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Art by Torajiro Kishi, from Devil #1

Isn’t it always? To your left is a panel from issue #1 of a mostly unheralded experiment in cultural interplay: Devil, a four-part, Dark Horse-published comic book miniseries created for the North American market by mangaka Torajiro Kishi and anime fandom favorite Madhouse Studios. Both entities are credited on writing and art, with Madhouse acting collectively, like in that one segment of the Batman: Gotham Knight dvd where everyone apparently had their names removed. Issue #2 is due this week, and from the looks of it I’m expecting more of the same prolix exposition and stilted dialogue — interestingly, nobody is credited with an English translation or adaptation — married to a distinctly flat visual style.

That latter aspect is what’s most interesting to me, and possibly to the creators. Kishi is best known (if at all) in North America for his full-color lesbian sex comic Maka-Maka, which picked up some good notices from Dirk Deppey (scanlated form) and Chris Mautner (2008-09 Media Blasters publication, two volumes). And while it’s tempting to observe that Kishi’s arrival on the American scene has transformed ladies kissing into smoking badasses and blazing guns and MUTANTS and VIRUSES and sperm! that makes! people! explode!, the artist himself has described the American comic book approach as “uniqueness in shadow and flattered colors,” in contrast to manga’s “detailing the lines.” Also:

I feel myself more as a creator than an artist. As a creator, I try to keep my focus on the message, and I change/adapt the style, depending the type of the story and the message… I believe that it is more important for the creator to have flexibility in his visual style in order to interpret and deliver the main theme and story of the project, rather than stick in one single style, or to try to protect some kind of ‘visual signature.’ Otherwise, I am afraid that the story itself may end up confined by my personality and patterns.

It’s worth going through the whole interview; I was especially piqued by Kishi’s decision to ensure that every issue has some conclusion to it, given that the ‘decompression’ often discussed a few years ago in collection-focused comic books seemed of a piece with action manga serialized in magazines. In necessitating rising and falling action as serving the story, in adapting his style to a ‘comic book’ approach, Kishi appears to associate broadly Western pop comics style with density, even going so far as to state that American comics are made for readers “who really want to get into the story,” which, from the tenor of the rest of his comments (and frankly the comic itself), relates visual compression with absorption – shadows and colors causing the eye to hang on the page, forcing consideration of the ‘text’ by non-writerly means.

Devil is still a pretty airy, fast-paced comic, though, and a very predictable story (so far) about a cigarette-smoking dude who doesn’t play by the rules in battling a terrible infestation turning people to monsters. As much as I appreciate Kishi’s perspective as looking in on American genre comics from probably a more visually-intensive scene overall, the experiential association I make is with the second credited author, Madhouse, which occupies a special historical place in appealing to a certain generation of anime viewers through accessible, violent works like Ninja Scroll and Wicked City, Yoshiaki Kawajiri pictures that still form the aesthetic basis for U.S.-Japan animated collaborations today — always lots of action, fantasy, even as anime in Japan becomes more and more of an ultra-specialized niche — and reflected a lot of the manga available in English translation at the time, sci-fi and shooting, often published by… Dark Horse.

In this way, the project is both up-to-the-minute and very old-fashioned, in both form and content, an every-issue-an-experience comic book comic that poses like the old anime that wagged the dog of manga. What nostalgia! What a letdown! You know who’s the target audience for this? People like me, exactly my generation of catholic nerds! I wonder if any of the Madhouse old-school are involved on that end? Like, maybe it’s Rintaro working in full script and the plot’s a huge allegory for the production of Yona Yona Penguin.

Hmm, I don’t think a lot of those last words made sense, particularly together. How about some other selections?

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Art by Sean Phillips, from Devlin Waugh: Swimming in Blood

I was rooting around the other day for back issues of Third World War, that gently diplomatic Pat Mills/Carlos Ezquerra strip from Crisis — the short-lived, politically-engaged sibling magazine to 2000 AD, initially set up so that its contents could be collected into strip-specific comic books and sold in North America — when I came across on old collected edition of the feature to the left: Devlin Waugh, which turned out the most interesting comic I picked up last week. As the caption indicates, that’s Sean Phillips providing the art; he’s known best these days for his Criminal series with Ed Brubaker, but he’s got a good deal of British work behind him, dating back to the late ’80s. I actually don’t think I’d ever seen this painted style, 1992 vintage, which he switches up with the occasional buckle of monochrome line art panels a bit more reminiscent of his current look. There’s also a smearier look for violent scenes, some photographic elements for television monitors… a pretty versatile, cocky outlay.

