Great Anthologies Create Not So Strange Bedfellows

I love anthologies. If you look over at the piece I did on the Forbidden Planet UK blog on Danny Hellman's Typhon, you'll discover why I love them - in a nutshell, it's the variety I suppose. But I also love new-takes on existing characters, as evidenced here on an earlier Batman post, and Marvel's Strange Tales has both these things going for it, Strange Tales is an anthology-comic, and it has a variety of new-takes on existing Marvel characters; by Peter Bagge (Neat Stuff and Hate) Nick Bertozzi (Houdini: The Handcuff King), Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt (co-founders of the hugely succesful Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School ), Nicholas Gurewich (The Perry Bible Fellowship), Norwegian cartoonist Jason (Low Moon, profiled here), James Kochalka (Monkey versus Robot), Michael Kupperman (Tales Designed to Thrizzle), Junko Mizuno, (Pure Trance). Paul Pope (Batman year 100), Johnny Ryan (Angry Youth Comix), and Dash Shaw (Bottomless Bellybutton).

It's a stellar line-up, complete with cartoonists who have heightened the profile of the artform beyond the pages of publications and the interweb. Japanese artist Mizuno's Gothic-Kawaii drawing style, a mixture of super-cuteness, and blood and syringes, appears on clothes and in gallery shows, and Paul Pope has designed a Pulphope line of clothes for DKNY and Diesel.

As with any publication of this sort, I have my favourites; Paul Pope and Jose Villarrubia's cover is excellent because it takes itself seriously, alerting the reader that although the Marvel Universe will be treated slightly flippantly, it won't be disrespected. This is a very clever piece of marketing which is especially important to a significant band of readers who are not particularly welcoming of indie cartoonists. For those readers, Paul Pope's cover and introductory story will prove a gateway to this comic's tone and Strange Tales #1 itself will surely prove a gateway comic to a world of indie-illustration for the uninitiated comic book reader. And with any luck, it will also establish a demand for more work in a similar vein beyond Strange Tales #1,2 and 3. I love the sub-text of Leavitt and Crabapple's She-Hulk (coloured and lettered by Star St.Germain), and what could easily be a jarring-juxtaposition of artistic styles, between Molly Crabapple's silky-thin, embroidery-like drawings, and Junko Mizuno's solid-lined Spiderman (translated by Aki Yanagi, and adapted by C.B. Cebulski), becomes a delight in the context of this anthology. I just adore Dash Shaw's Doctor Strange, for reasons to numerous to mention, and Michael Kupperman's Namor is equally brilliant. I think of all the stories in this volume though, my favourite is Jason's Spider Man, I read it about 3 or 4 times and each time I read it it seems funnier and more clever.

My only criticism of the comic, and it is a slight one, more a grumble really, or a gripe, and not even a full gripe, more a gr... or an ...ipe, is that a page or two of the work is 'Not Brand Ech-sy'. I mean, don't take that the wrong way, I loved Don Heck's comic at the time, but that style of parody isn't really what an indie-collection is about. What I mean is I don't like the pages that are more a parody of the character, than an indie-interpretation, as much as I do the rest of the comic. So whilst the majority of the illustrators have combined the more cartoony indie-look with a certain amount of psychological depth, one or two have delivered nothing more than a superficial parody. As I have said though, this is an anthology and whilst I might not love all the pages, there is still more than enough great work here to keep me delighted and eager to read the next comic in the series. All told, it's pretty fab.

All Artwork ™ and © 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.

Papercraft, Urban Paper, Paper Toyz

I have a bunch of posts in the 'drafts' folder that I had forgotten about. They are kind of rough and ready and some lack links and credits, so if you see anything of yours here that should be linking to your site let me know, and I'll slot it in. This post was put together in November 2008, I'm guessing, because I referred to the Guy Fawkes mask as 'timely'.

I should own a Dalek. A real one. Let me explain, when I was a youngster I "won" a competition to name a Dalek. I called it "Deckie", but instead of sending me a "real Dalek" the company they sent me an excuse about having 'too many winners', and a paper Dalek. They sent me what today would be called, I suppose, a papercraft Dalek. Of course, if that competition was run today I'd own a Dalek, a real one, and I would have been spared the trauma of having to try to stick my cut-out Dalek to cardboard with Treacle, because we had no glue at home. Instead, I do not have a real Dalek and I don't even have a parcraft Dalek because it all ended up a tear-soaked, sticky, mess. What a rip-off! It would probably have scarred a less heroic child for life, but I've managed to put the fact that despite actually winning a Dalek, I don't even have a papercraft Dalek today.

