Surprise?

Thanks to a request from my friend Davy (@davidbrustlin) I had a copy of this comic in my house for a few days:

"Fear Agent" #32, the last issue of the series. Now, I am notorious (especially to Davy) for reading (or watching) ahead, skipping over issues (or episodes), and generally 'spoiling' myself on all kinds of developments 'ahead' of me in serial narratives

I rarely find that my enjoyment of a story is ruined by knowing what's happened chronologically further down the river from where I stand in the current. The ideal? No. A disaster? Not really.

So I opened up "Fear Agent" #32...

...and I was delighted to find this message on the inside front cover.

Rick Remender, Tony Moore, and Dark Horse (@DarkHorseComics) are smart gents.

They saw my type coming a mile away:

I read it anyway.

I liked it. A lot.

I found, in "Fear Agent" #32, a story I could mostly understand and although I could not appreciate its connection to the overall structure of the series, I did deeply appreciate its structure as an individual issue. I just plain, old-fashioned, enjoyed it. I followed the conclusion to its main character's emotional arc, felt its resonance in my own life, and was moved by it.

And as I write these words, I'm reading "The Walking Dead" #92 on the NYC subway without having read #14 through #91. I like it, but not a lot.

Not enough to commit to reading the ongoing zombie survival horror epic. Sorry. But still. This is not a bad thing.

I think of it as a test. If I can enjoy this issue for its emotional, storytelling, creative content out-of-context? The creators are doing something right.

So congratulations to writer Rick Remender (@Remender) and artist Tony Moore (@tonymoore). You made me love something. Even without having "read the book up to this point".

~ @JonGorga

The Memory's Telling of the Journey is the Worthier Part

"Serenity: The Shepherd's Tale" from Dark Horse Comics

If you are at all a fan of Joss Whedon's ongoing sci-fi story: TV's "Firefly" and its feature film sequel "Serenity", you have been waiting for this comic even if you didn't know it, because you've been waiting for this story for a long time. And it does not disappoint. If you're not familiar with Joss Whedon's 'verse this may very well be the place to start.

Chris Samnee's art is wonderful. Clean-lined and smooth, alive and full of delightful human imperfection. His work retains that feeling of being hand-made (what the art historians call gestural artwork) and the result is great cartooning. But somehow his stuff is also realistic enough that it holds some weight. His people look like their bodies are moving over real terrain and through real air. Samnee (@ChrisSamnee) is one of those fantastically rare visual artists who is perfect for comics: smartly cartoony and fluid with strong recognizable shapes that build volume and give a realitic feel to the entire product.

There really are just a handful of them alive and working in the American comics industy at any given time: Dean Haspiel and Erik Larsen are the only other two that come to my mind.

Samnee's art is never a weak link in making visual narrative art. He was unknown to me when I first saw his name attached to this project, but after I saw the preview images [like the one above] and his work on Marvel's "Thor: The Mighty Avenger" series I had no fear about his art doing justice to the brilliant work of Joss Whedon and the original cast of the TV show that started the franchise in 2oo2.

Just look at the sketches from his blog, taking the actor's face and extrapolating the character's younger self(ves). How cool is that?
Now that I sufficiently sound like I'm obsessed with Chris Samnee and you think he's paying The Long and the Shortbox Of It money for these positive reviews both Josh and I have given him now... let's move on to the story.

To clearly depict a character's emotional journey is a tough act in any narrative art medium. To do so with a character who was already well-established and defined in a completely different art medium by a writer, actor, costumers, and cinematographers? And to then do it IN REVERSE?

That's remarkable.

Just as Samnee had to reverse engineer Ron Glass' face in the character of Shepherd Derrial Book, so too did Zack Whedon (@ZDubDub) find himself challenged with crafting a single linear story (a backwards linear story) that presents us his brother's notes on the character's life-story at all different stages from childhood to the middle-aged man we met in the show's first episode when he said: not the destination, but "how you get there is the worthier part." All this material was probably intended to be revealed bit by bit over two seasons of television. Remarkably, the resulting story is smart, unnerving, and emotional. Especially on the re-read.

THE LONG AND SHORTBOX OF IT?
"The Shepherd's Tale" is an exceptionally well-written and well-drawn character biography in reverse. Buy it. Read it. Read it again.

