Process: Terry and Rachel Dodson
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.
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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.
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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.
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