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THINGS TO CLICK
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REVIEW
DC Comics has had an excellent series of books in which short story form and the individual styles of creators are put together to make a showcase – for example Solo number 5 from August of 2005. It featured the beautiful black and white inking of Darwyn Cooke, along with his unique coloring.
Cooke's stories are tied together by a Slam Bradley tale interspersed between the individual short stories. Slam Bradley (wikipedia entry here) is DC Comics oldest (or nearly oldest?) character, dating from 1937. Cooke's stories are inventive and each one has a slightly different art and color sense.
For Batman fans, Cooke adapts the 1974 Night of the Stalker from Detective Comics #439. The original story was by Steve Englehart (from "an incident described by Neal Adams" so written on the first page of the tale.) the editing was by Archie Goodwin, who had the tough task in those days of making short 11 and 12 page Batman lead stories coherent and interesting with such little space. For an enlargement of a few panels from the tale click the image below:
COMIC BOOK BRAIN
Jesse Hamm has a "7 Reasons Why Alex Toth Drew Better Than I Do" page here.
The Comics Reader has an extensive list of links for Toth related news and information. Newsarama is carrying A news bite on the story too. Toth-fans.com has much more information also. - - The first time I saw Alex Toth's work it took me by surprise. It was the 1974 Detective Comics #442 "Death Flies the Haunted Sky." This was during Archie Goodwin's run as the editor and writer for Detective. At the time, I was 10 years old and I was used to Jim Aparo and Neal Adam's artwork for Batman, which is quite different from Toth's. For a few pages I was disappointed because the "look" was somewhat old-fashioned (as far as the conception of how Batman looked) and the way the panels told the story was strange ... but at the top of page four, where the empty hole at the top of the water tower shows Batman climbing out of it in a "time lapse" four panel progression, I was excited, and then I realized Toth had pulled another "time trick" on page three, showing multiple Batman figures in a single panel as he plunges through the roof of the tower. My excitement was because Toth had made the fiction of the tale become real for me; he had engineered a way to impress me with a sense of velocity, space and physicality... and he did it through a clever diagram showing motion and the effects. Only comics can do this as a way of telling a story. An adventure movie cannot suddenly stop and become a science documentary on laws of physics, and a literary effort must describe through words the entire visual panorama without resorting to a line drawing to show the event. But a comic can do all of this and all at the same time without the story breaking apart into mismatched pieces. Toth did all of this while telling a relatively simple detective story (Goodwin's stories emphasized the deduction ability of Batman, complete in an 11 or 12 page story.) I could not say at the time what I was seeing on the these pages, but now I know it was a near perfect modeled draftsmanship depicting an imagery world come alive in my ten year old imagination. Besides drawing the World War I era biplane that the criminal of the tale pilots, there are numerous interior room drawings and building drawings that show Toth's ability to imagine a real world on paper. I also was impressed with the effortless looking, simply drawn anatomical drawing of a leaping Batman on page 9. Toth indicated the rib cage and the spread of the muscles of the body as Batman stretches to bridge the space. Simply put, its not an "action pose" but an "action move" and the difference is that the eye gets to look at the muscular figure, but it is in a motion and in a "pose" that is part of the story and expresses the action occurring. I cannot tell you how often in superhero comics the action "pose" of the hero actually has nothing to do with the story but is an extraneous expression of some sense of the character that transcends the tale, or maybe better put, is not a part of the story but of the marketing of the attitude of the character. So much more admirable is Toth's approach, which is true to the story and expresses it. A year later after getting that Batman comic, I found a used copy of the 1972 Toth story "White Devil, Yellow Devil," which ran in Star Spangled War Stories # 164. I wrote an essay on this years ago (and put it on the web in 2003 at art & artifice) but coming across that tale also excited me. I read all of the DC Comics "war" comics at that time, and Toth's quiet, dangerous visuals of a jungled, shadowed world that seemed to project sound and the feelings of the fictitious characters was strikingly different from the bombast of the stories I was always reading. The contemplation that is within the story is appealing and Toth expresses this in so many ways. My appreciation for this story, and how Kanigher and Toth handled it, is obvious in my essay. Two other Toth tales which effected me was the often reprinted Burma Sky (read it with Toth's notes at tothfans.com) and the Crucifixion tale This Dirty Job (can be read online at tothfans - - with some of Alex Toth's notes about the story - - or at dialbforblog.com). For "Dirty Job" Toth has a bloody Roman sword as part of the story logo dribbling into the wine glass of the Roman soldier in the bottom panel. At Tothfans one can read his remarks repudiating the gimmick, but for me at the time I read it, it was effective and startling. Typological symbols like that fired my teenage brain. The news reports say that Toth died at his drawing table. He was a week shy of his 78th birthday.