If you've been wondering about whether these Serenity comics from Dark Horse are worth your time, this is one you should have no doubt about. If you were a fan of Joss Whedon's original TV series or the movie sequel you should not hesitate to buy and read this graphic novella. Even if you've never heard of the stuff, you can find something you will love here.

Go get one at your local comic shop! And try to enjoy your trip there because life is wonderful but will be over all too quickly and "how you get there is the worthier part"!

~ @JonGorga

About Your Paper Renewal?

I wrote an editorial not a long while ago subtitled "The Death of the Great Prints" about the distinct possibility that within our lifetimes all comics publishing will be mainly digital in nature. Every single last publisher will have either taken a leap of faith into the digital ether or perished gasping in trying to sell a physical object to a market that's no longer there.

BUT...

At least one publisher is making that great leap BACK into print. There were about 150 issues of the original print comic-book since the inaugural issue of "Dark Horse Presents" in 1986. The company made a dramatic change when Dark Horse partnered with website MySpace.com to create "MySpace Dark Horse Presents" and there were 36 issues of the MySpace version of the anthology. The last one hit the web in July 2o1o and now, starting in 2o11, "Dark Horse Presents" will be a print comic-book once again after 3 years online. Editor Scott Allie said: "When we launched "MDHP," MySpace was the world's leading website, at a time that you could actually have a clear-cut world's leading website, and we felt that we had the opportunity to do something exciting and new. MySpace was the perfect place to get tons of attention" and publisher Mike Richardson said: "We were excited about [it] because it took comics to a much larger audience". Comics will be available (still for free!) on Dark Horse's website here.

[via Newsarama and CBR/CBR]

Presumably, the company thinks that without one website reigning supreme they would do better to bring the successful anthology back to its paper roots. Simultaneously, some independent creators have begun to take back the printing press as a means of disseminating underground comics, which is, of course, how they did it back when underground comics were called comix.

About two months ago the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art (@MoCCAnyc) held a panel discussion about the comic-strip as a form and how it stands now in a world of newspapers closing down. The panel was called "The Future of the Traditional Comic Strip in the Era of Dying Newspapers". The solutions as presented were two-fold: become a webcomic or join together in a collective. Or both.

Yes, tremendously cleverly comicsmith Bill Roundy makes a comic called "The Amazing Adventures of Bill" that is posted as a webcomic (available at the previous link) and a newsprint comic-strip in a publication called "Coffee Talk", available in various Brooklyn locations. The newspaper comics-section without the newspaper. Brilliant, really.

"Dark Horse Presents" and "Coffee Talk" aren't the only comics enjoying the old musty smell of paper. Several examples of other comics utilizing newsprint were held up by "Coffee Talk" mastermind Tony Murphy at the MoCCA event: (1) a copy of New York City comic-shop Desert Island's local comic, a large-format newsprint comic called "Smoke Screen" and (2) a copy of Brendan Leach's comic: "Pterodactyl Hunters in the Gilded City" (the subject of one of my recent interviews here on The Long and Shortbox Of It), with a cover mimicking an old-style newspaper front page. Printed on newsprint.

Now I had this editorial all planned out in my head up until this point:

Both comics companies and individual comicsmiths have made a move away from the digital realm and back to newsprint. Plain, simple, interesting. Right?

That was before these double announcements from the day before the recent New York Comic-Con (@NY_Comic_Con):

DC Comics (@DC_NATION) will in January 2011 reduce the baseline prices of their entire line of 22-page comic-books from $3.99 back to $2.99.

and an hour later:

Marvel (@Marvel) will lower SOME of the prices of their comic-books from $3.99. Called a "partial move away" from $3.99, Marvel has stated that they can afford this because of the money they're making from their iPad app's digital comics sales.

[via CBR- DC announcement/Marvel announcement] (I really recommend taking a peek at CBR's DC article as they actually breakdown exactly which DC comics will now be $2.99.)

I was in the room at the "DC Nation" panel at Comic-Con where a huge screen displayed a defiant Wonder Woman in the famous 'Rosie the Riveter pose' with the famous statement "We Can Do It!" replaced with something like: "HOLD THE PRICE LINE!" DC Comics SVP and Executive Editor Dan DiDio also made it clear that although this means the back-up stories DC added to the books last year when the prices were raised are disappearing, the characters and stories in them will not.

What does this mean?

