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Hard as it is to believe, the above image is not intended to depict my mental state in attempting to finish another post on comics I found at the recent Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival. However, there is some connection: the horror and action comic evocations visible at the show — your Closed Caption Comics #9 and The Incredible Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd — put me in mind to revisit independent one-person genre comic efforts of years ago.

Immediately, signs presented themselves. No more than one day later did I come across Chaingang #2, a Northstar-published Rex Miller adaptation pencilled by brothers Joe & Tim Vigil. Then I found out on good internet authority that the latter Vigil planned to revive his notorious signature series Faust with writer David Quinn in 2011 for a pair of last-ever issues. Yet I found my thoughts returning to Joe Vigil, who’d been active with his younger sibling since at least their early xerox efforts in 1983. I thought and thought, and then I thought of Dog.

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In the interests of maintaining some semblance of momentum for these BCGF posts, I will now present as the obligatory opening ramble to the weekly upcoming comics column a gallery of recent alternative-flavored manga art culled from the December 2010 issue of Morning 2, purchased over my NYC weekend.

Don’t let the cover art by Hiroyuki Ohashi fool you – this is a high-profile spin-off of a major anthology from a Big Three manga publisher (Kodansha), and the alternative comics ‘flavoring’ typically goes to surface visual style, with content remaining somewhat straightforward compared to what you’d find in Ax or Comic Cue. But then, seinen manga tends to be more expansive in terms of subject matter than any mainstream North American comics, so it sort of levels out.

Anyway, feel free to scroll down for this week’s blind picks. Moebius!

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Don’t worry yourself too much with the text up top – it’s just one item of many from the recent Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, albeit featuring the artist of my personal favorite comic of 2009, Viz’s English edition of GoGo Monster by the great Taiy? Matsumoto. No no, don’t worry, Matsumoto wasn’t hidden away at some obscure table on the show floor — although you could be forgiven for thinking that, given the huge crowd and the crazy amount of stuff out for perusing — I just subscribe to the longview in comics convention terms. That is: the classic rule of comics show prudence dictates that you spend most of your time with comics you won’t easily be able to find outside the show, and I tend to extend that rule to spending time with comics outside the purview of the show itself that I otherwise won’t be able to access due to the geographical limitations of living in a bed of corn husks.

So Saturday had me at the Brooklyn Con itself — and I plan to write more about that later this week — but then Sunday also had me pursuing an unexpected hook up with old Warren magazines in Manhattan, which I believe is called ‘painting the town red.’ More pertinently to the image above, I also stopped by the Bryant Park location of Kinokuniya to mess around with their new releases rack. I think in the rhetoric surrounding manga and graphic novels and the decline of print format serialization in North American comics, there’s a real tendency to forget that Japanese comics typically don’t just drop on the market as books – there’s still a relatively large system of print serialization at work, not as mighty as it was years ago, no, but I think something like the weekly Big Comic Spirits still enjoys a circulation of a couple hundred thousand, and ‘shelf copies’ of recent issues can be a really fun thing to explore, especially when they’re inviting various luminaries from publishing history to contribute self-contained 30th Anniversary stories that aren’t likely to show up in book form any time soon. Hence: Matsumoto, my purchase of the October 25 issue (#45 for 2010), and the true purpose of the text up top.

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I thought of this when I heard Irvin Kershner had died, which goes to show you the psychological damage a lifetime of comic book reading can do. Kershner, of course, inevitably prompts some funnybook consideration; as director of The Empire Strikes Back, he picks up the considerable baggage of the asserted comics influence on Star Wars, while his direction of Robocop 2 — the first R-rated movie I ever saw in R-rated form — implicates more contemporary notions of translating a cartoonist’s style (i.e. errant screenwriter Frank Miller’s) to a big-money action movie.

Then again, these days the most direct Kershner/comics connection is in fact specifically wedded to psychological damage, in that he served as director for the notorious 1955 horror comic books episode of the television program Confidential Report, currently on a dvd included with the Abrams ComicArts release of The Horror! The Horror!: Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You to Read! While mostly comprised of awkward interview footage of, say, children recounting various horror comic plots or a reformed cartoonist indicating where touch-up artists made the breasts on his romance comic heroine larger, the meat of the program is surely its energetically cut (and rather patently staged) footage of kids romping out to the woods to take in some fine graphic literature, after which they engage in the unsubtly sexualized (if okay-for-’50s-television) assault of a hapless local boy.

It’s weirdly harrowing stuff — flaunting its journalistic license to loll in content abjectly harsher than usual for its era and style — boasting a centerpiece of delirious kitsch wherein narrator/creative force Paul Coates, like a proud graphic novelist perched at the podium of his spotlight panel at a art comics convention, recites the narrative captions of a jokey, she’ll-rip-yer-heart-out horror poem one-pager with all the cold gravity of Signal 30, after which one of the featured boys rises immediately to his feet and begins driving a pocket knife over and over into a nearby tree. I read comics that make me feel like that too.

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It’s almost Thanksgiving in the U.S., which means it’s high time for a big influx of Best of 2010 lists to start rolling in, particularly from quarters interested in sparking some holiday season gift-buying. In this exciting spirit of capitalism and pilgrims and shit, I’d like to present a few images from one of the best and most under-covered of many under-covered comics of 2010: Fantagraphics’ English-language edition of Jacques Tardi’s It Was the War of the Trenches. Doesn’t it look like a mighty column of prestige?

