Vertigo Quarterly: Magenta #1 – Review

By: Too many to list—or even to review. Just check out the issue.

The Story: You’ll be tickled pink by what you read.

The Review: I enjoyed the last quarterly just fine, but I couldn’t help being a little dismayed by the $7.99 price point. That’s a lot of money for a bunch of shorts, not all of which are gems. On the flipside, none of them sucked or anything, and for what is basically a collection of pieces by mostly unknown writers and artists, that’s pretty remarkable. You might say that what you’re really paying for is the dreams of some talented creators, for whom this might be an opening to a big break.

That just leaves the puzzle of the color themes for each quarterly. Cyan produced such a jumble of different pieces that it didn’t really seem to be much of a unifying theme at all. Magenta looks to be a very different story. There’s still plenty of variety in the stories generated in this issue, but certain patterns emerge, ones that just might have something to do with our psychological perception of magenta itself.

Vertigo Quarterly: Cyan #1 – Review

By: Too many to list—or even to review. Just check out the issue.

The Story: It’s impossible not to feel blue after reading this.

The Review: Of all the showcase titles out in recent years, the ones from Vertigo have been the best by far, with a good mix of known and unknown writers confidently spinning self-contained yarns from the chosen motif. Until now, I haven’t had a proper appreciation for the choice of motif, which provides some degree of unity to what would otherwise be jumbles of disparate, unconnected stories. But revolving stories around a color doesn’t quite do the same trick.

The big difference is that a color is an abstract concept in comparison to, say, witches or ghosts, which are somewhat more defined, even if a writer takes the notion in some radical direction. In theory, you can write any story and shoehorn a bit of cyan in there, which is what a lot of the features in this issue do, whether it’s Shaun Simon’s unconvincing “Serial Artist” or a metaphysical numbers extravaganza in Mony Nero’s “Much Ado About Nothing.” It’s easy enough for the colorists to dab a bit of sharp light blue in any given feature, but difficult to grasp the color’s effect on the story.

American Vampire: Anthology #1 – Review

By: Scott Snyder, Jason Aaron, Rafael Albuquerque, Jeff Lemire, Becky Cloonan, Francesco Francavilla, Gail Simone, Gabriel Ba, Fabio Moon, Declan Shalvey, Ivo Milazzo, Ray Fawkes, Tula Lotay, Greg Rucka, JP Leon, Dave McCaig, Jordie Bellaire, Jared K. Fletcher, Steve Wands, Travis Lanham, Dezi Sienty

The Story: A group of super-creators gathers to tell short stories set in the American Vampire universe.

Review (with very minor SPOILERS): Whoa! This was really incredible.  I knew I wanted to read this issue because I’ve read and loved every issue of American Vampire.  It wasn’t even a question for me, despite the $7.99 price tag.  I love AV and this was a MUST READ.  Even if it costs as much as two other comics, it was twice as long and probably ten times as good.

Even though I expected quality, I was still surprised by the excellence of the content.  I really didn’t know what to expect from the stories within.  I’m sure there have been interviews out there that detailed the content of assembled stories, but I quit reading such interviews a long time ago.  So, I went into this cold and couldn’t be more pleased.

The issue features a framing sequence by Snyder and Albuquerque (the regular creators on AV), set in 1967 New Mexico featuring everyone’s favorite American vampire: Skinner Sweet.  There isn’t a ton of content here.  Just a few little pages showing Skinner getting into a messy fracas that is surely a tease for when the ongoing series returns from hiatus.  I can’t wait to see more of this story.  Why did those bikers want to kill Skinner?  Skinner versus Hell’s Angels?  That sounds nifty.  I’ll read that.  Please hurry up and create those comics for me, sirs.  It also raised an interesting thought in my mind: Skinner sure hasn’t gone very far from home.  Except for his World War II excursion, he has never left the American Southwest and southern California.  I’m not really sure if that means anything except that Skinner was probably a lot like other Americans of that era: He mostly stayed around his home area except for war.  I mean, we haven’t seen Skinner in New York or South Beach.  Kinda interesting…

CBLDF Liberty Annual 2010 – Review

By: Various including Darick Robertson, Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba, Garth Ennis, Paul Pope, Evan Dorkin, Rob Liefeld, Gail Simone, Scott Morse, Geoff Johns, Scott Kolins, Brian Azzarello, Frank Miller, Terry Moore, Jeff Smith, Skottie Young, Jimmy Palmiotti, Amanda Conner, Ben McCool, Billy Tucci, Larry Marder and more

The Story: Comic creators collaborate on an anthology comic to raise money to protect free speech!