Well, obviously, it means we all get to save a little money on our monthlies AND more importantly it means when I recommend a monthly comic to YOU the readers, or to a friend in person, there will be a bit less 'sticker-shock' when we all say: 'Damn, comics used to be 10 frickin' cents!' In fact: 10 cents, 12 cents, 15, 20, 30, 35, 40, 75, $1, $1.25, $1.99, $2.99... I believe this is the first time in the history of the American comics industry that the baseline price has gone DOWN.

But, in the long run? What does this mean for paper?

I'm not sure if it's a vote of confidence in the format or a signal of its demise. Since people have been clamoring for the prices to go back down and the Big Two are giving them what they want, it shows that the big companies care about what their paper customers want. Theoretically they can now give it to them because, according to Marvel SVP of Sales David Gabriel, "We found that in a week's time, the download of the day-and-date [digital iPad app] comics were a little bit less than what [New York City's] Midtown [Comics] orders. They're one of the top retailers in the country, so it gives you an idea of where we're at." So are they giving the comic shop-pers what they want as a temporary appeasement as they phase them out? Meanwhile the guys like Brendan Leach and Tony Murphy are printing on the cheapest paper they can find to keep their decidedly not-corporate costs down.

It seems that if anything can be said about the entire comics industry in America from Marvel Entertainment right down to free comics newsletters at this moment, it's that while there is an ongoing serious flirtation with the digital format, paper still has a major, although changing, place in the distribution of sequential art.

~ @JonGorga

Bee in My Bonnet!

"bee in... The Ramble" from MySpace/Dark Horse

There was a unique and unusual pleasure to be had in hearing the comicsmith, Jason Little, read this comic out loud with accompanying music and a projection of the comic panel-by-panel to a small crowd at one of R. Sikoryak's (@RSikoryak) Carousel nights a few months back. Now the masses can be exposed to it as well since it has been published on "MySpace Dark Horse Presents". The experience of hearing this comic read that night (and then having it divorced from that experience on the web) was particularly surreal for reasons that will become clear over the course of this review.

Right from the start "The Ramble" is a hilarious tale of two friends meeting-up in the Big Apple's world-famous Metropolitan Museum of Art for a... uh... unique tour. Oh man. You've really got to click the link at the top of this post and read it yourself to fully appreciate this. THERE ARE NO WORDS.

Speaking of there 'being no words,' one of the most fun elements of the comic is explored after they leave the MET, occasional pictographs in place of words. An element that starts out playful like this:










and this:


And later, after a few sausage jokes, crescendos into something brilliant, painful, awkward, and hilarious:



And that's the tip of the iceberg.

There's a sequence of photographs inter-spliced with drawings during a tour of statues and another one during a film [above], four panels in silhouette during a discussion about burlesque, and there's a panel in '3-D' color-separation style while talking about 3-D. A character attempts to better read the text in another panel by grabbing the panel borders! The piece does take Bee and friends through the part of Central Park called the Ramble and all over New York City, but really it's a ramble through different art mediums and styles Little finds interesting. (On his blog, Little refers to this as the practice of "putting it all in there". Which says everything.)

Actually, as far as Jason Little's career in comics, the whole piece is just the tip of the iceberg.

I first became aware of Jason Little (@Beecomix) several years ago when I suddenly found myself in possession of a copy of "Jack's Luck Runs Out" from Top Shelf Productions, a marvelous/crazy comic that's like a Tarantino action-movie but with a playing-card visual style set in the world capital of entertainment: Las Vegas. I first became aware of his rotund reoccurring character Bee, a little over a year ago when I discovered "bee in... Motel Art Improvement Service" on Act-I-Vate.com [Unfortunately, that link now only goes to a 10-page excerpt. Fortunately, that means that a collected print edition from Dark Horse is in the works!] a webcomic about sexual discovery and... a whole lot of other crazy things.

I had the pleasure of meeting the man himself a few months ago at the Carousel event at which he read "bee in... The Ramble" and his personal style is as warmly whimsical as his comics. The surreality of the story for me is that after a sequence in which Bee and her friend get thrown out of a silent movie for the above antics, they arrive at a Carousel event where a sequential self-portrait of Little himself reads the first half of the comic we were hearing! Reading this later on the web broke the 'this comic could be now' feeling, but added an exotic feeling of cluing you into this weird gathering of comicsmiths. Add to this, the fact that it's the last comic in the last issue of "MySpace Dark Horse Presents" and that's mighty strange right?

