Coming Soon To A Spinner Rack Near You: Men of Wrath

Jason Aaron is working with Ron Garney on Men of Wrath, a creator owned miniseries for Marvel's Icon imprint, due out in October. The announcement came exclusive via CBR, so rather than include the watermarked cover, here's a bit on the book's background, from Aaron:

I love westerns. I'm a big western fan. I just watched "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" again the other day for the 100th time. I'm especially a fan of all of Clint Eastwood's westerns from the Sergio Leone stuff through his own westerns and in particular "Unforgiven."  

I always like to think of "Unforgiven" as if Eastwood is playing the same guy he played in all these other movies, the Man With No Name, or Josey Wales, or whatever; everything has kind of led to this portrayal. Character wise that's a far more interesting guy; Once you get to the guy who's at the end of his life and has done all of this horrible stuff and is looking back over his life and wondering what was it for? What did I do? That's a fascinating character to dig into. 

I also love the cinema of the the 1970s back when you could have an action movie with an old man as the lead. You don't see too many of those any more. So it's a combination of those and I'm sort of fascinated by those kinds of characters.
Now Ira Wrath is a very different guy than Earl Tubbs. His motivations are very different. A lot of their problems both stem from family, but that's really a theme of a lot of stuff I've done over the years. Family was one of the main overarching themes of "Scalped." That's something I'm always interested in.

The original idea for "Men of Wrath" really started with my own family history. My great, great grandfather stabbed a guy to death in an argument over some sheep. That's the opening scene of "Men of Wrath." Then his son, my great grandfather, died of rabies. Those are kind of my country roots and they inspired the Rath family in this book 


The cycle of violence in the book starts with the same thing, a stabbing that may or may not be justified. There's questions about it. It's certainly not a cold blooded murder, but that starts something. From that, the ball begins rolling and kind of gets worse and worse with each successive generation until it culminates in the present day.

Wednesday's New Things: Grayson

This is some kind of post-New 52 record-- two interesting DC comics in a three week span? Unlike John Romita Jr.'s stint on Superman, though, it's not the talent that's got my interest-- it's the character. I've liked Dick Grayson more or less since he became Batman, but I was never really interested in Nightwing. I'm too young to know Grayson as Robin, but Grayson as Batman had some juice; surely some fans of the character will take umbrage to this, but, separated from Bruce Wayne, he feels repetitious, perhaps even superfluous. This new Grayson series, though, takes Dick out of the spandex and into suit and jumpsuit world of espionage, which catches DC up with a move that Marvel made a decade ago. I would even go so far to say that the espionage comic is the great Marvel genre for that span, starting when Ed Brubaker took over Captain America in 2005, stretching through his entire run on the Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes iterations of that character, his associated work on Winter Soldier and Secret Avengers, the rest of the first volume of that latter books and then the two volumes that have been published since, Matt Fraction's run on Iron Man, Jonathan Hickman's S.H.I.E.L.D and Secret Warriors, the Civil War crossover and its aftermath, and the year-long Dark Reign crossover. That's not even to mention the current, and excellent, Black Widow series, or the inflections of the genre in other Marvel books, like the ongoing Original Sin crossover, Hickman's New Avengers, Al Ewing's Loki: Agent of Asgard and the overt references to James Bond in Fraction's absolutely label-defying Hawkeye. I don't read DC comics with enough regularity to know whether or not they've tried anything similar in the last ten years, but I can say that it certainly doesn't feel like they have, or that the attempts have been nearly so well received. 

Even if they have, though, looking at the preview and reading about the book, it seems like a lot of the elements here have been cribbed from some of the above series. Spanish artist Mikal Jenin's thin line and unusual panel sizes and combinations bear a passing resemblance to Phil Noto's Black Widow work, as do Jeremy Cox's colors, although the work is in both cases more standard issues than Noto's. Furthermore, the book's premise, with a recently caped hero partnering with a more established spy, reads a little like Winter Solider, although the comparison isn't one to one. None of this is to accuse any of the people involved, either Jenin, Cox, or writers Tim Seeley and Tom King with some kind of unoriginality, a suggestion that should always cause some eye rolling when we're talking about superhero comics. Good artists find things they like and then they take them. If Grayson is worthwhile, and it looks like it might be, it'll be because it has its own take on those ideas.

