Wednesday's New Things: Lightning Round

To make up for my absence the last couple of weeks, and because this week brings a plethora of exciting new comics, here is a slightly different than usual version of Wednesday's New Things, a lightly annotated list of things worth taking a peak at that come out this week.

Leading the pack is a period piece, set in ancient Greece and written by Kieron Gillen. From the preview, stunningly pencilled by Ryan Kelly and colored by Jordie Bellaire, you can see that it has that typically, frankly, Gillen. Do you think I can just send him my money by airmail? Or do I have to go to a comic book store?

This looks pretty fun. Darrow is a practitioner of a smoother version of the raw, loose style that I mostly associate with Frank Quitely, and which you can also see in the work of Chris Burnham, Simon Roy and Nick Pitarra. When a prose story came out, I think a year ago, featuring this character, I passed because, well, prose. But Darrow's art is great, emphasizing the movement that those artist do so well without any of the attendant squishiness, so I'm likely to pick this up the next time I head to the shop.

 It's nice to see that Vertigo is back in the game in a serious way. After the departure of Karen Berger, the imprint, which had seemed moribund for a while, really looked decrepit. Recently, though, they've published Trillium, FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics (the poorly renamed book formerly known as Collider) and, now, this, which, with established author Caitlin Kitteridge as its writer, seems an awful lot like Vertigo projects of old. I've never heard of either contributor, and the story seems to fit squarely in the gothic horror genre (not that there's anything wrong with that), but the art, by Inaki Miranda, looks great.

I bought the first two issues of this, didn't read them, and then moved. They're in my short box, alternatively laughing at me and looking at me longingly. The pricing on the trade edition of this book's first volume is tempting-- less than $10, for four issues? I suspect the subsequent volumes won't be as cheap, but even so, at $3.50 a pop for individual issues, I save money as long as a four issue collections costs less than $14. Is that enough of a savings, considering I already own the first two issues? As I reconsider my comics purchasing strategy, reorienting myself towards buying trades in the case of books like this, I think it may be. 

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These lego variants are fun. Not enough fun that I want to own one, but, still, fun.

These Best American Comics anthologies seem like good books for people like me, who don't have the time, energy, or cash to pick through everything that comes out in a year. Although I think I'll wait until the end of the year to pick it up, it's a pretty sure buy.

Hey! New Paul Pope is always exciting. 

Words and Pictures with Ryan Kelly

At last weekend's New York Comic Con, I did some reporting for Bleeding Cool. They were kind enough to let me mirror some of the interviews that I did for them here at THE LONG AND SHORTBOX OF IT! This is Ryan Kelly talking about his upcoming ongoing series with Paul Cornell, Saucer Country, and it was originally posted to Bleeding Cool on 10/15/11

JK: Ryan, can you tell me about Saucer Country, the new book you’re doing with Paul Cornell?

RK: Well, Paul could tell you a lot more, but unfortunately he couldn’t be here this week. It’s going to be an ongoing, I have a good way of explaining it to most people, but I don’t want to spoil. There really is a good way I could explain in two sentences, but I’m afraid of spoiling it for people and so I’m still slowly learning how to explain to people. Roughly, it's about aliens, but overall it's about everything that goes into the American mythology of aliens. As far as I know, it could be about anything from abduction to saucer mythology, close encounters of the first kind, the second kind, the third kind, maybe hybrid star children… that’s only things I get from the first script, and I’ve only read the first script. I read the outline, the second and third scripts are done, but I haven’t read it yet. The editors have read it. So, roughly, what I can say is this: it’s about this woman, she’s the governor of New Mexico and she’s running for President, and what we find out in the first issue is that something happened to her. Something bad happened to her. What we understand is that she’s been abducted, but we don’t really know. She’s in this situation where she has to run for President, but she also has to tell everybody what happened. That’s a conflict that we see in the first issue, the first arc. I don’t want to get too much into it. All we know is that the aliens could be anything. She does get a team together, an academic on alien mythology, you know, on abduction, someone who is really knowledgeable, some visitors from space. Also, she has her publicist, some of her political people together, because she has to run for President and she’s also got to find proof, to figure out what happened to her. She’s having dreams. It’s kind of dark. She believes she’s having visitors, she’s having experiences. I’m treading really carefully about the story here because I don’t want to spoil too much, we’re at a very early stage, but just so you get the gist of what it’s about. It’s a mix of hard sci-fi and political drama/thriller. I think it’s going to be introduced in February.