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Here we have an image from one of the highlights of this week’s releases: Fantagraphics’ The Littlest Pirate King, an English edition of the 2009 album Roi Rose by the redoubtable David B., himself working from a Pierre Mac Orlan prose story (from 1921, I believe). It ‘s a lovely presentation, as thin (48 pages), tall (8.5 x 11.25″) and comparatively costly ($16.99) as the hardcover album format tends to demand; it’s no surprise, perhaps, that the slightly altered title and solicitation copy (“…a magical yarn that can be enjoyed by young and old alike”) motion toward the Young Adult or children’s books market, a potentially safer space for works in this or similar format(s).

Yet there’s also an appreciable difference between what we’ve seen of David B. in English and what we’re about to get. If this is the kid-friendly Beauchard joint, its calling card is the artist’s interest in depicting animated panel-to-panel ‘action,’ as seen above. There is a great interest here in impactful representation: huge sea creatures, sloshing waves, thick shadows and rich colors, dictative of mood.

The iconographic style typically deployed by the artist — at least in the body of work available to English-only readers — sinks into a manga-like diminution of detail, like how a character might become chibi for the purposes of delivering a joke, though for David B. it’s to blend individual forms into masses of activity, gradually shrinking in the bottom two tiers as each panel leaps forward in space and time. In closer views, the skeletal nature of David B.’s undead cast allows for some dramatic use of shadow (panel 1), while otherwise conveying the mass of humanity that is the undead. No anonymous zombies here, yet it is an effort (and damn effective) at fixed depiction, which rests this younger-targeted piece that much closer to the mainstream of genre comics art.

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Last night I had a dream I was back in high school and I was giving a report on an unknown work of literature; the stakes were high, as I could see my teacher (whom I did not recognize) had already locked several students in cages. My selection was an obscure serial that ran in 2000 AD in the late-’80s, the title of which I cannot remember although I surely knew it then. My thesis was that it was an attempt by Tharg and his crew to incorporate the tropes of video games into the comics form, perhaps to cope with the new medium’s threat to the magazine’s young readership; the plot concerned a team of scavengers, a boy and a girl, hunting for tiny glowing orbs in a ruined mall, in fact the very mall I used to frequent years ago, which is odd in retrospect. Gradually, it was revealed that the scavengers’ masters were the ones producing the orbs by murdering living things, in addition to collecting them. “It’s about Thatcher’s England,” I can recall saying.

I don’t know who the writer was. Me, I guess. The artist was José Ortiz, of the Spanish series Hombre (with Antonio Segura), and the British series The Thirteenth Floor (with Alan Grant & John Wagner), and many, many American issues of Creepy and Eerie and other Warren magazines of the 1970s, for which he was the most prolific artist in all of their history. Like most everything that was Warren in the ’70s, it vanished into the dealer’s tables and flea markets, but for an odd while he was mainstream comics. I should have told my teacher. Can I have an extension?

So:

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Yeah, that’s right: I flip through foreign-language magazines looking for the comics. This is from a bookmark tucked away in a recent issue of Snob, a Russian-language lifestyle glossy which I’m told is common to newsstands in the NYC area, presumably given an especially liberal construction to “area” in that I’m three and a half hours away by train. As you can see, it’s an installment of John Deering’s Strange Brew, initially reading “It really tortured my soul to create this one…” Since I cannot read Russian, I don’t know if the same joke is being communicated presently, or if some advertising or Russian lifestyle-related jest has been covertly substituted, but I think all of us can agree, nonetheless, that making fun of gallery art and artists is as potentially universal a language as has yet been conceived.

Er, let’s get right to the release list:

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A few more 9-panel grids for you, coming out of Carol Swain’s 1996 long-form debut Invasion of the Mind Sappers. Swain tends to work mainly in short stories — many of them collected into last year’s fine Dark Horse hardcover Crossing the Empty Quarter and Other Stories — which means she sort of fades in and out of view in English-language comics. Still, assembling her various works, which would also include the 2004 solo book, Foodboy, and her 2009 collaboration with Bruce Paley, Giraffes in My Hair: A Rock ‘N’ Roll Life (and not her role as colorist on the notorious 1992 Peter Milligan/Brendan McCarthy project Skin), reveals an affinity for this simple, versatile layout.

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This scene comes courtesy of WildStorm-affiliated colorist Jonny Rench, who died this past weekend at the age of 28. I recalled him easily from the work pictured above, the 2007-08 miniseries The Programme, written by Peter Milligan and drawn by C.P. Smith. I can best describe Smith’s art as ‘heavy realism’ in the shadowed, deliberately posed manner of Jae Lee, whose own work typically divines much impact from its interaction with colors by José Villarrubia or June Chung; Rench colored Smith on the first five of twelve issues. In keeping with the broadly satirical nature of Milligan’s drug-kissed scenario — seeing literal Russian superpowers rise up to gift an uncertain terrorism-era America with the certainty of national competition — Rench blasts most all displays of superhuman force with garish, fuzzy, sickly colors. Otherwise, Smith’s photo-still figures are bathed in one or more hue.

It’s one of the more peculiar-looking longform series to see release from DC/Marvel in a while, enough so to wedge the visual team’s names in my memory. And it’s unfortunate my recall should be sparked again by such sad news, but there you go.

Onto the upcoming works:

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