What’s Good: You know what’s good: free speech!  Too often the term “free speech” is only thought of as it applies to journalists, but as soon as you start eroding artists abilities to portray their art in whatever why they please because some people find it distasteful, you start to threaten some of the essential liberties that are part of what it means to be human (much less American).  There are places in the world where people cannot say and print what they please and there are people in the good old USA who occasionally give a comic shop a hard time about displaying comics with – gasp – wanton violence or – double gasp – naked people or – triple gasp – naked people doing naughty things! And by “hard time” we mean “take the comic shop to court”.  The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is a non-profit that helps comic shops and creators defend themselves against such intrusions into free speech and every so often they put out an Annual to raise awareness and money.

Daytripper #10 – Review

By: Fabio Moon & Gabriel Ba (creators), Dave Stewart (colors) & Sean Konot (letters)

The Story: Daytripper comes to an end.  Is it going to tie things up with a bow or leave us with questions to ponder?

What’s Good: I thought this series wrapped up perfectly.  Some people might have wanted an explanation to the series that was along the lines of parallel universes, but this series was never about that.  It is about family and children and how habits and traditions are passed down through the generations. It is about everyday activities.   But mostly, it is just simply about life and the moments in all of our lives that write the book of “who we are”.

All of this series has been shown through the eyes of Bras and has touched on his important moments: the birth of his child, meeting his sweetheart, the publication of his book and this issue shows the end of his life and how he has become his father in some ways (the good ways) and how he treasures the relationship with his son and grandchildren.  It shows the circle of life in a way that I really appreciate as a parent.

The art is just so spot on.  It has been consistent throughout the series.  All of the bodies and faces are 100% believable.  I don’t think I saw a bad panel in the entire 10 issues.  There was never a scene where you think, “What the hell?  Is his back broken or something?”  On top of that, they have nailed the familial resemblances of the characters and the aging of those characters.  This is just a great, great issue and series.

Daytripper #9 – Review

By: Fabio Moon & Gabriel Ba (creators), Dave Stewart (colors) & Sean Konot (letters)

The Story: We finally get some answers to what is going on with Bras and why he keeps dying at the end of each issue.

What’s Good: For a change, Bras doesn’t die at the end of this issue.  I had kinda assumed that Ba & Moon wouldn’t make the entire series about scenes from the guy’s life and then have him die at the end.  Even though all of those issues ranged from good to spectacular, I was wondering what the bigger point was, but then each successive issue would come out without any hint that it would be tied together.  I was frankly getting a little worried (which is silly given how incredible the first 8 issues of this limited series have been).

I won’t say that this issue makes it “clear” because it is very metaphysicial and if you wanted this series tied up with a neat bow on the top, I think you’ll be disappointed after issue #10 next month.  But, we do start to get some clarity on what this series is about.

Not surprisingly, it is about life and the human condition.  In life, Bras works as an obituary writer who tries to do a good job.  He isn’t happy just writing up a date of birth and summary of family members and jobs held, he really tries to capture the essence of what made that person special and who they were.  I think what we are getting here at the end of Daytripper is that Bras is dead and has been dead for the entire series and before his spirit can move on, he has the opportunity to re-experience the poignant moments from his life and that is what we have seen in issue #1-8.  He dies at the end of each issue because he is, in fact, dead and nothing can change that.  In a way, he is kind of writing his own obituary or the book of his own life.  Imagine if after you died, your whole life was basically laid out before you and you were asked to edit it down into a 300-page book to tell the story of your life.  It’s kinda like that.

Daytripper #8 – Review

By: Gabriel Ba & Fabio Moon (creators), oddly this issue has no credits or indicia

The Story: What if a family member leaves on a routine trip and you never see them again?

What’s Good: The Brazilian brothers found a way to mix this issue up without really straying from the same basic story that we’ve had since the first issue.  Throughout the series, our main character, Bras, has died at the end of every issue after we see a story from a day or so in his life.  Part of the reason this issue is so powerful is because Bras doesn’t make a single appearance in the entire issue; we see the story completely through the eyes of his wife and young child who are going about their days while Daddy is traveling on business.

What the creators do so well is capture the exact emotions of what being a parent and having a traveling spouse is like.  “We” all like to talk about how comics have much more mature themes than they used to have because they’re more violent or have more sexual situations, but this issue of Daytripper is the real deal.  I just cannot imagine this comic having the same impact on someone who is 22, unmarried and without kids as it does on a parent with a spouse who travels sometimes.  They nail all the emotions: missing your spouse, the disruption in your daily routine by having to do your spouse’s daily tasks, the pleasure of having a child all to yourself, the voice mails and texts going back and forth, the minor irritation that the spouse isn’t there to “help” and (at the end) that little fear in the back of your mind: What if they don’t come home?

Even though this issue is yet another gut punch, I really appreciate a work that can make me feel much of anything on an emotional level without having to resort to shock and gore.  Try getting this level of emotional reaction from an Avengers comic!