There's another interesting thing going on here, which is the story about the series in the Daily Beast. In some ways its your standard comics journalism written for a not-comics publication, but there's some unusual stuff here too. These pieces are often written about A-list characters, but Dick Grayson doesn't exactly fit that description except as Robin, which suggests something about the relationship that civilians have to legacy characters who have deep in-comics histories that aren't reflected on television or in the movies. The article also has this weirdo quote from King,

Comics work on a metaphorical level...People don’t go around punching each other in the face. We do that to sort of talk about how people fight with each other, and how they deal with each other.

which is a sort of goofy way of making a really astute point about superhero comics and maybe comics in general; work about the thing itself is rare, and maybe it would be worthwhile to think about why that is. Finally, I think its fascinating that more than a century into the history of the medium, people still need to be told what comics is, a fact that is sort of disheartening, but also heartening in that it means that we're not even close to the limit of what comics can do.

Quickly, two more books of note:

First, on the top of the this should be cool pile, from Joshua Hail Fialkov and Gabo, The Life After.

Second, from the annals of who is this book for?

Wednesday's New Things: Floppies and Movie Screens

1. Two $5.00 releases from Fantagraphics this week. The first, Cosplayers 2, is the second in a series of short ones from Dash Shaw. The first issue of the book seemed pretty well received, a slight step back from Shaw's weirder impulses, but still subject to his propensity for surreal coloring and still a little out there. It seems like there's an opportunity to get meta here, either about fandom or about comics themselves. Same thing goes with Italian cartoonist Sergio Ponchione's DKW, which features one story each in the style of Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and Wally Wood. I'm always intriguing when an artist goes for a straight pastiche, instead of just incorporating an influence, in a particular project-- how do you approach it? Which era of an artist do they choose? Is their Kirby, for example, different from somebody else's? You can bone up on your Italian and see some preview pages here.

2. As the cover says, this is the French comic from 1982 that inspired that a supposed to be excellent just now coming out Bong Joon-Ho movie starring Captain America. I don't anything about the writer, Jacques Lob, or the artist, Jean-Marc Rochette, but the preview panels included with this review look excellent, if highly composed and a little stiff.

3. With the release date for Guardians of the Galaxy now less than a month away, Marvel is stepping up its promotion by putting out both a Star Lord comic and a new Rocket Raccoon one, written and drawn by Skottie Young. Young is a real talent, someone who takes his cues from gag comics as well as caped ones, and its nice to see him on a frontline Marvel book as opposed to cover duty or a Wizard of Oz adaptation. I was pretty into the idea of this book, but the preview is busier than I would like, and it strangles some of the visual comedy. Still, this one is probably worth picking, particularly if Young focuses on the action a little more towards the end.

4. This one is exactly what it sounds like, one of Craig Yoe's crate digging releases, but in floppy rather than trade or hardback form. I wonder about some of the choices behind a book like this-- how long is it supposed to go? How did Yoe choose the stories? Why release it as a floppy? Actually, that's the most intriguing-- do books like this sell ok as single issues? It seems to me that this is the kind of thing that a completist or historian would shell out good money for a hardcover. The stories inside really do look great, though. They don't make 'em like this anymore. Can you imagine the kind of things we'd be seeing now, if Wertham hadn't ruined everything? 

Wednesday's New Things: It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's a DC Comic I Actually Want to Read?!

1. I don't know when the last time I read a DC comic was, or even what it was-- it has to be two or three years ago already, and it was either Wonder Woman or Batman, Inc. The latter ended, and the former was excellent, the only new 52 book I ever really liked, I just lost track of it. This new John Romita Jr. Superman comic, though is pretty tempting, even if I've been burned by star turns on this particular book before. With Geoff Johns doing the writing, the story will be decent but not spectacular; Johns sells a lot of perfectly competent, crowd pleasing comics, but JRJR is really the big draw for me. There's not a whole lot of pleasingly blocky art that still has motion-- Chris Samnee also comes to mind-- but, given that JRJR is the godfather of that kind of style, that's exactly what you'll find here.

2. This is something else I've lost track of, but my lovely lady has been reading it regularly and likes it ok. Avatar has been doing this sort of internet first publishing for a stretch already, with one of its Crossed spin-offs, but we'll see if this six months of free online comics into one $20 trade paperback translates into sales for a property without an already established fanbase. Si Spurrier is an excellent writer of comics and has an extraordinary range, while German Erramouspe is surprisingly dynamic given that he's hampered by the Avatar house style. One of the things that I pointed out when Disenchanted debuted in October was the way that the square presentation of the comic online was hampered by the fact that the pages were obviously drawn for a typical, rectangular page. It'll be interesting to track if Erramouspe has adapted to this weird double form over the last six months. 

3. Lane Milburn's weirdo science fiction/adventure comic Twelve Gems looks like a live one. From the preview, the plot seems to be an 80s cosmic cartoon bent through the lens of Fletcher Hanks, while the art has R. Crumb's loathsome doughiness reigned in by an affinity for shading and dark space-- it's hard to tell on the preview, but the dark color seems to be bluer than a true black-- straight out of Charles Burns. 

