which Mouly and Speigelman have also fashioned in collaboration with educators and educational advisors, stemming from the idea that comics are ideal for young readers, drawing them into the story, helping them “crack the code that allows literacy to flourish” — a comic book page acts as a road map to the mechanics of story telling that have proven difficult to some children and are valuable to any child.
With all that context for a book like “Benny and Penny,” it’s with relief that I report the book to be charming and simple, as it should be. Benny is a little mouse pretending to be a pirate — a wooden crate is his make-believe pirate ship. His little sister, Penny, wants to play with him, but a rejection and a scuffle sends the two into a conflict throughout the day where they will, inevitably, learn the value of each other.
This is no simple, sentimental aside, however — while familial affection is an obvious central component to the story, it doesn’t get in the way of creating a good bit of depth to the mice. Benny is a bit obstinate and reactionary are sudden, Penny is sly and patient — both characters are terribly honest, probably due to Hayes’ memories of his own dynamic with his younger brother and the idea that a kid might have to learn a lesson several times before it sticks. So it is with brother-sister relationships as it is with reading.
Hayes’ work hits the right between children’s books and comics. His mice and their world have that nice, warm texture of a personable picture book, but the panels flow with sequential ease, with energetic animation to his characters — there’s great body language going on here and Hayes gets a lot of facial emotion out of little mice.
Aimed at readers K-2, “Benny and Penny” will give any kid that age something delightful that will also challenge them — and any parent reading alongside will find plenty to be amused by. Toon Books is off to a great start and I look forward to them changing the way we look at comics.
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April 18th, 2008 John
Creepy and mythic, Cyril Pedrosa’s “Three Shadows” follows a family to the end of its greatest fear, examining what a parent will do for a child, while managing to steer the story away from a foreboding gloom that could overtake it and transforming it into a fable.
The appearance of three dark horsemen on a hillside upsets the idylls of life for a mother, father and son. Both parents deal with these manifestations in their own ways, seeking both frightening counsel and unsure flight from the problem. The father’s solution sends he and the son on a treacherous journey from home on a boat that is filled with passengers who pack the decks and nooks and crannies like scared insects, overseen by a corrupt captain and his associate, an amoral slave trader who attempts to befriend the father.
The incidents on the sea journey are merely a portion of the odyssey that has engulfed the father and son as they try to outrun the mysterious trio, but for Pedrosa, this is not the story of a chase, but of a transformation. Filled with mysteries to be solved, Pedrosa stays with you far past the logical end, guiding the reader through a range of emotions as each layer is peeled away.
The most amazing aspect of Pedrosa’s storytelling is his rich understanding that the family are just three people in an entire world — with each page, hundreds of stories are hinted at, little snippets of every person’s journey is eavesdropped upon and, by the end of the book, a ledger of happiness and grief has been compiled through the interactions of the father and son with everything that happens around them.
By doing this, Pedrosa is able to reveal the personal fears inherent in the family’s situation while giving it a context, one that ultimately leads to the conclusion. Once the three shadows are revealed and the nature of the universe is accepted, it is left to the family to be a part of the world that has unfolded around them, rather than apart from it. Life itself is an entity made of many parts and they, as a segment of this creature, must play their part in its continuance.
Pedrosa’s tale is reminiscent of certain films of Ingmar Bergman, like “The Seventh Seal” or “The Virgin Spring,” as well as Italo Calvino’s rich fairy tale reimagings like “The Baron in the Trees” and “The Cloven Viscount,” and every bit as lovely and profound as any of those. Pedrosa is able to mix the dark allegory of his writing with an astounding visual skill that is able to utilize various strengths depending on the scene. Pedrosa’s work is at times light and cartoonish, with springy black lines giving motion to his figures and his backgrounds — other moments, it is stark and black, sometimes sketchy, sometimes muddy, often vague and always pounding you down with heavy emotion. It’s a visual tour de force by a former Disney animator and certainly a sign of further great things to come from Pedrosa.
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April 17th, 2008 John
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a comic that people take more personally than “Love and Rockets,” and I don’t think I’ve encountered the work of a creator whose characters are embraced in quite the same way as Jaime Hernandez’s. Maggie and Hopey and their circle are often treated as real people, fully realized, by readers and fans, as if Hernandez has happened upon something so real, so personal, that it’s impossible not to marvel at the fullness of his fictional realizations.
Hernandez’s strength, though, isn’t the ability to present meticulously mapped-out characters where every inch of their being is known to him — it’s the ability to present snippets, moments, that give implication to their depth, gestures and panels that say more than whole confessionals and offer the reader something unique, the opportunity to interpret these people through their own experiences and perception. In this way, the stories of Jaime Hernandez are less those of an author telling a solid tale and more of a collaboration with his audience, where the realization of a character like Maggie is as contigent on who is reading her as on who is writing and drawing her.
