THIS WEEK IN COMICS! (8/11/10 – You guessed it: Italy.)
by Joe McCulloch
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Neil Gaiman is an axiom. Or perhaps a kind of totem. He’s certainly been a comic book character, several times, even occasionally in stories to which he had no preexisting relationship.
Witness: Donna Mia, an intended four-issue miniseries created by one Trevlin Utz and produced with colorist/sometimes-inker Eric Olive for Dark Fantasy Productions, which appears to have been active in comics publishing from 1994 to 1997. Only two issues were actually released, spun off from the publisher’s Dark Fantasies house anthology, wherein the Donna Mia character — an escaped succubus apparently fused with a medieval Italian girl — made her funnybook debut. As you might imagine, only Neil Gaiman could possibly handle such a life’s story, so there he sat in the titular miniseries, covers by Michael Wm. Kaluta, variant red foil edition available with bonus centerfold, all shades and leather jacket and iconic and astonished at the super-secret sexy origin. You might call it a ‘bad girl’ comic.
Needless to say, the best part of this best of all pages is the reflection in the glasses, no mean feat given that subsequent bits of issue #2 involve the title character stripping down to just wings and a tail in front of the gobsmacked Angela co-creator — watch out young lady, I hear his cinnamon voice carries a siren’s tinge of its own! — and then a flashback to Hell in which Our Heroine’s stiletto hooves tear open a sister succubus’ womb, from which emerges a gigantic fetus stating “fuck me,” later replaced by a Grievous Angel with a serpent for a penis and backed at all times by the Kabbalistic tree of life. The issue’s cliffhanger then implies that demons may have stolen Gaiman’s car; I can only hope the planned resolution involved Dave Sim arriving cigarette in mouth and ordinance in hand to help clean ’em up.
But what to make of Gaiman’s presence? I mean, Utz mentions “bothering” the popular writer, so it’s not like he got plopped down on the page without permission. It could be that Utz just felt Neil Gaiman’s presence in the plot would be funny and entertaining, and apropos given its mythic storytelling substance. But it’s also useful, I think, to realize that Gaiman and his still-running tenure on The Sandman had come to embody a tradition of quality for genre comics, a bulwark against the solid rushing glow of chromium and prism; in Dark Fantasy’s active years, over half the Direct Market shuttered from distribution strife and speculation woes, and lateness. Gaiman, present in friends’ books and visible in the industry, could be evoked as an ideal, a style, a gently self-deprecating force of words and thoughts, present perhaps to differentiate a thoughtfully purple succubus comic from its assumed boobs ‘n blood peers – the ‘bad girl’ books, best embodied by Brian Pulido’s Lady Death (also est. 1994), remain probably the most disreputable comics of the past quarter century.
Or, hoisting up her high-heeled hooves before the man in black, showering in leisurely splash fashion while Neil Gaiman considers Greek sculpture and other things in the parlor, maybe Donna Mia means to chafe with quality, to inject some essential bad (girl) taste into the genre lit mix. To state her case, right to the man’s face. Utz would later go solo for a few years, taking the series to the nascent Avatar Press, your home of nudie variant covers before attracting David Quinn & Tim Vigil, then Warren Ellis & Garth Ennis & Jamie Delano & Alan Moore. Not Neil Gaiman – not so far, and not in Donna Mia, which deleted his role from its Avatar reprint of the perdition flashbacks.
But cartoonists and scriptwriters are also people, dammit, and here are some of the comics they’ve made:
Dorohedoro Vol. 2: I would propose that admirers of James Stokoe’s fine Orc Stain might want to check out this ongoing series (est. 2002) by Q Hayashida, part of Viz’s SigIkki effort at releasing huge chunks of older-skewing series online and later collecting them into books. It’s a loose and bloody quest saga, concerning downtrodden folks in shitty fantasy city dealing with the effects of sorcerers conducting odd experiments. Featuring a guy with a lizard’s head and a human inside him; grimy, dirty detailed costumes and urban environs are married to almost ’80s retro character designs. Good gross fun for all, with 14 volumes now out in Japan. Over a hundred pages online here; $12.99.