THE LONG AND SHORTBOX OF IT?
The humor in the character interactions can be a bit 'precious' at times and the draftsmanship has a few uneven moments, but in the end the jokes are great, the art is smooth, plus it's colored fantastically, and the play with art medium and art-styles more than makes up for any faults anywhere else.

Really, all of Jason Little's work I've encountered so far is worth reading. Look him up at Beekeeper Cartoon Amusements' website.

~ @JonGorga

SDCC Was...

...well, a little disappointing, to be honest.

• There was a lot of news on the movie front, most of which we already knew- and some of which we really wished was true, even if it wasn't.
• We've got some fun new stuff from Marvel, like the new Strange Tales and Fred Van Lente's Power Man and Iron Fist mini.
• We've got an end to the Brand New Day status quo, with Dan Slott taking over all writing duties on Amazing Spider Man, which will now ship twice monthly.
• We've got a Grant Morrison penned Batman team book called Batman Inc. and a suggestion that Bruce Wayne, upon his return, is going to do something other than be Batman.
• We've got an 80-page Robert E. Howard anthology series from Dark Horse, entitled Savage Sword (which, oddly enough, I'm looking forward to- if for no other reason than that it looks like a good way to jump into some of Howard's characters).
• We've got some images from the next League of Extraordinary Gentleman.
• We've got a Morrison and Geoff Johns collab.
• We've got a shit tonne (that's an official measurement, by the way) of Captain America related projects.
• And we've got Kieron Gillen, a fantastic writer, on a new, awfully titled, X-Men series called Generation Hope.
  

While a lot of this is really cool, it's also run of the mill sort of stuff. Nothing explosive happened at SDCC, no announcements that were truly mind-bending. There weren't even that many announcements, all things considered. Are there no more exciting announcements, in a world where the Internet is basically just a huge rumor mill? Or are the companies sitting on something big for NYCC, which is an actual comics event?

We'll just have to wait until October to find out.

LATE EDIT: In retrospect, this post is perhaps a little cynical. After all, it can't be every year that Marvel buys Marvelman and promptly does nothing of note with the property.

Making the Best of It?

There's a new movement of people (proudly?) declaring themselves #notatcomiccon. You can read about it here. 55 comic shops around the country will host parties funded by Dark Horse Comics and something called ChinaShop Magazine, supposedly owned by Red Bull. The goal is to give people who can't make it out to San Diego for the big days a chance to get together in their respective communities.

This is... interesting.

On principle I'm against declaring something in negative terms. I don't believe it to be mentally healthy. Why are you declaring yourself #NOTatcomiccon? It smacks of over-the-top, woe-is-me irony. The promotional images don't help.

On the other hand, on principle I'm for spreading something good out from a single-centralized geographic location. Why should San Diego have all the fun? Furthermore, the San Diego Comic-Con, while probably still a very fun and exciting event, has become increasingly 'the San Diego Media-Con' as TV and film folk originally there to promote their comics adaptation works have, in some people's eyes, begun to take over the convention.

This simultaneous nation-wide party is described as a promotion to "celebrate the highly dedicated culture of sequential art". To me, that sounds like the way it's supposed to be.

"a fun and creative atmosphere where free drinks and over $200 worth of Dark Horse prizes will be available"

I believe that the 24th is the exact date of a previous engagement Clare and I have with a college friend. If it weren't for that, I'd be planning on being at either Midtown Comics (Times Square) or St. Mark's Comics (Brooklyn Manhattan!) here in NYC partying it up!

~ @JonGorga

UPDATE 7/21/2o1o:
I was incorrect on two counts here. One is not my fault because Dark Horse's website gave me bad info. The party hosted by St. Mark's Comics will be at their MANHATTAN location, not their Brooklyn location.

The other, is that the dates were changed for the previous engagement and so you can expect to see me at at least one of the two #notatcomiccon parties. Possibly both!

A Swiss Samurai. Who Knew?

"365 Samurai and a Few Bowls of Rice" from Dark Horse Comics

My high school Drama teacher (emphasis on the drama part) used to say: "All theater is about sex and violence!" Cheery fellow he was. I am thus pleased to discover a work of narrative fiction that encompasses both sex AND violence, but isn't really about either.

It's about enlightenment.

