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So the other day I heard that Adam McKay — Upright Citizens Brigade co-founder, former Saturday Night Live head writer and director of various Will Ferrell theatrical vehicles such as Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Step Brothers and the imminent The Other Guys — was apparently close to signing on as director for a movie version of the Garth Ennis/Darick Robertson-created superhero beatdown comic The Boys, so naturally I thought: didn’t this guy write a comic himself somewhere? Way back in the mists of time, when we all were so young and prone to arguing whether it was the 21st century yet?

Absolutely: years before McKay had directed a feature film, he and SNL/Conan O’Brien veteran & TV Funhouse creator Robert Smigel scripted X-Presidents, a 2000 Villard Books expansion on one of the old SNL cartoon shorts, where Ford, Carter, Reagan & Bush get superpowers during a celebrity golf tournament and do battle with America’s enemies, like Manuel Noriega, or Reptilio. It’s a pretty funny book, formatted like a trade paperback collection of comic book issues, and dotted with as many artists (three pencillers, an inker and his studio and a letterer/colorist working from the original animation designs) as a typical superhero run of the day. Lots of fake ads, of the vintage sort you’d see in Acme Novelty Library, but this came out before the Jimmy Corrigan collection, or Clowes’ David Boring, so it seems to have missed out on the visibility granted soon after to bookshelf-format comics.

It mostly seems to be forgotten, which is too bad; there’s some decent (if occasionally obvious ha ha old comics) laughs, sometimes approaching a Michael Kupperman-type surrealism of decontextualized shared culture. It lacks Kupperman’s elegance with the form, though – Smigel readily admits it was basically a means of realizing an X-Presidents movie script without having the money for a feature film, which kind of shows, and maybe that’s another reason why it hasn’t quite stuck in the minds of comics devotees.

But all of us will be forgotten one day, as will the following list of purchasable funnies:
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From "Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour" (vol. 6); color by Dylan McCrae

On October 4, 2008, I had the pleasure of conducting a live q&a session with Bryan Lee O’Malley as part of the programming slate for the 2008 Small Press Expo. O’Malley is the creator of the popular Scott Pilgrim series of bookshelf-format comics, soon to see its sixth and final volume released on July 20, 2010, along with a motion picture adaptation directed by Edgar Wright, set to premiere in North America on August 13, 2010.

Moreover, O’Malley is perhaps the most visible face of a young comics-making generation liable to draw considerable influence from international comics art, and pursue means of distribution outside of the classical comic book format – his background is in webcomics, and his print-format career, est. 2001, traces the meteoric growth of manga as a presence in English-language North American comics reading. Even if we set visual qualities aside, it is striking that so many of O’Malley’s cited influences are comics and animation material targeted at women and girls; just one reading generation prior, this would have been almost unthinkable, as American comics had by and large abandoned that demographic as insignificant.

Yet O’Malley also keenly distinguishes between manga traditions — boys’ comics, girls’ comics, ’70s Golden Age traits, anime-adapted tropes — and applies them to a grander, evolutionary metaphor in Scott Pilgrim, a romance comic (and so much more!) about leveling yourself up by understanding your lover’s (possibly storied) romantic history, and confronting the negative traits “evil” ex-boyfriends might represent. Gaming action hangs over everything as a looser, atmospheric metaphor for personal myth-making; video games don’t function as ‘literature,’ not like books, but they are eminently applicable in their social role-playing capacity.

What follows is a record of our live q&a, transcribed by me, and edited to remove ums and ahs and hanging sentences. Keep in mind, this was 2008, so the currently most-recent book of the series, Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe, had not yet been released. Many thanks to Chris Mautner, aka “Audience #8,” for recording the panel (his own thoughts on Scott Pilgrim are hereby commended to your attention), and Bill Kartalopoulos, for shepherding the event into reality.

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NOT EVEN A PICTURE THIS WEEK! ONLY FORTHCOMING COMICS! PLEASE CLICK FOR FORTHCOMING COMICS! SELECTIONS TO FOLLOW!

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Nothing in this comics world is more compulsively readable than random Steve Ditko comics, and here’s a recent favorite: The Big Man, from the 1986 Renegade Press release Murder #1. Simplicity in action – an anxious toymaker gets back at his nasty business partners by building a super-costume that transforms him into an enormous guy at will.  Then he crushes his enemies with enormity. “An envious mind, maybe a tiny mind with a big hate. A victimized mind seeking redress, etc. etc. etc.” muses a detective, whose function is mostly philosophical elaboration; the villain dies in a costume malfunction. So basically it’s The Incredibles, if The Incredibles was 115 minutes of Syndrome handing out critical beatings.