Casanova #1 – Review

By Matt Fraction (writer), Gabriel Ba & Fabio Moon (artists), Cris Peter (colorist)

Like most Good Things in comics, I would argue that we can blame this one on Warren Ellis.

See, back in 2005, Ellis created a comic with Image called Fell, an atmospheric detective story told in an experimental format that packed more content onto fewer pages for a lower cost. A completely satisfying reading experience for Value Menu prices–a worthy experiment to pursue, right? Fraction certainly thought so, and a year later he supported Ellis’ Slimline format with the release of Casanova, a psychedelic, genre-busting tale of espionage, music, and the multiverse. Under the Image banner, Casanova enjoyed fourteen glorious issues before going on hiatus while Fraction, Ba, and Moon went on to achieve super-stardom through other projects. But the times are, as Dylan keenly observed, always a-changin’, and after two agonizing years, Casanova has been brought under Marvel’s Icon banner where it’s good and ready to remind the world why it is one of the greatest American comics we’ve got going right now. No joke.

At its heart, Casanova is the tale of Casanova Quinn, a master thief and unscrupulous rogue whose very existence is an insult to his father, the head of a superspy organization called E.M.P.I.R.E. (nope, they still haven’t explained what the hell it stands for, but does it matter?). After Casanova’s sister, the apple of her father’s eye and an operative in his organization, is killed in the line of duty, Casanova is abruptly kidnapped from his dimension by Newman Xeno, the bandaged kingpin of a criminal organization called W.A.S.T.E. (nope, don’t know what that one means either, but whatever) and dropped into a parallel universe where he is dead and his sister is an evil bitch working for Xeno, who now wants our Casanova to work for him as a double agent in his parallel-father’s organization.

Got all that? Yeah, me neither. But that’s okay because Casanova is back to blow our freaking minds, and we need that kind of Weirdness in our comics.

This comic is about so many things: fathers and sons, love and hate, redemption, greed, egos and faith and the perils of screwing with time and space. And it’s a comic influenced by so many things: rock music, beatnik poetry, James Bond, science, religion, books, comics, the aesthetics of Genres and the ambiguity of Love. And it does it all with such brazen, assured coolness and ruthless swagger that you hardly realize it’s a story that’s trying to tell you meaningful things. It’s also a record of Fraction’s life, of the things that were on his mind and the ideas and music and comics he was feeling passionate about at the time he was writing each script. There’s a kind of honesty to the way he’s let us into his world that I really identified with when this comic first came out, and I’m really grateful to see that vibe continues here in the back matter of this issue.

Daytripper #7 – Review

By: Fabio Moon & Gabriel Ba (writing/art), Dave Stewart (colors), Sean Konot (letters)

The Story: Will Bras be able to find his missing friend Jorge and what will happen when they get back together?

What’s Good: I still don’t really know where this storyline is going.  Wait, why am I listing that as a “good thing?”  Well, I’ll tell you: I spend more time trying to figure Daytripper out than any other comic I read.

I read about 60 new comics every month, so that doesn’t leave me tons of time to ponder the intricacies of someone’s obtuse plot.  Usually when I read a book that is just a little too “meta” (e.g. Batman #700 this week), I just grunt and pick up the next book on the stack because I’m annoyed that the writer is making it so darn hard (or perhaps trying to be a little more clever than the writing/art skills of the book will allow).  However, with Daytripper, I have really spent a lot of time trying to figure out what Ba and Moon are up to with this story.  I have NO answer yet, but I am fairly sure that it isn’t a knock off of “you killed Kenny!” from South Park.  This will make a great collected edition!

This issue was very interesting because for one of the few times in this series, events in this issue directly reference back to the prior issue.  The only time we’ve seen that before was with some of Bras’ girlfriends/wives, but even those stories did not feel as tightly tied as issues 6 and 7.

In the last issue, we saw Bras worrying that his good friend Jorge had been killed in a plane crash.  At the end of the issue, we learned that Jorge was alive, but had become disturbed/depressed and decided to “check out” of life and go on walkabout.  That issue ended with Bras dying in a logging truck accident while trying to go find his friend.  This issue again shows Bras looking for Jorge, but it is years later.  The search and reunion are touching and the end was pretty shocking/brutal (especially how it ties into a postcard that Jorge had sent to Bras).  Part of this series’ shtick is killing Bras at the end of each issue, so it does remind me very much of watching early episodes of South Park to see what interesting way Kenny would die.  This death for Bras really caught me off guard and that’s saying something because you read the entire issue with an eye towards the death at the end.

Daytripper #6 – Review

By: Fabio Moon & Gabriel Ba (creators), Dave Stewart (colors) & Sean Konot (letters)

The Story: Has Bras lost his best friend in a plane crash?  Will Bras die again?