Vagabond Vol. 32: Of course, there are more… composed manga available. Indeed, few can be tighter than Takehiko Inoue’s long-running, soon-ending swordsman saga, keeping pace a prudent one volume behind the Japanese releases. Note that, if you are following along in the three-in-one VizBig editions, this will eventually form the middle segment of vol. 11; $9.95.
Gente Vol. 1 (of 3): This is also a continuation, if in a new-title-new-concept spin-off manner to artist Natsume Ono’s Ristorante Paradiso (also in English from Viz). The prior book (sort of) saw a young woman searching for things in her life; this series focuses on sexy, bespectacled male waiters and their personal travails; $12.99.
?oku: The Inner Chambers Vol. 4: And for continuing drama of many men among few women, here’s the English latest from Fumi Yoshinaga’s ongoing female shogun/male harem drama, anticipating a Japanese vol. 6 by the end of this month; $12.99.
20th Century Boys Vol. 10 (of 24): Naoki Urasawa – yeah, him too! The suspense continues to mount, as it will for another 2500 odd pages, truth be told; $12.99.
Bone: Tall Tales: Jeff Smith’s signature creation has enjoyed a very successful second life in colorized form via Scholastic, so I guess it’s time the side-stories receive the same treatment. Featuring the previously b&w 1999-2000 series Stupid Stupid Rat Tails — written by Tom Sniegoski and concerning the awesomely-dubbed frontier hero Big Johnson Bone in adventure strip-styled whoppers set many years prior to the proper Bone storyline — along with some Disney Adventures stuff and a new framing sequence. Available in softcover or hardcover form; $10.99/$22.99.
Felix the Cat: The Great Comic Book Tails: Catastrophic double tales/tails pun – AVERTED. And I thought Scholastic just didn’t get the joke. Anyway, this is new from Craig Yoe’s line of reprint projects with IDW, a 224-page hardcover collection of Otto Messmer & Joe Oriolo material from assorted Dell and Harvey comics; $34.99.
Al Williamson Archives Vol. 1: A 64-page, 9″ x 12″ retroactive tribute to the late artist from Flesk Publications, reproducing sketches, production materials and personal illustrations straight from private files; $19.95.
Flash Gordon Comic Book Archives Vol. 1: In which Dark Horse extends its Golden Age of Comic Book or Horror Magazine Reprints to the Alex Raymond creation, here represented via 312 pages constituting what I believe is the complete original material from Dell’s Four Color (1947-53), plus an additional 1953 one-off. With art by a young Frank Thorne, plus Paul Norris and Jack Lehti; $49.95.
The Adventures of Superboy Vol. 1: Marvel has probably the big entry in ye olde superhero sweepstakes this week with a $34.99 Marvelman hardcover digging up nine issues’ worth of Mick Angelo material from the ’50s, but my attention is directed toward this similarly-mounted DC production putting together old-timey Smallville stories culled from More Fun Comics #101-107 and Adventure Comics #103-121, featuring Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster & divers hands; $39.99.
Big Book O’ Ditko: Your latest Pure Imagination compilation of Steve Ditko stuff, a rather unspecific 140 pages of (apparently) monster comics and miscellaneous Charlton stuff. Note that Ditko also continues to release new material via Robin Snyder – three new 32-page booklets and a collection of cover art in 2010 so far; $25.00.
Gødland: Celestial Edition Vol. 2: Some more recent reprints, $34.99.
B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth – New World #1 (of 5): New branding for a new storyline! But Hellboy kinda gazed into the otherwise detached B.P.R.D. world in the last issue of his own series, and that’s as good a demarcation of change as any longer title. Still Mike Mignola, John Arcudi & Guy Davis. Preview; $3.50.