GENERAL NOTES The Frank Miller and Jim Lee DC comic Batman and Robin All Stars has hit it's fourth issue. I noticed that in issue one, Batman and the traumatized Dick Grayson get in the Batmobile and head for the Batcave. Well, in issue four, they finally get there. Does this mean the "story arc" for this book will take approximately 3,792 pages to complete? Also, this issue has a six-page foldout drawing of the Batcave. I have a page analyzing this series at Art and Artifice.
Garry Alanguilan (inker on much of Leinil Yu's artwork) has an impassioned plea for artists, especially Filipino artists, to not "self-exploit" themselves. Read it at his site Komikero Comiks.
COMIC BOOK BRAIN
The DC Comics of history could not have published this book, which contains (among other things) hundreds of joking jabs at the silliness of under-wear on the outside of their pants heroes. But, there has been a thousand parodys drawn along these same lines about Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, et al, by thousands of kids since those characters first were created, and now DC Comics is pulling back the curtain and cashing in on the genre. (Historical footnote: Marvel Comics produced the parody title Not Brand Echh! back in 1967. And there were Mad Magazine parodies – e.g., Superduperman appeared in 1963.)
Bizarro World announces on the back that it is "whimsical, eccentric, unconventional," which is certainly true as compared to the regular line of "serious" superhero books put out by DC, but for the most part these (mostly) funny looks at DC's trademarks are what you might expect if a small army of cartoonists were turned loose to make family-friendly gags. However, not everything is a joke herein, there is some digging about for insight and analysis of these superheroes (one that is disturbing in its implication is Dylan Horrocks' "Dear Superman," which in effect is concerned with the Flash, and his inherant problem with being so fast. The artwork by Farel Dalrymple is nicely rendered cityscape that depicts a whole world of life that is both obvious and mundane, but from the point of view of a speedy superhero looks exotic and something like a voyeurs dreamworld. In particular the coloring by Paul Hornschemeier points out the intrusion of reality versus comic fantasy when the brightly costumed red and yellow figure appears finally at the end of the story/monologue. It is a perfectly thoughtful piece and not a parody, but certainly not a straight hero tale either. But what exactly is it then?) Another example, the Tomer and Asaf Hanuka "Batman" tale, it wants to be taken seriously, a virtual opposite to (say) Johnny Ryan/Dave Cooper's "Super Dumped". The Hanuka story could easily have fit the format of DC's "Batman Black and White" book which featured several stories of the Batman character as psychological phenomenon. It is not so far afield from a typical Batman tale that it could not feature as a "back-up" in one of the monthly titles. On the other hand, it would not pass as a standard lead story, it would certainly throw-off the typical reader (I think) though it might be a welcome surprise. (And also of note; there was the Simon Bisley/Neil Gaiman Batman tale which was a bitter gagfest and expose of Batman story formula itself. That story was in Batman Black and White and would fit into Bizarro World easily.)
But the hyper-energetic Dave Cooper artwork in "Super-Dumped" is more like the real theme of this book: well-drawn, gags, and more than a bit of satire about superheroes and comic fans in general. This volume is a beautiful collection of art styles. I can flip it open at almost any page and find something colored and drawn wonderfully. Many of the jokes are quite hilarious too, though a familiarity with the characters is definitely required (e.g., the Evan Dorkin/R. Sikoryak "Marvel Family Circus"). It is not all affection coming through in these tales, but the book is a simple, fun read (some exceptions mentioned above) and these short tales typically do not waste a moment of time getting right down to business and mocking the superhero they've targeted. There are pieces that look something like classic Mad Magazine, and stories with lineages that go straight towards Dan Clowes and other contemporary cartoonists. The Kyle Baker/Elizabeth Glass piece "Personal Shopper" in which Alfred has to order a new Batmobile from a custom shop without revealing who it is for is quite funny but is a little jarring. At first it looks like one of those "picture books" made from an animated film, but once you get accustomed to the computer typeface and page design, it truly is just another comic book story, and Baker's artwork is elegant. A compact, entertaining anthology. I hope it will spawn a sequel collection with the same eclectic quality. DC Comics, May 2006, $19.95 USD, 200 pages. DC Comics page on the book here.
I have a review of the film Poseidon at Cinemagraphe. |
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MAY 31, 2006 
Paul Pope has had a 4-issue run of Batman Year 100. The story carries on with the same issues and concerns as Pope covered in 
I recently made a trip to Michigan. In particular spent time at Mackinac island which is in Lake Huron. Some photographs from the trip are 
HOSTING AND DESIGN FROM
eeweems.com
