Reading Wrap-Up, Pt. 2

Some more stuff I've read in the past couple months..

Asthma by John Hankiewicz. Sparkplug Comicbooks. $17.00 USD. I had a vague memory of liking what I'd seen of Hankiewicz elsewhere--probably from an anthology or two--so I gave it a shot. I can't say I enjoyed it, but I didn't hate it. I could pull any of dozens of arch, bizarre lines from it and make fun of them, like "I never dreamed I'd raise my shade and by the moonlight have a landau of my own," but I did like his use of language. If you're open to it, there is some amusement here of a very dry, absurd variety, but it's a lot of work, and over perhaps too generous a selection. In other words, I had a hard time finishing it. One problem is that I think that while Hankiewicz displays a number of different art styles here, he's not great at any of them, so it's like he tries to hide that fact by the sheer variety, by exaggerating figures into grotesques or absurdities, and employing obsessive crosshatching for backgrounds without achieving beauty with them. I can't recommend this one, but as with anyone who's trying to do something different, one hopes future work will find him better synthesizing his ideas into something more coherent and compelling.

Apollo's Song by Osamu Tezuka. Vertical, Inc.. $19.95 USD. I hadn't read Tezuka for about a year, intimidated by the size of the volumes that kept coming in and being filed on the desk hutch in my office. I always forget how quickly they read. This one is over 500 pages but I blew through it in a couple nights, and the thing is--I had to read it that quickly. Astonishing story about a cynical, emotionally scarred young man cursed by a goddess for his hatred of love to experience many lives of doomed love. The idea seems to be for him to eventually love another more than he loves himself, but the ending isn't quite as pat and, I guess, Western, as one might expect. Melodramatic, profound, erotic work with startling scenarios from a Nazi falling for a concentration camp-bound Jewess to a dystopian future where a man loves the ruler of the race of clones who have subjugated their human creators. Most cartoonists, if they did a work half this good, it might be their crowning achievement, but for Tezuka it's just one of many; in fact a largely unknown work until now.

Daredevil: The Devil, Inside and Out Vols. 1 & 2 by Ed Brubaker, Michael Lark and Stephano Gaudiano. Marvel Comics. $14.99 ea USD. Much as I like Ed Brubaker's writing, I hadn't read any of his DD run until catching up a bit with these. At some point I had drifted away from Brian Michael Bendis' run, but it's not difficult to get into the new status quo here, and indeed Brubaker strikes a great balance between the tone of what has gone before and delivering new stories, based more or less equally on gritty crime dramas like Oz and Homicide as well as the more glamorous world of espionage and subterfuge found in James Bond and Bourne films. Some good twists, interesting ideas, and nice character work, though Brubaker doesn't seem to know quite what to do with Matt's wife Milla at this point. It must be a great temptation when your lead character is married to a character you didn't create, that isn't a longtime fan favorite like, say, Mary-Jane Parker in Spider-Man's books, to kill her off and start fresh, especially as the Matt Murdock character is quite used to losing lovers this way. Anyway, I'm not sure what's going on with the series currently, but these first two trades are extremely well done.

White Rapids by Pascal Blanchet. Drawn & Quarterly. $27.95 USD. This is a terrible book, probably the worst from the normally reliable D & Q. Blanchet has a love of Art Deco and Modernist design and employs it here like a kid, with the graphic novel being his personal candy store. The idea of using this attractive design to tell the history of a Quebec power plant in the '30s to its closure in 1971 is fine--there's promise in essentially setting a typically American story of progress and hope in another country. But Blanchet just can't tell a story. There are no characters here, no structure, nothing to strive for or against. He gets by for a while with the idea for the plant and the plans to build it and its surrounding village, but once that's done, he's lost. Pages are wasted on a typical family driving on the new road, singing, or the legend of some big pike that no one can catch, and then the plant shuts down and everyone has to move out. One would presume, as the biographical material says Blanchet hails from a town not too far from Rapide Blanc, that the motivation for telling this story is something of a personal one, and yet there isn't any personality here. Oddly enough, the glib, slick art is actually undermined by the use of recycled paper, which dulls the effect with its buff coloring and little brown dots of recycled material embedded in the paper. At $28 this is one of the more expensive softcover graphic novels you'll find, and it's a ripoff at half the price, an utterly empty exercise in craft. I'm old enough now where I don't necessarily think one lousy book is an indication a publisher is heading in the wrong direction--Drawn & Quarterly will survive this folly just fine, I'm sure. Let's just hope they lose Blanchet's number next time he wants to string some posters together and call it a story.

The Amazing Spider-Man: The Complete Collection DVD-Rom. By Gitcorp, $50 USD. This dvd contains every issue of ASM up to about the middle of 2006, three months into the Civil War saga. It's useful to have it all on one disc, easily accessible on pdf format. The scans are two to a page and normally appear fairly small, so you'll have to zoom in a bit to read it easily. Your feeling about the quality of the scans may have something to do with your feeling about downloading comics illegally. Perhaps not as much these days, but it was once a very simple matter to find all these issues in much clearer scans, and without a rather annoying Marvel logo superimposed over every page. These scans are from actual comics, so the '60s and '70s issues will show some yellowing at the edges but otherwise look okay. Still, none are of such great quality that anyone is going to use them for an illegal purpose, so it's pretty irritating to see them here, when you've purchased the disc. I must admit I haven't really read any of these issues in this format and am not sure I want to. Maybe I'll be bored and want to read some Romita-era stuff that hasn't appeared in a nice hardcover yet, or catch up on the JMS run, or something. It's interesting to see things I'd forgotten about, like how long Jim Mooney's and Mark Bagley's runs were, or that Erik Larsen filled in for a few issues after John Byrne's ill-fated run in 1999/2000. It's depressing to see how many mediocre artists like Keith Pollard, Tom Lyle, Raphael Kayanan and others, as well as mediocre writers like Tom De Falco and Howard Mackie, were allowed to steer one of Marvel's flagship series. It's also depressing that if you had to pick the 50 best issues of the series, almost all of them would come from the first eight or nine years of this 40+ year book. Also, the second Clone Saga (of which one can only get bits and pieces here due to ASM crossing over with several other Spidey series, miniseries and one-shots) holds up a lot better than most of the mid-to-late '70s material.