Murder was one of frequent Ditko cohort Robin Snyder’s anthology projects with Renegade, loosely arranged under the banner of Robin Snyder’s Revolver, as in ‘revolving’ artists and themes, although only the first six issues were numbered under the Revolver title – then came three issues of Ditko’s World: Static, an issue of Ernie Colon’s Manimal, three issues of Murder and a reprint-heavy Revolver Annual subtitled Frisky Frolics. Ditko showed up in almost every issue, as well as various artists and writers associated with the Warren magazines, which had folded a few years prior in 1983; indeed, some of the content is reprinted from Warren publications, while it’s possible the assorted Bill DuBay and Jim Stenstrum pieces (scripts?) were intended for Warren during their time with the publisher. To your left you’ll see Jim Stenstrum’s Tales of the Siberian Snowtroopers #1 (Revolver #6, reprinted in Annual #1), drawn by future Image co-founder Erik Larsen, who otherwise contributed a few illustrations to the extended Revolver project. If the story wasn’t intended for Warren, this would mark the only original, non-Warren comics work by Stenstrum, a specialist in keen violence and sarcastic heroism of the sort that would eventually spark a pre-Image comics revolution in America, the ’80s British Invasion fed by a growing 2000 AD and Warrior, as I’ve indicated in this space before. Here, it seems several time periods exist at once, although I wouldn’t call Stenstrum ‘ahead-of-his-time’ in the ’70s – internationally he was perfectly of his time, while many American genre comics hung a few steps back.

But now, onto the sequels, collections and follow-ups you dare not miss:

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Last week was a slow one for me, comics-wise. My main pleasure was this – finally tracking down a copy of issue #7 of Viz’s old release of Cobra, a Buichi Terasawa manga from the late ’70s/early ’80s about a secret agent-type space hero with a cannon for an arm. This was during Viz’s period of releasing portions of manga series as perfect bound miniseries (at higher prices – Cobra ran $3.25 per issue) which would then sometimes get collected as softcover books, though not in this case. This was also a time of fairly aggressive framing of ‘manga’ as akin to Western comics, so a lot of chest-beating action stuff or fantasy work got translated, all the better if it had some awareness in anime fandom, which Cobra did among miscellaneous sci-fi fans (already aging a bit) who maybe traded tapes of the 1982-83 television anime.

Of course, Cobra ran for 18 volumes in Japan, so Viz’s 12 comic books didn’t get very far into the story. Terasawa would eventually develop into an illustration-oriented, rather cheesecake-y comics artist, but this ’70s stuff bears a lot of Osamu Tezuka’s stamp, in that he started out apprenticing in Tezuka’s studio. This was all part of a plan to somehow become a film director — he did eventually direct some of the anime based on his own comics — which contrasts a bit in approach with the movie pitch comics of today. This is an older kind of comic, even in terms of English adaptation – Marv Wolfman is credited with such, as another means of familiarizing North American audiences with Japanese comics. He has a small essay in issue #7 about discovering the old Cobra tapes while watching anime with Chris Claremont and James D. Hudnall, the latter a prominent figure in manga-in-English, having been (among other designations) one of the souls present for Naoki Urasawa’s first appearance in English in the form of the urban military action series Pineapple Army, though Urasawa (still years off from Monster) was best known as a popular sports mangaka, and anyway was working from scripts by Kazuya Kud? of Mai the Psychic Girl, whose presence I imagine was the real draw (if indeed there was any; the series didn’t run for too long).

And yes, I know I can just buy all these old comics off the internet — issues of Cobra aren’t particularly rare —  but hunting around for missing pieces is part of the fun for me. Many of the following selections are, however, very self-contained or now easier and more collected than ever:

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Monday was Memorial Day here in the U.S., which means UPS had the day off, which means comics (including new Shaky Kane) don’t arrive until Thursday, which means Diamond didn’t release their finalized new comics list until this afternoon, which means I’m here 24 hours later than expected. Given the benefit of an added day of contemplation, I realized that this would be the first New Comics Day since the middle of May to feature no Joe Kubert comics — no gigantic Sgt. Rock in Wednesday Comics, no inks over son Andy’s pencils in DC Universe Legacies #1 — so I took it upon myself to post the above image, a pencils & paint depiction of combat from the artist’s Dong Xoai, Vietnam 1965, a drastic severing of sides of the brain in the body comics.

I haven’t heard a lot about the book online – I imagine it looks and quacks like some of Will Eisner’s later work, if you manage to claw under the shrink wrap, but it’s really a far odder, conflicted work, paring Kubert’s drawing down to its barest and most nakedly expressive, even more so than his 2003 Yossel: April 19, 1943, a fictional sketchbook autobiography from an alternate life. There he marked out places and faces and scenes; here he depicts action for just under half of the book, but without the panel borders that might impose a tighter notion of pacing, or restrain his slashing lines from almost reaching into adjoining scenes. The given sensation is less depiction than recollection, scenes still woozy behind the eyelids of someone who knows how to draw these things so damn well he can work as if by prolonged fit of instinct. It’s not ‘finished’-looking art, no. Sometimes it doesn’t even behave as if finished – I had trouble just telling characters apart at times.

But, I never didn’t know how they felt. Look at those faces. Bodies. In loosening his war comic style, Kubert’s excitement segues into terror, and froths with agony.