The weirdness that a Swiss artist/writer named J. P. Kalonji is the creator of this bande dessinee graphic novel about a young samurai, and that he chose to construct it as 379 sequential full-page splashes only adds to its unique charm. If Kalonji chooses to continue working in comics and do less design-work as his bio describes he may really be a new European talent to watch.

I, at first, mistook the work for manga. And I think, dear reader, you can forgive me for this given the size (manga/digest), the author's name (Kalonji), the publisher (Dark Horse), and the subject matter (samurai violence and enlightenment) of this graphic novel.

But after more thought I can see why the solicitation for the graphic novel compares the art to both "Blade of the Immortal" AND to "Bone". Jeff Smith's same slightly cartoony, fluid line can be found here and the starkness of the black and white makes the similarities all the more obvious. In fact, the stark solids of the colorless artwork also gives the splash-pages the appearance of simple woodcuts not unlike those that were common during the Edo period in Japan. The time at which the story is supposed to take place.

The work is -obviously- very Japanese. The character designs of each samurai our main character Ningen encounters are brilliantly distinctive to the point where you will remember a handful of faces after you've finished the whole thing.

Now that's remarkable because there nearly ARE 364 samurai (270 really) each depicted and each killed in turn by Ningen in his quest to avenge the death of his master. In that way, it's very similar to manga like "Blade of the Immortal" and "Lone Wolf and Cub" where opponent after opponent appear and get dispatched (usually by being cut in half) with a flick of the main characters blade.

Over the course of the book's 379 pages, 270 samurai go down and one year passes. One year = four seasons in four chapters: Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer. Ningen meets one woman with whom he shares a different emotion in each season: the young Aki in need of protection, the mature Fuyu who offers him protection and comfort (sexY tiME! very nI-cE!), the sweet Haru with whom he shares pure love (and subsequent pure pain), and finally the older Natsu who gives him practical assistance in the last moments of his life's journey.

Those aspects of the ultracompetent main character that I always found pretty ridiculous (dangerous looking men fall with little to no effort when he draws his sword, woman pop up out of nowhere and are either perfect angels or hot and ready to have sex with him with no dinner OR movie) are totally forgiven and work very well here because of the remarkable surprise-ending fantasy aspect of the story...

Why does Ningen meet only 364 samurai when the title is "365 Samurai"? In what way is Ningen's story a fantasy? Why does Ningen find everything he needs to continue his quest around the next corner?

That, my dear friends on the road of life, is what you need to read the graphic novel to learn for yourself.
Now, go READ it. It's gorgeous.

Gorga's Looking Forward to Wednesday 1/13/2o1o!

Okay, in light of the epic kinda-sorta-defeat of last week I really should/will buy something this week. But I still need to finish some reviews for stuff from the end of last year, not to mention the 2oo9 year in review posts all three of us are working on!


The weeklies...
"the Amazing Spider-Man" #617
"The Gauntlet" moves on to revamping the Rhino.

"Batman: Wydening Gyre" #4
This Batman mini penned by Kevin Smith has been good fun so far. If the cover is to be taken as a real indication of the contents I think we're finally going to see a lot of the Joker in this title.

"Daytripper" #2
Issue #1 might be on all three of our personal best of 2oo9 lists. That should tell you everything you need to know.

"the Invincible Iron Man" #22
This series might just be the best in mainstream superhero comics right now.

"X-Men Origins: Cyclops" one-shot
Again, these "Origins" one-shots are hit or miss to me. I'll take a look and make a full report of my opinions to you, the consumer.

"Spider-Man and the Secret Wars" #2 of 4
Still haven't read ish #1, but it looks like the comics equivalent of french fries drowned in ketchup, salt, and vinegar. Smells a bit sour, tastes totally sweet, goes down easy.

The books...
"Ed Hannigan: Covered"
I've never heard this man's name but I do know that there were some awesome covers wrapped around some issues of "Peter Parker: the Spectacular Spider-Man" back in the 70s and 80s. So when you combine this with the fact that there's some money going to a guy in bad health who gave something to the industry and the medium, it is something we should all really pick up.

"Rocketbots: Trouble in Time"
This looks like good fun. Sounds like something Pixar would dream up, right?


Okay, the truth? Although I didn't buy anything out of the new material this past week, I ended up breaking and buying some ridiculously good deals yesterday.