Anyway, if you've seen my Rod McKie papercraft cut-out and keep doll, you'll know I love these papercraft things. I'm a fan; it's all I can do to stop myself cutting up my Chris Ware books, believe me. Papercraft sculptures really add to a publication, don't you think? I think they do. They were very popular here at one point and appeared regularly on the back page of some British comics - my cousin Allan told me. I'm not saying he did, but my cousin Allan might have cut out all the papercraft girls that came with the Bunty Comic, and he might well have practised his counselling skills on them - there's a thought - and you thought they weren't practical...

Today's papercraft models are, by comparison, utterly amazing, and despite the fact that you can knock up a 3D-model on Maya or Lightwave or Rhino, these paper constructions still command a lot of respect in the toy and game designing communities, and they are increasingly popular with cartoonists and illustrators who often prefer a tactile turnaround to a digital one. Japan, the home of Origami (oru and kami) leads the way in papercraft, as you might expect, with giant robot sculptures, and an endless amount of practical and impractical designs, from a variety cartoonists and illustrators, and even from companies like Yamaha, Canon, Honda, and Toyota.

With sites like the Paperkraft blog, Papercraft Museum, Thunderpanda, The Web Dude, Cubeecraft, and Toy-a-Day highlighting a range of skills and designs available, Urban Paper, a seriously underrated art form in the west, will continue to attract fans and practitioners. If it is an art form you would like to know more about, and maybe experiment with, then you'll be pleased to know that there is a Japanese Paper Craft programme, Pepakura Designer, and a viewer, Pepakura Viewer, that you can download for free. In the screenshots below, I'm using the Pepakura tools to show you Web-Dude's Papercraft Gigantor guide, and model and a timely Guy Fawkes mask.

Whether you just fancy collecting and assembling some favourite vintage characters, like Astro Boy, or the Moomin Trolls, or more modern cut-outs like the cast of Dexter; or you fancy designing your own Papercraft figures, it really can be a fun way to spend some time. And don't overlook the fact that some Papercraft figures of your own characters can be a pretty handy (excuse the pun) piece of PR.

Sorry about my tardy posting of late, the good news is it was down to laziness, not ill-health. I've also been meandering around Edinburgh during Festival Fringe time, which takes a lot of energy.

You'll be pleased to know, maybe, that although I haven't been posting, I've been keeping abreast of the times, and reading a lot about cartooning via Twitter. I don't know if I've mentioned this to you before but I have modelled my life after Melanie Griffiths character in the movie Working Girl, seriously, I collect all the clippings and snippets I can, that relate to cartoons and comics and publishing and the like, and I read them like a sort of meta-text, in relation to one another, in order to create a sort of dumbed-down edited narrative, that I can understand.

I realised at some point during this decade, not sure exactly when but it probably came to me and surfaced during a post on TCJ Forum, that we are living through a period where, for Marxist historians, the antithesis, indie comics, and the thesis, mainstream comics, have merged and the establishment, mainstream publishers, have begun to appropriate the medium. This period is bound to be one of upheaval, as the formally indie cartoonists and writers take over the mainstream titles that will survive, and try to create new characters, if the system will let them. And of course if the system does not let them, then the very brightest stars will be lured away to smaller comic book publishers who will allow them to stretch their creative wings.

Swings and Roundabouts.

Okay, washing my Flashpen was a bit silly, but get this, it works! Seriously, a PNY Attache, it did a full wash and dry in a shirt pocket in an Indesit and after drying out, it works. None of the others came back to life, so this is a real good pen, and I suppose its fold-in-on-itself motion is what helped save it. Although at least one of the others might have been thrown into the old washing machine, but I'm pretty sure that was an Indesit too, so the only other factor would be the quality of the shirt, but it was a thin cotton shirt, so you know, it just looks like the pen is a toughie.

So, you know, that saves having to scan all the stuff into a new drive, to move it around, so I'm quite happy. That doesn't balance out the day, which has not been great, but it is a tick in the positives' column.

Anyway, I mentioned the new work for the older book idea well that's what got soaked. I was really upset because the hard stuff, the actual drawing and writing had been going okay, and then I worked through the boring scanning bit and then the Photoshop malarkey, only to lose the darned pen...and well, the rest you know. But that's all water under the bridge now, I have the finished hi and lo res drawing back, without having to do it all again. Yippee.




It is, as I mentioned, now three smaller books but as the story goes forward it also adds to the back-story, so I'm kind of literally beginning in the middle of the thing, rather than at the start. Now I am utterley convinced that author/poet John Burnside taught me this trick about working back in the story as well as forward, when he did a stint at Stirling University, but it's such a good idea I want to pretend I dreamed it up.

