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

Johan & Peewit: The Black Arrow: This oversized 1995 release of the ill-fated Fantasy Flight Publishing bears the interesting distinction of being, as of now, the only non-Smurfs comic by Pierre “Peyo” Culliford ever translated to English. But even then, he couldn’t totally evade that delightful blue horde – Johan et Pirlouit was the originating series of the Smurfs characters, although this particular album, La Flèche noire, dates from 1957, the year before their debut.

I don’t know if this volume is representative of the whole series, but on its own it’s just the kind of slapsticky period adventure stuff even totally unacclimated readers might instantly associate with mid-century Franco-Belgian kids’ comics. The absence of Smurfs co-writer Yvan Delporte is palpable; the jokes are funny and cleverly extended through the story — I particularly enjoyed a recurring cannibalism gag, keystone of all successful children’s entertainment — but never build into the nearly dangerous chaos of the Peyo/Delporte albums, a real decorum-shaking knockabout fun that would underscore the satiric nature of the better Smurfs plots. Here it’s just bland, boyish hero knight Johan and pint-sized comedy sidekick Peewit navigating uncomplicated palace intrigue and ‘wacky’ action scenes of the type Peyo’s occasionally stiff art can’t always get to sing.

Granted, maybe 10% of the guy’s body of work has been available in all the history of English language comics publishing, so broad criticisms will always be a little suspect.

Sadly, the good people at Fantasy Flight Publishing were already marked for ruin; ’95 also saw the release of Spirou & Fantasio: Z Is for Zorglub, an honest to goodness English translation (by Kim Thompson!) of vintage (1961) work by influential master cartoonist André Franquin, working with background artist Jean “Jidéhem” de Mesmaeker and co-writer Michel “Greg” Regnier. As we all know, U.S. publication of this material is prohibited in Leviticus; God’s vengeance was swift, so that a prepared second album was never released (note however that UK publisher Cinebook released some post-Franquin material a few months back).

Indeed, all FFP ever published after that appears to be Percevan: The Three Stars of Ingaar, a 1982 fantasy album from artist Philippe Luguy and writer Jean Léturgie (later joined by Xavier Fauche). The publisher later transitioned into an RPG company, Fantasy Flight Games, and either regained or somehow never lost the Percevan license; as of July, they’ll have released the entire extant series in four hardcover three-in-one volumes, just in time for the French vol. 13.

X-Men and Spider Man: Well ok, Mario Alberti:

This was a 2009 miniseries (I got the trade paperback for half off) that picked up some good word basically on the strength of Alberti’s art, although it wasn’t the first time he was published in North America; Humanoids released a single oversized album from his series Morgana (with writer Luca Enoch) in 2002, and presumably planned to localize his two-volume Redhand (scripted by Kurt Busiek) as part of its short-lived alliance with DC, although we’ve yet to see any of that in English.

Both of those series are fantasy adventures, but Alberti’s tendency to position small, stylized ‘realist’ characters attractively in tableaux while leaving action to hang in the air as curves and swirls of muted, painterly color applies well to contemporary superhero stuff, especially nostalgic stuff set in several eras – dozens of shared-universe characters can interact in the same space, each panel detailed so as to become a distinct window unto a palpable Marvel universe, big and booming to suggest the weight of history, and the all-important impact of meaningful, continuity-altering events. This is the theme of the book, analogized in Alberti’s consolidation of dozens of period-perfect costumes, clothes instead of spray-on hue, not so entirely ridiculous in such a lush place as merely owned by history. Real history. Marvel continuity.

Alberti also perhaps serves to consolidate interest in what, all metaphors aside, is inevitably a troubled effort among shared-universe superhero comics: a self-contained short-form project with no obvious connection to a line-wide crossover. Or: you can review prior impacts as much as you want, but if you’re not doing something new, now, that’ll have repercussions, impact on the new Marvel history currently being written, your utility is in question. The title seems almost mockingly unassertive ( more so in the legal indicia, which pares it down to just X-Men/Spider-Man), but writer Christos Gage — who first became visible to a good chunk of readers during a different universe’s meltdown, 2006’s abortive Wildstorm reorganization under absentee mastermind Grant Morrison — uses it as more of an extra-blunt statement of purpose. This is the X-Men and Spider-Man, and what they mean together.

It doesn’t add up to an awful lot; each of the miniseries’ four issues takes place in a different Marvel time period, following a plot line that runs through the characters’ histories together, a barely-defined cloning scheme involving villains Kraven the Hunter and Mr. Sinister. Every issue follows almost exactly the same formula: (1) era-setting exposition; (2) huge fight scene; and (3) denouement in which the threat endures. At times Gage seems to be tempering his writing style to match each setting — a chapter set in the ‘black costume’ Spider-era has characters incessantly coughing out each other’s code names and describing their powers, a la Jim Shooter’s editorial preference, which is amusing for about 1/4 of the issue, then becomes exactly as annoying as reading an authentic comic of the day — but that’s as deep as the inquiry goes. The rest is pure fanservice, a parade of remember-that-character/plot given the basic thematic organizing principle of ‘every clone (i.e. character revamp or hare-brained storyline) deserves some love for its heroic effort,’ shared-universe flattery as its most unabashed.