Hernandez is able to achieve this through obvious cartooning formats — obvious in that they are widely used, but plainly brilliant in that he does it better than most and has the insight to see the possible limitations of the cartoon storytelling medium as absolute strengths to telling the story of real people. Someone could relate the lives of Maggie and Hopey in gigantic prose novel, hundreds and hundreds of pages exploring their minds and motivations and feelings and histories, but it would not pack the wallop of one wordless panel from Hernandez that captures so much more about people — that they are obvious and mysterious at the same time, each person is that person as well as the person you see.
There seem to be two ways to read Hernandez’s Maggie and Hopey stories. One is to follow them through the years, pick up whatever is released and read them in succession. The other is to get things as you feel like it with no real adherence to schedule or even chronology. I have to admit that I am in the latter group and though I am positive that there are huge strengths to the former, there is something in the way I approach the stories that heightens my experience in that it mirrors real life. There are huge amounts of people that escape my daily gaze, for whom I don’t know what goes on in their life with any regularity, but rather in big catch-ups. That’s sort of what Maggie and Hopey and the others are like — just as they seem to be wisps on the edge of other people’s crowds, I am a wisp on the edge of theirs and every once in a while I intersect with them and see what they’re up to.
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April 15th, 2008 John
For the uninitiated, “Kamandi” is the story of the so-called “Last Boy on Earth,” meaning the final “normal” human being, raised in an underground compound on a world where talking animals have taken over under mysterious circumstances known only as “The Great Disaster.” Kamandi has adventures on this future Earth, encountering radioactive mutant iron men, dog scientists, robot-populated versions of 1930s Chicago, and much more, always wearing his trademark — and very ‘70s — cut-off jeans. It’s a little bit “Planet of the Apes” mixed with a lot of the mad and bizarre ideas of Jack Kirby.
The original title stands the test of time and that’s a surprise right there. I can still remember being a nine-year-old fan back in 1974, pretending to be Kamandi. I remember it pretty clearly — my personal storyline in this fantasy was that the backyard sprinkler was a time doorway that I leapt through in order to enter Kamandi’s world and, yes, transform myself into Kamandi. Corny, true, but devoted and something from a lost world.
Among Jack Kirby’s DC creations, Kamandi has really gotten the short shrift in post-Kirby use. One one hand, it’s one of the few Kirby creations I can name that continued on wonderfully even after he left the title — Gerry Conway and Jack C. Harris both had fun with it. The title was less served by its 1993 revival, which had a decent plot — that Superman caused the mythic Great Disaster — but totally lost the fun and, more alarmingly, the talking animals. Other than that, Kamandi has been relegated to Batman team-ups and being transformed into Tommy Tomorrow in the original Crisis on Infinite Earths — his actual story was never given the proper ending it deserved and, somehow, I’m not so sure that one realized in the jaded world of three decades later would be very satisfactory. Case in point, the character and situations are being revisited in the current DC series “Countdown” as a sort of prequel, but what little I’ve read about it doesn’t make it seem as though it’s anything more than comic book continuity pedantry . . . but perhaps I’ll give in out of curiosity.
In conjunction with that prequel, DC recently offered a small celebration of the original delightful comic in their “Countdown Special,” which offered three Kamandi stories to a new audience. I’m glad, because it’s a good, affordable way to reveal the sweet allure of the book and, also, to test out the audience for, perhaps, a Showcase collection, something I’ve been waiting for forever (alongside “Howard the Duck,” my issues of “Kamandi” sit beside my desk, some of the few prized possessions of my comics collection as a kid — I’d like a Showcase collection for my kids, though, since I’m not quite prepared to give up my own issues).
This special revisits the first issue, which sees Kamandi leave his compound and grandfather to discover a flooded New York City and the new structure of the world aboveground. Other stories have Kamandi facing off against a deadly giant germ that goes by the great name of Morticoccus and running up against the legend of Superman — or “The Great One” — in a story that obviously inspired the 1993 series. Each story is filled with action and the classic stilted Kirby dialog that is now so charming and plenty of fighting action, as well as the skewed vision that made Kamandi so special.
I can’t recommend this small collection enough — it hints at a very different view of comics and science fiction, one that was filled with innocence and excitement, one that could get a little corny even while setting your imagination on fire, one that was filled with the unexpected and bizarre and fueled creators of my generation to fashion the stories they do. Unfortunately, my generation of creators has taken that information and spawned a genre of convoluted storytelling that spans not just comics, but television, books, everywhere. Few dare to be goofy anymore, so many science fiction stories are now done by people with one eye focused on a mirror rather than the page. The world that “Kamandi” was produced in was as frustrating and naive as it was a exciting and filled with vision, and it seems as far away from us as Kamandi’s. It’s nice to see a little bit of it retained, made available to revisit and be enjoyed.
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