Wednesday's New Things: Play It Again, Satellite Sam

1) Bullets, broads, business, a murder on Broadway? What's not to like about the second issue of Satellite Sam, from the suddenly very prolific Matt Fraction and Howard Chaykin. It's good to see Fraction working outside of Marvel again; he does best when he's got the most space to breathe, which is why his best series at that publisher have been the ones where he could do whatever he wanted either because editorial's let him play (Invincible Iron Man, FF) or because nobody's going to crow about what he does with the characters (Immortal Iron Fist, Hawkeye). I was a little disappointed with Chaykin's art in the first issue, which seemed sketchy, half formed, like they yanked it from him before he was done. At the time, I wondered if his pencils always looked like that, and the lack of color just revealed it to me, but, if the preview is anything to go by, he's gotten that in check.

2) I missed the first issue of this one, but its an interesting idea; a few connected stories, with the same author but different artists. I've been wondering about why there doesn't seem to be a market for anthology comics in the US, but if something like this, something where the quality is consistent relatively consistent, can succeed, it would suggest that the problem isn't so much the fact of the anthologies themselves so much as it is what it is that goes into the sausage. Preview here.

3) Holy moly, Jeff Lemire writing and drawing his own horror/sci-fi/historical fiction love story? And will you look at the preview pages? There's something about his art, maybe that wavy line, which removes the pretense of realism and replaces it with a certain sort of impressionism, that's always seemed to call out for the softness of water color; that he's mixing it in with more traditional looking comics coloring suggests that he's getting creative. I'm very excited for this one. 

Chatter: Hillary Chute

This sense of the poetic page as the space of performance opened my eyes to how comics functions narratively and graphically. Comics is a site-specific medium; it can’t be re-flowed, re-jiggered on the page; hence, it is spatially located on the page the way that poetry often must be. The rich relationships between word and image in which spatial arrangement is significant, and which characterizes contemporary comics, had precursors in all sorts of poetic experiments. This connection struck me afresh at a recent talk I gave on comics when a Romanticist poetry professor told me his students became better readers of poetry after having been exposed to graphic novels, because they were more attuned to lineation and other constitutive, spatialized features of poetry.

-- Hillary Chute, from "Secret Labor: Sketching the Connection Between Poetry and Comics" in the July/August issue of Poetry. 

Quick Update

I'm moving this week. Back to your regularly scheduled programming just as soon as I pack all of my crap comics into my car.

Coming Soon To A Spinner Rack Near You: Gillen and Kubert's Wolverine Origins II

Kieron Gillen, on what's inside (via CBR): 

This story is set right before World War I. It takes place right around the time the German Schlieffen plan for winning that war was was made up. So we're on the cusp of what will be frankly a horrific century and what will civilization mean, then? An earlier draft of the story featured characters like Sigmund Freud and the Futurist movement. That was my original focus. All that stuff is sort of gone, and now I'm really focusing on the characters and what's important there, but in terms of themes, the idea of civilization and how violent it can be is a big part of this story... 

The X-Ray was originally called that because they had no idea what it was. An "Unknown" or X-Ray was pretty much the short hand for that, and this story is only a few years after that. So it makes sense that if they found a new form of human living in the woods, they'd call him an X-Man. That's all kind of built into the period detail. Ideas like Eugenics were prevalent around this time in this world that was on the brink of war.

Wednesday's New Things: Young Avengers, Dan Clowes, Xtra Hawkeye

1. Although they're not writing a Wolverine comic, Gillen and McKelvie really are the best they are at what they do: Young Avengers #8 is the apex of what they've managed so far, a book that both does more than just tempt formal questions and that, with a hidden kiss and a cameo appearance from an old friend, does a whole bunch for the feels crowd; it's a crowd pleaser for sure. More on all of this soon, I hope. Plus, Noh-Varr grows a beard!

2. If you live in, or near, Chicago, have you made it to the Museum of Contemporary Art's Dan Clowes show yet? For a Clowes neophyte like me, it was a twofold revelation. This first was the work itself, which I know I should read, but somehow just never got around to; for this purpose, the Reader, put out by Fantagraphics, will be a big help. The second is in the inviting way that the exhibit is set up, which potentially, solves the weirdness of looking at sequential art as art on the gallery wall, or at least it does a little bit. More on that later, too, when I get a chance to go again early next month.


3. An extra Hawkeye issue, written by Fraction and drawn by Pulido? What could be bad?