It’s a little like what All Star Superman could have been if it hadn’t been about anything other than older superhero comics, although I get the feeling Gage was constrained by in-continuity responsibilities; a new villain is introduced in the end, a Kraven/Sinister clone hybrid with most of the classic X-Men lineup’s powers, a la the Super-Skrull, a concept so reductive it could be Gage is deliberately begging the question of how degraded superhero concepts can get before they’re unworthy of affection.

Weirdly, by his limiting structure, an odd critique emerges: because every succeeding chapter must bear the burden of both explaining the changed circumstances of the characters as well as the continuing plot, only the initial, John Romita, Sr.-styled chapter lets the young, happy Marvel superheroes chat and dance and flirt and just be. From there it all got so damn complicated, goes this history in miniature. Gage & Alberti have a similarly-styled Spider-Man/Fantastic Four project in the making right now – I hope its engagement with superhero circumstance is as rich as its settings.

Diamond Girl Vol. 1: This is a trashy sports manga I picked up for five bucks in a cutoff box despite its having been on U.S. shelves for maybe a month, tops. It’s about a teenage girl who’s really good at pitching baseballs even though she hates the game, and when she transfers to a new high school the wacky baseball club (you can tell they’re wild ’cause some of the guys have piercings or facial hair) goes to stalker-like lengths to recruit her and disguise her as a boy so as to win the big game(s). It’s dumb as hammers and all the jokes are forced and schematic, as if the series editor emailed creator Takanori Yamazaki a style guide re: deployment of chibis and small-text asides, but it does excel in one thing: it’s the most male gazey comic I’ve read in forever.

Sure, the joke here is that she’s not gonna be a man when she’s quite clearly all woman, except – something around half of the straight-on views of the heroine are absolutely obsessive one-handed renditions delineating the curve of her skirt around her legs, butt and hips or the myriad statuses of whatever top she’s sporting. If Alberti draws clothing to accentuate place, Yamazaki gleefully halts time by forcing page detail onto luxurious bodily forms.

There’s something else, though: no nudity. No panties. Remarkably few accidental gropings. It’s not chaste, oh no, but instead of forcing the heroine into a pretty standardized manga mode of objectification it instead goes a ways toward filtering the reader’s viewpoint through the eyes of a really horny 16-year old boy. So, a more intuitive mode of objectification, but at least it’s something.

Also, I liked the action bits. Right-to-left, remember, and click to make ’em big.

I really liked that. Like how the ball’s trajectory is halted by a full page splash. As is typical for youth-targeted genre manga of this type, panel-to-panel flow is crucial to the expression of action. Time is dilated to a considerable extent, while place dissolves into temporary lines and partial white void, pliable in much the same way as the emotive character cartooning typical to Japanese comics. Of course, manga like this also benefits from a fairly secure industry allowing for long, steady serialization of self-contained stories (and proctoring the assistant-stocked studio setup often necessary for continuous production), which encourages the use of page space for stretched time; even at the height of the ‘decompression’ popular half a decade ago in Marvel comics, the effect of wide panels and bleeding pages was primarily the conveyance of enormity.

And anyway, there is sometimes interplay between heavy detail and near-abstraction in manga like Yamazaki’s, albeit so as to better modulate impact’s flow:

Please don’t expect any jokes about the artist ‘encouraging a close reading.’ It’s Mother’s Day.

Orc Stain #3: But, you know, these aren’t ironclad rules. Peyo came from the Marcinelle school of Belgian comics art, which favored expressions of animated movement compared to the ligne claire of Hergé. You can draw from whatever you want, and few draw more than James Stokoe, who’s gonna have a slow-building popular hit on his hands if he keeps these Image comic books up, mark my words.

This is the newest one, an all-action issue, 3/4s a massive chase scene, melding absurd, chaotic detail with bloody activity in a way that now recalls Geof Darrow’s lamented, incomplete 2004-07 series The Shaolin Cowboy, itself a crypto-reworking of his old Bourbon Thret stories (or at least the one I saw in 15 Years of Heavy Metal), the style of which exploded into the mad minutiae of Hard Boiled and The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot, and then with the Cowboy seemed to go back to the start and reconfigure itself as ceaseless swinging and shooting, bodily above environmental.

Stokoe keeps hopping too, though his frame of reference captures its own unique hybrids, Vaughn Bodé bumping into Hayao Miyazaki as techno-mythic-organic creature-weapons veer through the air. The artist’s orc characters are prone to transformation too: shot with a poisoned arrow, Our Hero develops clusters of bright sores, bunching and piling around the point of impact like chain mail then spreading out over his body like raised colored plates. Characters constantly talk about cutting dicks off, but only the hero seems to have the secret power to see the fault lines and pressure points in literally anything – the places where all creation can break down to its components.

It’s very unified, very strong. It’s a good comic. I don’t know where it’s going, since its more prone to focus on world building and then running around the built world than tight plotting. There’s anxieties too. At the top of this issue, as has occurred in the past, Stokoe references the futility of orc existence, where everybody is nameless and forgotten besides the towering past masters, where a blood oath, at least, “gave an orc a purpose… something to strive towards.” Then there’s a chase, traceable I guess from all the old mothers of comics international.

You may find it still new and worthwhile.

Labels: Christos Gage, James Stokoe, Mario Alberti, Peyo, Takanori Yamazaki