The writer is John Smith, among the most prominent British sci-fi comics types to have never quite registered with Vertigo or thereabouts. He’d wanted to take over Hellblazer after originating writer Jamie Delano left, but Garth Ennis was taken on instead; a single issue of Smith’s material (#51) was released, drawn by Phillips, a regular cohort, as a taste of what might have been. He then worked on a big showcase revival of Dr. Fate, which wound up knowing a troubled life as Scarab, an eight-issue 1993-94 Vertigo miniseries. That was the year after this debut Devlin Waugh strip, Swimming in Blood, which was apparently a huge success with readers of the Judge Dredd Megazine. Indeed, the character Waugh is both a denizen of Dredd’s world and cut from the same cloth as that famously droll take on costumed action hero rhythms, but instead of a dutiful authoritarian he’s a ruthless aesthete, a Vatican assassin sent to quell a vampire uprising in the undersea prison Aquatraz, only to preen and flex and admire his collection of watercolors (which he has taken along) and demand apologies from the beleaguered staff for wholly perceived slights. Only after dozens of pages does he take action, leading to his own transformation into a vampire, his blood lust calmed through sheer force of superior breeding, at which time a pointed anticlimax arrives.

It’s a curious, fascinating work, stuffed with literary nods (“Interzone Pest Control,” tee hee) and odd flourishes, like parenthetical captions supplementing narrative captions for lyrical effect, maybe the only prominent, semi-recent use of parentheses by an action comics writer outside of Brian Michael Bendis. It’s from 1992, though, and it feels like that to me – Phillips’ muscular characters bring to mind a lot of the roided-out superheroes I was reading at that time, but fucked around with from the careful tension between writing and art. His massive he-men grimace and flex like any Image revolutionary, but Smith’s story gives it specificity; of course Devlin Waugh poses and struts around, because that’s his sense of beauty. The easy spoof of muscular art is to say that it’s all posturing and no real action, but Smith makes it clear that Waugh can throw down, just as Phillips shows his drawing board versatility – the real joke is that Waugh is a creature of ultra-refined id, and prefers to just pose, because that’s his aesthetic, his veritable meta-attitude. Even as the story threatens to linger on past its welcome, much like its ‘hero,’ Smith & Phillips assure us it’s all in the best, most considered taste.

This really got me going; I haven’t even gotten into the overtly camp and homoerotic elements, which wash the whole thing over. I immediately got to looking for more, and (inevitably) discovered that the collection I’d read had been subsumed into a larger collection of Waugh strips, two softcover volumes (Devlin Waugh: Swimming in Blood & Devlin Waugh: Red Tide) released as part of the very short-lived mid-’00s DC/Rebellion publishing alliance. This led me to glance again at my Third World War issues and realize that Smith & Phillips had also worked on an early Crisis serial, The New Statesmen (the originating artist of which was Jim Baikie), which was also released in North America in both comic book and bookshelf formats in the early ’90s.

One thing just leads to another. I can’t hang on to money in comics, and I don’t even publish the fucking things. I… what? You want more, NEW options for expenditures this week? Good! GOOD.

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Art by Osamu Tezuka, from MW

Hey everyone. My name is Joe McCulloch, although you might also know me by my various internet aliases, like “Jog” or “Thierry Groensteen.” I was a contributor to two of the print issues of Comics Comics — and I currently write reviews and essays at The Savage Critics and The Comics Journal (er, soon!), while contributing to a weekly movie column with the Rev. Tucker Stone and occasionally blowing dust off my homepage — but I’m here right now to put this site into compliance with recent amendments to the Greater Internet Funnybook Discussion Act of 1933 (initially prompted by an especially potent stack of Tijuana Bibles and, likely, the repeal of Prohibition) requiring all comic book websites redesigned after December 31, 2009, to furnish a weekly post detailing all the neat-looking shit due in comic book stores that particular Wednesday, or be liable for penalties, including and limited to death.

So here’s a short rundown of comics and things due imminently (3/3/10) at Direct Market retailers serviced by Diamond Comics Distributors (and whatever else I find). Not all of this stuff is guaranteed to show up, although most of it stands at least a fighting chance.

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