DMZ #56: Ok, so let’s say you bought that new issue of Heavy Metal last week, and let’s say you really liked that Nathan Fox art on Fluorescent Black. Or maybe you have fine memories of Marvel’s Dark Reign: Zodiac last year, or Dark Horse’s Pigeons From Hell the year before that. As luck would have it, Fox is drawing this self-contained issue of Vertigo’s Brian Wood-created/scripted life-in-an-urban-American-war-zone series; $2.99.
Rawhide Kid: The Sensational Seven #3 (of 4): Being your Howard Chaykin comic of the week, a continuing gay cowboy adventure scripted by Ron Zimmerman. Preview; $3.99.
A Skeleton Story #1 (of 5): I confess I’ve never heard of publisher GG Studio prior to today, but it appears to be an Italian group looking to translate its publications for English comic book release. This is a 2007-09 series from animation studio Rak&Scop (Alessandro Rak & Andrea Scoppetta) (which also had or was supposed to have an animated game component), concerning a private detective in the land of the dead investigating a mysterious life. Very polished visuals, judging from the periphery materials; $2.99.
Route des Maisons Rouges #1 (of 4): From the same publisher… hey! The title’s not even in English! No fair shifting from Italian to French!! Again, a very animation-styled affair, this time from writer & GG Studio President/EiC Giuliano Monni, with artists Vincenzo Cucca & Barbara Ciardo, who’ve done some Marvel work (such as She-Hulk) as well as a 2008 comics extrapolation from Disney’s High School Musical. In contrast this is about the employees of a French brothel in a fantasy dimension struggling against rivals inside and out of the industry; $2.99.
The One #1 (of 5): ITALY IS OUT OF CONTROL, or GG Studio opted to ship all their comics at once to save some money, which I think is how it works. This looks like your straightforward continental fantasy comic, spread out wide among concept man/co-plotter(/President/EiC) Monni, writer/co-plotter Davide Rigamonte, penciller Pasquale Qualano and colorists Alessia Nocera (supervision/’atmospherics’) & Andrea Errico. Swords & shit; $2.99.
Mediterranea #1: This has to be, like, 105% of the Italian comics pages typically seen in English on average per year, right this week. From Monni (plot), Alessandro Cenni (script), Gianluca Maconi (pencils), Nocera & Ciardo (colors) and Pierluigi Abbondanza (flats). This one’s kind of like Michael Turner’s Fathom getting sucked into a whirlpool of anime, from my momentary inspection. Oh – previews for all the GG Studio comics I’ve just mentioned can be found here; $2.99.
Sky Doll: Lacrima Christi #1 (of 2): And finally, a Eurocomic from Marvel’s continuing relationship with French publisher Soleil, splitting up a 2008 anthology album related to ITALIAN ARTISTS Alessandro Barbucci’s & Barbara Canepa’s ANIMATION-SLICK spiritual media satire into a wee lil’ miniseries. Stories by the creators, plus Mikael Bourguoin and Enrique Fernández. French-language preview; $5.99.
Labels: Eric Olive, Neil Gaiman, This Week in Comics, Trevlin Utz
Was there a sub-genre of arch British comic book writers appearing as themselves in various comic books? I remember Gaiman writing himself into his and Michael Zulli’s aborted Sweeney Todd adaptation (my 15 year-old self thought the potential of this Sweeney Todd comic was simply AWESOME), Morrison of course appearing in Animal Man… Alan Moore must’ve popped up somewhere, too. Is anyone in pop culture better than the British at self-representation? Maybe not. I’d like to see more comics with odd shower scenes (love that photo ref drawing) starring comic book writers. Seems like fertile ground.
Gaiman (or some approximation thereof) was in a bunch of comics around the mid-’90s, usually in his capacity as a friend to the artist… he was in CEREBUS, RARE BIT FIENDS, I think STARCHILD… all of those books were tied to the self-publishing movement (as was TABOO), with Dave Sim at the front, and I always felt the presence of cartoonists/writers in each other’s books were tokens of support, even if meant in parody (Sim’s work) or the relation of dreams (Rick Veitch’s)… or so I understood it after the fact; at the time my exposure to self-published comics was via ads on the back cover of SHADOWHAWK.