I bought: "MySpace Dark Horse Presents" Vol. 3 (which includes an excellent "Serenity" story) and "Acme Novelty Library" #19 for $16.30! That would have been $36 at full retail price. Both were things I'd wanted and planned to get for a while, so I did good.


UPDATE: 1/14/2o1o
There are those weeks when I just think comics are getting better across the board and I'm just lucky enough to be along for the ride.

I picked up the "Ed Hannigan" booklet. It's nice to learn about someone in the industry who I'd never heard of before. I hope that if the day comes when I'm a professional on in years without pension that something like this would happen to give me some badly needed money and recognition.

I picked up "Daytripper" #2, "Widening Gyre" #4, "Amazing" #617, and "Iron Man" #22 because they are excellent comics. All of them.

I picked up "Spider-Man and the Secret Wars" #2 because it's continuing to flesh out one of my favorite stories from 80s Marvel history: "The Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars".

I passed on "Origins: Cyclops" because it just seemed to be running over territory we'd seen a billion times and trying to tie it into the current stories. I'm sure those current stories are great, but I don't see the point in structuring an origin revamping one-shot to lead-into ongoing stuff. Unless I missed something, I thought these "X-Men Origins" one-shots were supposed to be cool, timeless re-presentations of X-Men characters in their youth. Why can't they all be like "X-Men Orgins: Jean Grey"? Timeless and of high quality.

I also passed on "Rocketbots". Mainly because I couldn't find it to decide if I wanted to buy it or not.

When are the reviews coming, I could not tell you. But come they will. And they will be good.

We are all three really hard at work on whipping up year-end review posts for you. So be patient!

Gorga's Looking Forward to Wednesday 12/2/2oo9

Sorry to those (any?) of you who follow us weekly and have been missing my weekly pull-list posts. Starting my new seasonal position at a museum's gift shop has made my schedule a little too hectic to be regular...

weeklies:

"Jonah Hex" #50
Darwyn Cooke is such a genius that the comics he makes are rarely NOT worth looking at. This week a double-sized issue of Jonah Hex arrives drawn by him.

"Siege: The Cabal"
jesus... Read the preview pages.

"Supergod" #2
Haven't finished ish #1, but I am intrigued.
Disgusted, but intrigued.

Books:

"Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary"
This sounds wonderful...

"365 Samurai and a Few Bowls of Rice"

This looks like genius, right here.

A nice light week.

Last week I bought a huge number of things at the two Black Friday sales in Manhattan: one at Jim Hanley's Universe and another at St. Mark's Comics. (The St. Mark's sale doesn't end until this Wednesday, which means you can get your weeklies there for 10% off! Shhh!) To list everything would be stupid and a waste of your time.

The two things I will mention are two graphic novels that I had been very excited about for a long while: "Asterios Polyp" by David Mazzucchelli and "Monsters" by Ken Dahl.

Who knows? You may see a review pop up on the latter from me eventually!

UPDATE: 12/2/2oo9

Right. Because of Thanksgiving the schedule was pulled back, so the new books will be out on Thursday the 3rd. Sorry about that.

UPDATE: 12/5/2oo9

I just picked up "Siege: The Cabal" and "365 Samurai And A Few Bowls of Rice" this week.

I passed on "Binky Brown" because it's a giant commemorative over-sized reprint of what was originally a tiny mini-comic. It's also a reproduction of the original art, white-out strokes and all, not the comic-as-printed in 1972. Not my bag, man.

I couldn't find "Supergod" #2 anywhere...

By the way, I've learned that "Monsters" isn't really a graphic novel. It was a mini-series. (See: #1, #2, and #3.)

Dark Horse Noir

A couple of weeks ago, in one of my Already Tired of Tuesday posts, I'd mentioned that I had ordered the brand new Dark Horse Noir anthology from my shop.

I don't know if I've ever really written about this here, but I adore crime stories in all their forms- detective and con stories in particular, but I mostly just adore the crime genre. It makes sense, therefore, that crime comics, in taking on one of my favorite genres in my favorite medium, have a very special place in my heart. Somewhere in between my first exposure to the genre (the brilliant 100 Bullets) and the latest issue of Criminal I became fascinated by the notion of crime-themed sequential art, and I've been slowly looking into as many examples of the genre I can find.