4. This collection of The Hypo artist Noah van Sciver's early work features a preface by cape comics artist Ethan van Sciver, who happens to be Noah's much older brother. That's the kind of detail that I always wonder about, but rarely have the desire to actually go and investigate its veracity. The younger Van Sciver's work is nothing like the older one's; the lines are few, many of the characters are ugly, designed to show human frailty sickness than the fantasy of physical will to power. There's a fair amount of alt-comics weirdness here, too, although its wrapped up in a neatly into the stories at hand. Preview here.

5. I just love The Goon.

Wednesday's New Things: Getting Intentional

I've been gone for a while. After my semester ended, I expected to take a break from blogging that coincided with the vacation that took me first to Chicago, then to New York, Connecticut, the middle of nowhere in Virginia, Memphis, and back to Austin. I intended, as I often do when I travel to visit comics shops in the places I hadn't been to before, and take pictures of the storefronts and post them on this blog. I didn't do that. And, until the Buttersafe post last week, I didn't do anything -- I couldn't interest myself enough in whatever cape comics were coming out the last few weeks to put together a Wednesday post and I haven't really read anything during the last month and a half, so I couldn't write about anything either. Basically, as a comics reader, I was feeling sort of stuck.

Partially, this ennui is a function of some other stuff that's going on in my life, but its also a recurring theme. A couple of times a year, a gimmicky new storyline is announced or the price of all the comic books goes up and I begin to wonder how much I care. And then I go to the store on Wednesday, and I buy a bunch of comics I don't read, which may be the wackiest part of all of this. Somnambulating through a weekly ritual that I'm supposed to love says something ominous.

So I'm going to get intentional. I'm going to think more critically about what I'm buying, and more critically what I'm not buying. I'm going to take some of the capital I'm spending on, say, cape comics every week and put it aside so I can look into "graphic novels" and in particular, comics from abroad and minis. To go where the excitement is, basically.

With that in mind, here's some stuff for this week.

I've been waiting for this one since Young Avengers wrapped up in January. New Gillen and McKelvie (hell, new Gillen or McKelvie) represent an automatic buy for me-- in some ways this may become the model for how I buy floppies, and in particular superhero comics, in the future. I do have some reservations about this title; it looks great, of course, and the dialogue is excellent, but the premise seems unusually forced, an advancement on some of the ideas from Phonogram combined with a certain amount of the superheroes as modern myth stuff that seems somehow artificial, almost cute. We'll have to see if these concerns bear out, but I'm hopeful that this is an if-anyone-can-pull-it-off-its-these-two kind of situation.    

Non-fiction comics are one my great loves, and one of the things that I'm most excited about looking deeper into. Nick Bertozzi's last book about explorers, Lewis and Clark, seems to have been pretty well received, and his new one, Shackleton, also looks to be pretty good. Finding some way to minimize exposition is one of the big problems with books like this, and Bertozzi seems to have found a good way to balance the need for information with the associated need to not be boring. Pay particular attention to the panel and page designs, which look particularly excellent and elucidating.   

This goes on the list of books I'd buy if I had all the money. IDW's artists editions are an amazing resource for those of use who are interested in artistic process, and, an investigation into how Schulz developed and then guided his minimal, yet highly expressive, line, seems particularly rewarding. I'm hoping there'll be a copy I can flip through at my LCS.

Ed Brubaker is my favorite writer of comics; the fact that the great genre at Marvel has been the espionage comic for the last half decade or so is basically his fault. On his own, he's another one of those insta-buys for me, but I've lost track of his work in the last year or so. I stopped reading Fatale in the shuffle of moving from New York to Texas and I bought the first two issues of Velvet and then I missed an issue and couldn't find it, so I never caught up. This is a good place to pick it back up; Image's policy of pricing their first volume trades at $9.99 makes it an easy pill to swallow. 

Meags Fitzgerald's Photobooth is another intriguing non-fiction work out this week; unlike Shackleton, it takes the traditional comics step of integrating memoir into the cultural history that's the book's sell. I think Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Are You My Mother as the apotheosis of that sort of work, and the greenish wash on the cover of Photobooth is reminiscent of the former suggests that Fitzgerald is very consciously influenced by Bechdel here. If you take a look at the preview, you'll see it elsewhere, too.

Finally, Eye of Newt is a relatively typical YA-fantasy plot illustrated like an illuminated medieval manuscript. Although Michael Hague's art is mostly very attractive, it will be interesting to see whether or not the unusual approach will make the comic seem stilted over the course of 20 or so pages.