But Gaiman had a very particular image going… he was unusually applicable to something like DONNA MIA too, where the artist was outside of that circle of activity. It’s funny to contrast something like that with Alan Moore’s involuntary cameo a few years before in BATMAN: THE CULT, where Jim Starlin & (SWAMP THING co-creator) Bernie Wrightson ‘cast’ him as the head thug for the evil religious leader. I think they might have just liked Moore’s ‘look’ – thought it fit a Batman thug. But that was 1988, the same year as THE KILLING JOKE, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable (though certainly incomplete) to process Moore as a force of destruction loose in the superhero world… have either of them ever commented on that? Nobody seems to mention that aspect of the work (likely due to it being BATMAN: THE fucking CULT), but it’s obviously supposed to be Moore as that character… his hair’s less fluffy is all…
Yay! DMZ #56. I actually bought the entire Fluorescent Black hardcover from Heavy Metal at SDCC, and it’s fantastic, particularly the intro essay from the writer about his future version of Singapore that has both dystopian and utopian elements. Anyway, Nathan Fox also did a previous issue of DMZ (#28 I believe) which is fantastic, a single issue about a DJ named DJ Random Fire.
Oh my god i just ordered Flourescent Black from Heavy Metal. I can’t wait. I think Fox stepped in for DMZ maybe #18 as well.
He did parts of #18 and 19, and all of #27 (not #28; 27 was the DJ one) – he’s also set to do the next issue (#57) as well…
“Alan Moore must’ve popped up somewhere, too.”
I’ve always imagined that he’s the black-clad scruffy guy who’s drawn in a disconcertingly detailed manner in “The Return Of Ray D.”
My favorite Moore cameo is in the Beard-Hunter issue of Grant Morrison’d Doom Patrol, #45? It’s real fast but there’s a shot of the great hall in the Bearded Gentlemen’s Club of Metropolis where you can see a big framed canvas of Moore, proudly labeled “Our Founder”.
He definitely also shows up in the background one of his own Swamp Thing issues, the one featuring all John Constantine’s English pals where that nun relives Rory Hayes’s “The Creatures in the Tunnels”. I don’t have the issue on hand, but I want to say it’s a bar scene and you can see him having a pint with Bissette and Totleben.
I remember seeing that, I think Sean Phillips drew it? I might be thinking of a different scene, because what I’m remembering was in Hellblazer.
Moore also shows up in Paul Grist’s Jack Staff books, forget the character’s name. It’s hippy-mystical in nature, as is the character.
On the crabby side of things – I’d hesitate to plug anything from Greg Theakston’s Pure Imagination’s – their output is junk, especially in this day and age of austere reprints replete with essays, background information and photos and good to amazing reproduction. For years Theakston has churned out these cheap reprints of public domain Kirby, Ditko and Toth for the jacked-up price of $25 a pop. Completists and die-hards who hand over their dough are rewarded with crappy reproduction of not-great material, along with sloppy editing and printing, not to mention indifferent, sub-par design, all in a bleak ugly, uniform format. I avoid all of Pure Imagination’s stuff, I think it’s the antithesis of what people seem to stand for on this site. They make Craig Yoe’s books-by-the-yard output appear masterful.
I hesitated too, actually; I don’t mention every Pure Imagination book that comes along, but… fundamentally, these posts reflect my interests, and not always in a plan-to-buy manner. Like, sometimes I just want to make a notation that something EXISTS, if it’s pertinent to an artist I’m really interested in, such as Ditko. Which… clearly, mentioning anything in this post is a form of advocacy, because I’m omitting (relatively) high-profile comics all the time, in that they don’t intersect at all with my interests, yet I’d feel I’d want to know if a Ditko compilation was out, if just to page through it…
I always think of the bearded fellow twirling the children in the air in the first few pages of Al Columbia’s “Pin & Francie” as Alan Moore, which then gives the book (or at least that sequence) more of a punch than it already has, considering…
Er, “Pim”
Peter Milligan makes an appearance in Shade the Changing Man #36-39, as the writer ‘Miles Laimling’.
