Quick Rating: Delightful
Title: Rebound

Doing the things that plastic can What’s he like? It’s not important

Writer/Artist: Kyle Baker
Editor: Joey Cavalieri

Do you remember the funny pages? That was what your dad offered to read to you on Sunday morning when your mom was trying to get a little extra sleep. Before there were comic books, there were comic strips. More than likely, you were exposed to Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes or Bloom County or Nancy or Beetle Bailey or…. You may not have been very discriminating. Who is reading the funnies? How can you read just one? Have you ever noticed that mice don’t have shoulders?

I don’t know why Superman and Batman and all the rest survive as American pop culture icons and Plastic Man is condemned to the ignominy of blank stares. There is a statue of Superman in downtown Cleveland. There should be a statue of Plastic Man outside a Play-Doh factory somewhere. How many children fight over Plastic Man action figures? Aren’t they always the ones still hanging in the discount aisle (next to Lethargic Lad and the Tick)? Why not a movie? Of course, it would star Jim Carrey.

Kyle Baker appears to be the lovechild of Jack Cole and Salvador Dali, having served an apprenticeship under Tex Avery. Comics, like most pop culture, get by on intelligence and/or liveliness. Every panel in Plastic Man #1 shines with joie de vivre. It is fun to read this comic book. Sure, the jokes are old, but humor is in, well, timing, and, you know, presentation. Baker can draw a good joke.

In this issue, we get to know Plastic Man at work and at play. We revisit his origin. He’s a pliable superhero with a bucket of creativity. The public idolizes him for his audacious escapades. We also meet his sidekick, the much-maligned Woozy Winks. Despite the hero worship, Plastic Man is troubled by meaninglessness in his life. And we conclude on a highly mysterious note. The panels are big and there are a lot of primary colors.

I really enjoyed Plastic Man. It accomplishes a near miracle in updating a character without doing its history a disservice. While not probing the most troubling questions of our day, it does not insult your intelligence. Kyle Baker makes the pages dance as if Mikhail Baryshnikov had strapped pencils to his feet.

December, 2003

Quick Rating: Yeeesh
Title: Arturo

Writer: John Rozum
Artist: Paul Lee
Color: Sherri Van Valkenburgh
Letters: Janice Chiang
Cover: Tomer Hanuka
Editor: Zachary Rau

Popular art forms are always chasing the next big thing. Comic books are nothing if not a popular art form. Usually, they’re a bit behind the times however. Perhaps that’s because the more mass the media, the longer it must wait for enough of the masses to assimilate something. Moreover, comics must deal with the detritus of being pegged as a children’s medium. This guarantees a look-and-wait attitude on the part of publishers until enough dubious parental decisions pile up to allow for generalized acceptance.

Thus, we had the mostly-naked women phase in the mid- to late-nineties, preceded by the soap opera as storytelling phase. All of this has been overlapped by an extended drugs-and-blood-and-flesh-make-for-gritty-realism phase. Nowadays, horror has begun to raise its grotesque little head. It has gotten so you can’t swing a dead writer at a comic book convention without hitting a publisher with at least one horror comic in his stable.

Midnight Mass debuted in an earlier miniseries, which I have not read. According to John Rozum, this miniseries will give him the chance to focus on the monsters and some of what makes them tick. Apparently what makes them tick is moving into a house, slaughtering the residents, and watching cable. Our protagonists, the Kadmons, are a married couple. They fight monsters. They appear to be quite busy in their chosen profession, but then they do live in a world knowingly populated by monsters and, yet, they seem to be the only people fighting the monsters.

The art is grim, light on the light and heavy on the gray. In some respects, it has a rubber-stamp feel- I mean it looks inked into static ness. The creature designs are interesting, but I kept seeing them as Muppets. That’s for me to deal with. You will hopefully have a different reaction. Otherwise you will never watch Sesame Street again.

I don’t know why people read horror. I’m not even sure why I do. It used to be that a comic book horror story was brief with a twist ending. The art did all it could to ensure the observer had chills. Modern horror comics tell extended stories about monsters desperate for us to get to know them. The cathartic effects are limiting, at best, particularly the more graphic the horror portrayed. The horrors of King Lear’s losses by the end of Will’s play are far more cathartic than watching his friend blinded onstage much earlier. The story, so far, in Midnight Mass is repulsive. It’s neither bad nor good, which is an entirely different matter. I don’t know what that means for buying the next issue.

Waldorf’s got my leg!!!

January, 2004

Quick Rating: I Remember It Well
Title: various

And where is Luna Moth?

Writer: Michael Chabon, Jim Starlin, Kevin McCarthy, Howard Chaykin
Artist: Eric Wight, Jim Starlin, Kyle Baker, Howard Chaykin, Kevin McCarthy, Steve Lieber
Colors: Michelle Madsen, Christie Scheele, Dan Jackson, Jeff Parker, Dave Stewart
Letters: Virtual Calligraphy, Jim Starlin, Dan Jackson, Steve Lieber
Editor: Dave Land, Diana Schutz

Michael Chabon has been cropping up all over the place these days: comic books, popular movies, New York Review of Books, McSweeney’s, etc. If you’re unfamiliar with his name, then you need to glance around at popular culture a little more widely than American Idol and People Magazine. He wrote a book a couple years ago called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It describes the adventures of two golden age comic book creators. Among their creations was the Escapist. Now, he leaps from the realm of fiction to the… realm of… graphic fiction. This comic contains 80 pages selected from the Escapist archives, presented as a loving retrospective on the character.

Pseudo-nostalgia (the longing for a past which you did not experience) is apparently an already established concept. This should not surprise anyone who has been influenced by their parents’ taste in music or has shopped at any clothing chain store. Yet, it is always an odd experience seeing someone in bellbottoms flashing a peace sign or a leather jacket and green hair. Do those people truly long for a lost life? Do they just want to live in a world apart? Do they honestly think they look good when so many others did not?

Pseudo-nostalgia is a weird and treacherous thing. Where one person sees harmless fun, another is insulted. Is it artistic creativity or game play? If you’re unaware that the entire thing is false, then can you still enjoy the experience? If the creation has no basis in reality, what exactly is the point? The point is that pseudo-nostalgia is safe. And I think that is what pseudo-nostalgia is truly about. It turns on the pleasures of lost youth. It provides all the comfort of real nostalgia without the nasty aftertaste and bloated sensation that accompanies the discovery that you’re nostalgic for something that was horrible in reality.

Much of Alan Moore’s current output turns on pseudo-nostalgia. The same could be said of the Ultimate line put out by Marvel. Superman is practically the embodiment of the concept. In some sense, the entire comics industry turns on actual nostalgia as it relies on adults to buy comics written for adolescents.

He is a comic book dilettante which is not a problem. Any adult who still reads comic books probably has a few other fish to fry. Hopefully they’re shuffling in a newspaper or a non-comic-book-based movie every now and then. Only pre-adolescence provided anyone the blinders necessary to be a comic book obsessive.

And yet I really liked this comic book. The stories were entertaining. The hero felt different enough that I remained interested. I worried at the right times. And I enjoyed the prose sections which elaborated the history of the character. And I hope it’s okay. I did not come out of it with that gnawing sense that Chabon is hiding the ball and going to turn on me as a reader. I did not feel insulted for being entertained. I liked the art a great deal- consistently enough that I don’t feel any need to single out a particular artist for kudos. My only hope is that Chabon’s quarterly concern does not devolve into a series of in-jokes and poor pacing. But that’s for another review on another day.

It’s worth noting that the price on this book is steep, but it works out to the same per page price as every other pamphlet sold in this expensive hobby.

March, 2004