Also, look at those captions: white and digital in keeping with DC’s house style, and, in several instances depicted here, defiantly failing to match Kubert’s penciled guidelines, which somewhat unnervingly remain on the page. And the lettering/production is in fact the work of another person — Kubert cohort Pete Carlsson — although it’s Joe writing the transcript-style dialogue, and the ultra-dry, stolid narration, not that either mode sounds particularly different. To say the words and pictures in this book jar isn’t halfway enough – they don’t even seem to occupy the same space. It’s like the drawings were a comic somebody found, and then a narration was constructed around it, as if to make sense of it.

It’s a fictional story, albeit hewing very closely to the activities of the eventually-designated Detachment A-342, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) in Vietnam in 1965, leading up to the actual Battle of Dong Xoai in June. Fascinatingly, an included 40+ pages of text-based supplements are apparently not supplemental at all – they’re Kubert’s source material, a newsletter put together by surviving members of Detachment A-342, through which you can observe how events have been compressed or combined in the story proper. And, just as the newsletter is largely unconcerned with conveying the personalities of the men involved in favor of hard procedure and incident, Kubert’s invented dialogues serve as almost purely transitional between alternately choked and purplish spreads of info-rich narration. And, of course, those leaping drawings.

I realize my interest in this book is a little esoteric; I couldn’t flatly recommend it without some major caveats pertaining to its clash between text and drawing, the latter more overpowering than ever. Yet – that’s the beauty. This is a heavily fact-based work of fiction, broken down and adapted and put on the page, as logic would dictate, but the art nonetheless feels like it existed first, because it is expressive and personal, and primal to battle, and it called for facts and text to tease it into a slightly heavier place of recognition so we can know which uniforms are worn and how the scenes should doodle in. Push it back, loosen it up a little more, in the second half of the book where the shooting starts, and suddenly it’s soldiers everywhere.

Anyway, as for my fellow latecomers:

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That’s right, what can we do for you? So many wonders are available right now for just a few thin dollars, although I am legally obligated to mention that they do not involve a worm coat, unless Johnny Ryan elects to involve one in your personalized erotic violation; $100.

Speaking of which, the above image hails from issue #10 (Dec. 1979) of Warren Publishing’s notorious 1984 (later 1994), an “illustrated adult fantasy” magazine released in the wake of Heavy Metal and succinctly characterized by contributing writer/occasional artist/eventual momentary editor Jim Stenstrum as “a beaver-fest” in TwoMorrows Publishing’s The Warren Companion. Stenstrum wrote this piece, The Whatever Shop!, a sarcastically patriotic American-consumer-vs.-dangerous-foreigners 12-pager that also pokes some fun at unattainable beauty standards as promoted by society at large (and, as it goes, the rest of the magazine). Hammered critique was typical of his work, best remembered in harsher form via the Neal Adams collaboration Thrillkill (from Creepy #75, Nov. 1975), but exemplified in 1984 by Rex Havoc and the Asskickers of the Fantastic, a short-lived Abel Laxamana-illustrated recurring feature in which a crew of consummate action professionals confront strange, typically parodic beings and kill them. In these segments, the magazine becomes less the Swank of late ’70s newsstand comics than a Mad-informed American cousin of 2000 AD. But future developments were not forthcoming – when Stenstrum left Warren in 1981, he left comics entirely.

The art seen above, of course, represents another stream: it’s the great Alex Niño, who eventually became the standout regular of 1984, crafting increasingly elaborate spreads as swirling cartoon puzzles, stretching outward toward Warren’s bankruptcy in 1983. Such visual expansion is also a pertinent theme for this week’s highest-profile deluxe item:

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Here we have Leatherface as depicted in Tsutomu Nihei’s Biomega (vol. 2, the color bits in the beginning), surrounded by a Jason X corps of armed enforcers. I’d always thought the villains in Biomega had a Clive Barker feel, but I hadn’t realized until this episode that they were possibly referencing specific characters—or just plugging characters in, as it seems here. This isn’t at all ill-fitting in Nihei’s world, already visually indebted to illustrators like Zdzislaw Beksinski, or the Biomega iteration of such in particular, much more of a seat-of-the-pants action spectacle than Nihei’s longer, earlier, weirder, transhumanism-scented action series Blame!—it’s pretty much Kamen Rider plopped down into a zombie movie to start off with, and there’s something fitting about distinguishing the evolution-minded villains from the rabble by dressing them like hard-to-kill horror movie icons, easily villainous superhuman ‘types’ fit for looping in. Long live the new flesh?

Other icons set to mix ‘n match:

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Always a favorite, due to the hand:

From Baby, you’re really something!, a 1990 Fantagraphics-published collection of adult paperback illustrations by Frank Frazetta (1928-2010).

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Recently I presented my dear mother with gifts and purchased some comics from many nations: Belgium, Japan, Wolverine. Let me share them with you.

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