My memory might be off, but isn’t Lord Roth Sump (of Sump Thing fame) supposed to be Moore as well?
The Moore character in Jack Staff is “Morlan The Mystic”, I believe.
Steve Gerber wrote himself into the last issue of Man-Thing, wherein he actually becomes the Man-Thing for a while. Chris Claremont later wrote himself into Man-Thing for his last issue.
Don Simpson later made fun of Gerber by writing him into Megaton man as “Paul Nabisco”, travelling with his talking goose character.
Of course, cartoonists/writers working themselves into their comics goes at least as far back as EC… MY WORLD, and I think one or two where Gaines & Feldstein could be glimpsed in the EC offices… this always strikes me as corollary to the publisher’s attempts to build fan-addicts by personalizing their crew, making them seem like people the reader ‘knows,’ if only through letting the artists sign their pages and drawing attention to individual styles (albeit in the confines of their established visual formula, page breakdows and such)… there’s a promotional aspect to that, I think specific to that moment in comics, in contrast to later cartoonists/writers putting some peer (or not) into their comic, where the presence of that peer (or not) can function as advocacy or repudiation of the aesthetic/philosophy that person represents.
(And naturally, something like Morrison putting himself in ANIMAL MAN comments on the relationship of writers to the corporate-owned comics world; certainly not a fresh literary notion on its face, but of special application to a venue where the ‘writing’ won’t stop with any particular writer… after all, John Ostrander subsequently killed Morrison off in SUICIDE SQUAD.)
Gene LaBostrie from Moore’s final issue of Swamp Thing is a stand-in for the writer, waving goodbye to the character as he ends the issue. He says: “Laissez les bontemps rouler. Please, for us, for all of us—laissez les bontemps rouler.”
I love this factoid from the DC wiki:
Gene LaBostrie possesses the strength level of a man his age, size and weight who engages in moderate regular exercise.
UPDATE: Contrary to what Marvel’s site and various online solicitations had me believe, Enrique Fernández is not in this week’s issue of SKY DOLL; that space is occupied by manhua artist Benjamin (of ORANGE and REMEMBER). Fernández’s piece will presumably appear next issue.
Simon and Kirby appeared in a Boy Commandos story back in the early 1940s. There’s a 1942 Scribbly story by Sheldon Mayer where he meets his characters. Jack Cole drew himself into a Plastic Man story, didn’t he? Or was it a thinly veiled stand-in? And Feiffer did something in a later Spirit featuring him and Eisner, I think.
Ha – Winsor McCay appears in the final strip for A PILGRIM’S PROGRESS; the poor guy doesn’t have to drag that fucking bag all around if McCay isn’t drawing him… makes for a funny comparison with AUTOMATIC KAFKA, where Joe Casey & Ashley Wood suggest that not having a comic anymore is a useful means for preserving the dignity of the characters, offering their ‘lives’ some measure of certainty…
Steve Rude and Mike Baron drew themselves on line (with Kirk, Spock, others) in an issue of Nexus.
Have Joe Matt or Harvey Pekar ever appeared in their own stories?
[…] courtesy archaeologist of the half-remembered Joe McCulloch, in his must-always-read This Week in Comics column, some amazing Italo-beats with Neil Gaiman, […]
[…] the August 9 New Yorker – is not online. I can make up for it. At Comics Comics Joe McCulloch dug up the unfinished “bad girl” miniseries Donna Mia, an entirely unremarkable fossil from […]
I read a truly entertaining comment by Dave Sim somewhere re: other artists appearing in Cerebus. I guess when he had Rick Veitch appear, he had Veitch letter all of his own dialogue, and Rick was just laughing his ass off “What am I doing THAT for?”, ” Why am I SAYING that?” and so forth. I just loved the idea that the creator of those oh-so out there dream diaries was so flummoxed/flabbergasted by his appearance in the book.
Moore also had a cameo of himself in Promethia as I recall.
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