When I heard about the Noir anthology, I was pretty excited, particularly because I heard about it on Jeff Lemire's blog. That Lemire (who seems to be everywhere these days) had contributed a story to the collection was reason enough to buy it- that Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, Brian Azzerello, Gaberial Ba and Fabio Moon had contributed stories and pictures to the book was just sort of icing on the cake. Well, a lot of icing on the cake. And maybe a cookie and a milkshake on the side.

I digress. When I went to my store on Friday to pick up my books from the last couple of weeks, I got a chance to look at the collection- and it's fantastic. I mean, first of all, just take a look at the design: its unbelievably beautiful. Really, just look at the cover- it's understated and yet powerful, just like a good noir story. You get everything you need to know about the anthology by just looking at its cover- and then you turn it over, to see if you missed anything, and you find the back. Now, it doesn't look as nice here because I couldn't find an image file of it on the internet, and so I had to scan it, but that isn't the designer's fault. Here, too, the look is wonderfully powerful and understated- mostly black, with a little bit of grey and white. The details you could divine by looking at the cover can be read on the back, as well as that fantastic list of creators, several of whom I will be checking out solely based on their work in the anthology.

The design is so striking that even if I hadn't have known any the names on that list, I probably would have bought it anyway. The team at Dark Horse clearly put a lot of work and thought into this, and I felt it was appropriate to commend them for it before we began to work our way through the anthology itself.

Now, the beauty on the outside doesn't stop there. It's a damn good-looking book through and through, and if you can find it in your shop I urge just to flip through it so you can see what I mean. The art is, on the whole, unbelievably fantastic. The artists I mentioned above (Lemire, Ba, Moon, and Phillips) put in their usual brilliant work, but I was also struck by David Lapham, Kano and Steven Gaudiano (working together on one story), M.K. Perker, and Eduardo Barreto. I think I've named every artist in the anthology save four (I only left out Hugo Petrus because the Alex De Campi story he's illustrating is incomprehensible) and even those artists are pretty good- just not quite as good.

Part of what makes the stories in the anthology so damn worthwhile is, like any noir story worth its ink, how unbelievably complex they are. Take Perker's story, The Albanian, for instance: it manages, amazingly, to be absurd, terrifying, serious, heart-warming, and a little bit disturbing all at the same time, and all of these different aspects complement each other brilliantly. Somehow, the protaganist turns the murderous rage of an office worker into a little boon for his son- the morality and sense of this desicion is left ambiguous, and that's part of why it's so effective. The Perker story is also notable if only because it's one of six (eight, if you count the Fillbach brothers and Brubaker/Phillips, who work together so well and have worked together for so long that they might as well be one entity at this point) stories written and illustrated by the same person- this is interesting to consider, because it makes me wonder how the process changes when this is the case and, furthermore, why it lends itself so well to the noir genre.

I don't know about most of the other artists who worked by themselves in Noir, but I do know that Lemire works best when he's by himself, and "The Old Silo" is unbelievably good. It's got the atmospheric and moody feel typical of Lemire's work, and the rural setting he's so fond of, but it advances beyond that- while he's dealt with moral ambiguity before, he's sort of shunted it aside: here, it's full blown and incredibly finely focused. It's surprising that he hasn't written a story quite like this before because he's so incredibly good at it.

In fact, all of these creators are incredibly good at it- Dark Horse picked a fine stable of writers and artists for this anthology. This review is already pretty long, and I don't want to spend a whole lot more time talking about individual stories, so I'll just bring up two more. The Brubaker/Phillips story is wonderful (at this point, I expect nothing less), and it further proves that Sean Phillips may be the best crime comics artist there is (with the possible exception, of course, of Eduardo Risso). "21st Century Noir" has everything a good noir story should (the femme fatale, the gorilla, the double cross) and a little bit more, and it's worth every panel. Finally, the Azzerello/Ba and Moon story is the crowning jewel of the collection- the twin artists are some of the best working in all of comics, and their work is consistently mindblowing and (despite the fact that what I'm about to say goes without saying at this point, I'm going to say it anyway) Azzerello is among the genre's best writers- the twist at the end of "The Bad Night" is so unbelievable that I had to read it twice just to make sure I had interpreted it correctly. It shows that the writer has guts and, furthermore, that he knows exactly what buttons to push.

I really can't urge you enough to pick up this anthology. At $12.95 it's vastly underpriced for the quality that's inside, particularly if you like crime stories. At the very least, just take a look at it. I promise it will be worth your time.