What’s Good: The marriage of story and art continues to be just exemplary in Daytripper.  Ba and Moon are really doing a great job of finding real events that we can all associate with: birth of a child, death of a family member, finding new romance, or…in this case, the fear that a good friend has been lost.

The basic premise for this issue is that there has been a plane crash.  Bras, who is a lowly obituary writer at the newspaper, is asked to write obituaries for the victims.  Bras really throws himself into the work, but is very concerned about his good friend who was supposed to be on the flight.  We repeatedly see Bras try to call his buddy on his cell (which is what we’d all do), and be disappointed when it just rolls to voice mail.  Haven’t we all been in that situation:  Calling a friend who you’re worried about, having their phone roll to voice mail and thinking in the back of your mind….”That’s exactly what the phone would do if ______________ happened.”  It is just amazing how well Ba and Moon are able to find these little parts of life and then use them to build drama and a story.  They are also masters of facial expression and body language.  Daytripper could almost be a silent comic in places and you would still know what is going on.

Daytripper #5 – Review

By: Fabio Moon & Gabriel Ba (writers/artists), Dave Stewart (colors) & Sean Konot (letters)

The Story: An 11-year old boy enjoys an idyllic time of innocence on his family’s farm.

What’s Good: You could almost do a copy/paste for what is good about this title month after month.  Both the story and the art effortlessly capture memorable moments from a person’s life.  In this case, we are focusing on our main character (Bras) as an 11-year-old boy who gets to spend the weekends on his family’s farm.  Part of the reason a story like this is so touching is that it reminds you of being eleven.  The joy of flying a kite.  The mayhem of large family gatherings.  Getting a first kiss from a girl.  Just being a kid without a care in the world.   As an aside, I wonder if this comic connects with women as well as it seems to connect with most men?

I’m really impressed at how well Moon and Ba have come up with a list of these types of events in a person’s life.  But, more impressive is how well they meld the language of the story with the art.  Especially considering they aren’t native English speakers.  They have really mastered the facial expressions and body posture of the characters so you know exactly what their mood is, what they are thinking and how they feel.  Bravo!

This issue also really yanks at your heart and makes you dread the ending.  If you’ve followed Daytripper, you know how they all end and when you open this comic and see that it is about an eleven-year-old boy, the dread creeps over you.  Very effective storytelling, even if it isn’t particularly pleasant.

I also want to give a quick kudos to Dave Stewart.  The coloring in this issue is really nice and I don’t think colorists get enough credit.

Sugarshock (One-Shot) – Review

By Joss Whedon (writer), Fabio Moon (art)

The Story: Straight from the web comic and onto the pages, the amazing rock band, Sugarshock debuts. They participate in the Intergalactic Battle of the Bands (which may not actually involve “bands”, but definitely involves “battle”), take advantage of groupies, get into a car accident, play The Saddest Song in the World, and generally hate on Vikings.  Not in that order, of course!

What’s Good: “Dude, Gwar fell on your car.”  “It’s a common condition, actually. Called MADNESS!”  “Squirrels have NO SOULS!” These are a few samples of the hilarious dialogue that Joss Whedon dishes out here, and if they sound at all funny to you, imagine how much you’ll laugh when you actually read them in context!  I’ll admit, Whedon’s knack for dialogue doesn’t always work when it comes to comics (such as his Buffy Season 8 series), but it really sings in Sugarshock.  You truly get a sense of the characters whenever they speak; that is, if you can stop laughing for a second.

Fabio Moon has earned a new fan.  His artwork is just as much fun to look at as Whedon’s script is to read, and he really is the perfect artist for this story.  He has a great kinetic, youthful style that manages to be cartoony but never goes over the line into being too cutesy.  There’s a nice look at Moon’s sketches and designs in the back, and they’re a treat to look at.  I’ve never seen his work before, but you can be sure I’ll be seeking out for more of it soon.

Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this book has the best sound effects this side of Incredible Hercules. Genius!

What’s Not So Good: It’s really difficult to find fault with something this much fun.  If I wanted to nitpick, I would complain that the chapter breaks (This story was originally presented as three separate episodes on MySpace’s Dark Horse Presents web comic, where it won an Eisner award) are a bit awkward when read all at once. This is especially noticeable when the text pokes fun at the readers for having to wait for the next installment, but then you turn the page and, well, there it is.

Conclusion: This book is $3.50.  25 pages of story and 14 pages of extra art. And it’s a blast! Anyone unhappy with the current state of $3.99 for a 22-page comic should really give this a try. Whedon & Moon have created a great roller-coaster ride here, which is equal parts random and whimsical. Fans of Scott Pilgrim who need something to tide them over until next year should definitely pick this up, as well.

Grade: B+

-Joe Lopez