Here's an interesting fact (oh, no); the characters are cycling up Ellens Glen Road, and will turn along Lasswade Road, and make their way to Liberton Brae, or Libby Bray, to use the vernacular; which is an area in Liberton that was full of allotments and apple and pear trees. It is the place we used to go 'scrumping', and I write about as Lepertown. Well, I happened to be reading a Tweet from my Twitter chum, author of Going Bovine, Libba Bray, just when I clicked the pen open - Libba Bray, Libby Bray, - spooky, huh?

That's Seizon - Life

I used to like all the titles Alan Class Comics reprinted over here. They were all really Tales to Astonish or Bewilder or Astound the reader, that is those filling the gaps between the adventures of Mandrake the Magician, and T-Bolt, and the Phantom, were. Those were the stories I liked best, the filler stories. The comics that had no big comic book star, but were made up of a bunch of disparate short stories, were by far my favourites - not simply because they often contained little gems by Ditko and Kirby, they did, but because there was more substance to the stories, or at least it seemed that way to me, back then.

In retrospect, reading them today, as I sometimes do, a lot of these filler stories were a little hackneyed. You kind of new what to expect, a slightly supernatural twist in the tale that was anything but unexpected. Occasionally though, there was a thoughtful piece of writing in there, and those stories really did make a lasting impact on this young reader.

Hindsight is a great tool for any reviewer, and I realise now that the type of story that really resonated with me was likely to be based, however loosely, on urban-mythology. You know the stuff, the claw on the door handle, the banging on the car-roof outside the lunatic asylum, the strange woman with the hairy wrists, and variations on these tales. One story that really excited me was a story about a stranger accepting a lift in a car from a driver who gets increasingly paranoid that the person he has picked up is an escaped mental patient. The twist in the tale is that it is the driver of the car himself who is actually the lunatic at large; not the person he has picked-up. I remember thinking of this story recently, when I was rereading Locas in Love, where an increasingly paranoid Maggie starts to worry that a car is stalking her car. Another favourite was the against all odds tale, that often featured a character who after being diagnosed with a deadly illnes, goes off in search of a final adventure, and ends up being, somewhat mysteriously, cured.

I'll be honest, if you ask me what other stories are in that Alan Class Comic, the one with the paranoid driver, I'd struggle to tell you. And if you asked me which superhero the filler stories frame in the publication, I just wouldn't be able to say. The truth is, I wanted more stories like the paranoid driver, or I wanted the paranoid driver story to stretch for an entire comic book. Perhaps I was already starting to outgrow superheroes. The trouble was, of course, that there really wasn't a lot out there, other than superhero comics, that combined words and pictures for me to read. It is different today, thankfully, there is much more choice now, although it is still in many ways a limited choice if one considers all the autobiographical publications as one genre.

Growing up back then, I would have loved a comic like Seizon - Life. Oh, I admit that today, the adult me thinks the third volume of the series falls a bit flat, and that the story is a tad melodramatic, but the teenage me would have really loved it, and if I'd read it in my early twenties, then I might have started producing work like it.

Seizon, a collaborative effort by Nobuyuki Fukumoto, a previous winner of the Kodansha Manga Award, and fellow Kodansha Manga Award winner, Kaiji Kawaguchi, is a twenty three chapter story, spread over three volumes. It is first and foremost an action thriller, that tells the story of Takeda, a desperate and dying man determined to bring his daughter's killer to justice, before he himself is eaten away by cancer.

Scanlated first by Kotonoha, and finished (finally) by Hox, Seizon, is a classic who-done-it, but with a very modern denouement. The protagonist, Takeda, has suffered the loss of his wife, who died not knowing whether their daughter, Sawako, missing for the past fourteen years, was alive or dead, to cancer. When Takeda learns that his own terminal cancer is in an advanced state, he decides to end his life. However, just when he is about to hang himself, the phone rings and we hear the message from the police that they have found his missing daughter's corpse.

His short remaining life given new purpose, Takeda resolves to remain alive long enough to bring his daughter's killer or killers to justice. But he must move quickly, under Japanese law, the statute of limitations for murder lasts for 15 years, and Takeda has only six months left to live, and six months left to bring his daughter's killer to justice.

Drawn in typical Seinen style, Seizon looks terrific, and in the main the story captivates and keeps the reader interested in what happens next. It does flag a little toward the end, but when it does the cinematic switches of POV, illustrated well in the final page above, pick up the pace. I'd love to see some work like Seizon or Soil (we'll do a Soil blog later), created here in the UK and maybe in the US, but I'm only too painfully aware that there are limited opportunities to showcase such work.