JK: Can you talk about you’re going to approach it as an artist?

RK: It’s interesting. They’ve really just let me run with it and do my thing. There’s been some challenges early on about how to depict them, you know, the grays. I’m investigating and learning more about this and doing research on the hundreds and thousands of people around the world that truly believe they’ve had experiences of the third kind, that they’ve been abducted. I’ve been doing a lot of research, and I want it to be really scary, I don’t want it to be like an alien invasion, like what you would see on movies or tv. I something kind of new, but also kind of familiar. I’m inspired by everything from Whitely Striber’s Communion, and also Stephen Speilberg’s take in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, so I want to be scary, but I don’t want to give away too much: they have black eyes, they’re scary, they’re frightening. I want people to use their imagination, without having to give too much. I want there to be a lot of mystery, a lot of black, a lot of darkness. But there are also a lot of people standing around in business suits talking, because it's also like a government conspiracy. I’m going to mix in some of that.

JK: Can you talk a little bit about your book FUNRAMA?

RK: Funrama is a total side project. Every artist has one of these. You know how it is. I work on it every minute I’m not working on my real work, it’s a total side project, but I’m totally dedicated to it. I’m going to be doing it for the rest of my life. Funrama is like me doing superheroes, if I did superheroes. There are characters and stories in it that I created when I was 11 years old. All of my characters, I created them when I was a little kid. I’m bringing them back, because the whole point of doing this is fun. I’m not making a dime from it, no money from it, no publisher. It’s kind of like remembering that comics are for fun, that that’s what I do. I won’t call it a hobby but… that’s why I call it Funrama. Funrama is a place, it’s a power, it’s a spirit. It could be anything. I’ll be drawing it for the rest of my life. Probably until I’m about 80. There’ll be a hundred issues, and I’ll still be doing it. I’m really dedicated to it.

An Opportunity I'm Not Library To Pass Up

I don't like winter break very much. It's not that I don't like the time off (I do), and it's not like I don't like my family (I love them, that's why I come home), there just isn't very much to do in Chicago's north suburbs in late December and early January. Rather than find things to occupy me, then, I have often to make them.

Luckily, my local library has a pretty sweet graphic novel and collected comics collection. It's growing, too: when I started checking books out as a freshmen in high school, the whole shebang occupied maybe four bookshelves. Today, when I walked into the library for the first time in probably about a year, it took up four whole bookcases.

Clearly, someone at the Highland Park public library likes me very much.

I always use the opportunity of being home to read some stuff I wouldn't have read otherwise; things that just aren't my speed enough to buy, or things that are just too big, unwieldy or expensive for me to consider purchasing on a normal occasion. This vacation, I've chosen three things to read, all of which encompass both categories of comics I borrow from the library.

The first, Fantagraphics' complete collection of Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar, is my introduction to Los Bros Hernandez. That I've read nothing of their work means that I have a pretty big hole in my comics knowledge, and I hope the experience of this tale, which originally ran in the Bros' Love and Rockets anthology, is as fantastic as everyone says it is. The HPPL also has Luba, Locas I and Locas II, so it's possible I'll also get to at least one of those before the break is over.

The second, Top Shelf's collection of Eddie Campbell's Alec comics, entitled The Years Have Pants, is something I've thought about buying a couple times, on the strength of recommendations alone. It's a huge, beautiful, book- I hope I enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy looking at it.

The last maxi-sized comic currently on loan to me is Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly's Local, which looks about as perfect a comic for me as there ever was. If Wood's Demo proved anything, it's that he writes a great short comics story and this collection of twelve interconnected ones, about a girl who sets out from Portland, Oregon and just travels around the country, looks perfect. And pretty.

I'm hoping to review each of them; I'm curious how their massive size and quality paper changes the experience of reading comics. I'll let you know how it goes.