Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe!

Your eyes do not deceive you, folks: The fifth volume of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series doesn’t hit shelves for a couple of weeks yet, but thanks to the good people in Oni’s marketing department, I’ve gotten an advance copy to review!

And short version?

 

 

It’s awesome.

As for the long version, well, let’s start with the negatives: Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe is not as purely enjoyable as Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, which marks the first time in the series that the latest book doesn’t just blow away its predecessor. But to be fair, Gets It Together isn’t just the best of the series thus far, but one of my favorite comics of all time, so it makes a pretty tough act to follow.

At the same time, SP v.5 really couldn’t be any other way. Volume 4 was exactly what it said on the cover–the story of Scott finally getting his life together and learning The Power Of Love–and as such, it marks a big emotional turning point for the story for Scott himself, and it leads naturally into a story that raises the stakes. He’s the one that gets it together, he’s the one that learns to accept Ramona and his feelings for her, he’s the one that steps up and has a talk with Knives Chau’s dad, and in this one, he’s the one who has to deal with everything around him falling apart.

 

 

If you’ve been following the series so far–and really, you oughtta be–then you have a pretty good idea of what to expect from this one. The basic beats that make the series so fun (menacing exes, people being hit so hard that they turn into change, sub-space highways) are all here, but with a shift in tone that sees the past catching up with Scott and Ramona in some pretty significant ways that can’t always be dealt with by a handy video game reference.

It’s fitting then that while Scott spends more time fighting in this volume than ever before, very little of it’s actually shown on-panel. Instead, O’Malley shifts the focus to the supporting cast while the big fights rage in the background, and while this can be a little disappointing at first if you–like me–have been hoping to see Scott throw down on a bunch of robots for the past fourteen months, the tradeoff is a deeper emotional undercurrent. At this point, we already know that Scott’s going to win any fight he gets into, and by taking that as a foregone conclusion and using the time to set up the other aspects of the story, O’Malley’s asking a different question: Sure, the hero fights hard and gets the girl, but what happens after? What if they go through all that and it doesn’t work out?

It’s an interesting change from the more lighthearted tone that the book started with, but that’s what made it such a good read to begin with, and what continues to keep me hooked, to the point where I’m honestly regretting that we’re this close to the end.

So while this one might not have the pop of the last volume, it’s every bit as awesome.

Like I said, a review copy of Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe was provided by the publisher, but it’s scheduled to hit shelves at your friendly local comic book store starting February 4, and probably reputable online retailers shortly thereafter. So buy it already!

Exclamation Points Make Everything Better!

Other than my sketchbook, which I’ve lugged around to conventions to get shots of guys like Cobra Commander and Donald Duck, I’ve never been much of a collector of original art. Don’t get me wrong, there are a couple of pages that I wouldn’t mind owning the originals of–one in particular springs to mind–but the good ones tend to be pretty expensive, and it’s just an aspect of comics that I’ve never gotten into.

Until now, I mean.

Yes, thanks to a late birthday present from super-nice ISB reader Jeff Meyer, I am now the proud owner of two pages of original art from Scott McCloud’s Zot! Specifically, they’re the originals of these:

 

 

#12, Page 21

 

 

#22, Page 22

 

All things considered, I’m a pretty recent fan of Zot!. It was always one of those runs that I could never put together, and when the trade came out, I couldn’t wait to read it. Not because my friends had always told me how good it was or because it looked like a lot of fun–although both of those are true–but because I was really curious about Scott McCloud’s street cred.

I imagine it’s been like this for a lot of folks, given how long Zot!‘s been out of print and how many places have adopted his later work as the standard textbook, but the first thing I’d ever read by McCloud was Understanding Comics, and while I found it to be a pretty fascinating look at the medium, I always wondered what made this guy the authority. After all, when you’re going through the books by guys like Will Eisner or Denny O’Neil, there’s a pretty handy body of work to look at and go “Oh, right, this guy clearly knows what he’s talking about,” and for McCloud–at least in my experience–there wasn’t.

That probably sounds a little more disparaging than I mean it to be, so let me clarify: I do think Understanding Comics is a heck of a solid, thought-provoking read, and it’s obvious just from that that McCloud’s a talented guy who did the research and thinks an awful lot about comics, but I’ll admit that there’s always been that nagging part of my brain that thinks “Well if you’re so smart, where’s your masterpiece?”

As it turns out, McCloud’s masterpiece is right here in the the new trade of the book’s black-and-white run, and I’ve gotta say: Even with all the buildup that you get with ten years of wondering how it’s going to work out, even with the fact that McCloud is literally the guy who wrote the book on comics, it’s still better than I expected it to be.

For those of you unfamiliar with the series, here’s the Cliff Notes: Zot is Zachary Paleozogt, the teenage Flash Gordon meets Billy Batson hero of a parallel Earth in the far off retro-future year of 1965, who travels back and forth between his world and “ours”–the more “realistic” Earth of the late ’80s–with his (girl)friend Jenny, who finds Zot’s sparkling clean utopia infinitely preferable to her own suburban life. On his world, Zot faces off against various extremely entertaining villains, from the laughable De-Evolutionaries to the sinister technological madmen like 9-Jack-9, but–and I know this is going to sound pretty out of character for me–it’s once Zot gets stranded on our Earth and the stories shift to the day-to-day lives of Jenny and her friends that it truly becomes amazing.

And it is amazing: Even without McCloud’s commentary explaining exactly what he was doing and what themes he was working with for each story arc, it’s obvious that this is something made by a guy who was figuring out how and why things work on the comics page and then building stories about them that are just a joy to read in every way.

Which isn’t to say that they’re perfect. The absence of Batman chucking a car battery at someone aside, there are a lot of places that come off as very heavy-handed–like, say, whenever Jenny starts talking–but for the most part, they hold up better than almost anything else from the era in their treatment of capital-S Serious Issues, and manage to be entertaining at every turn. The story in #33, for instance–“Normal”–deals with homosexuality against the backdrop of a suburban high school, and while it would’ve been very easy to go off the rails in a number of directions–with McCloud or his characters coming off as preachy, or over the top to a “What have you done for the black skins, Green Lantern?” extreme–but it doesn’t miss a beat. It’s thoroughly engrossing, and if you’re familiar with the story, you’ll know what I mean when I say that the ending had hook, line and sinker.

There are bits in the commentary where McCloud expresses a concern about bits of his stories coming off as too naïve, but in reality, he manages to strike the balance between the “realism” of Jenny’s earth and the optimism of Zot’s in a way that very, very few creators have ever been able to hit before. It’s great stuff, and thanks to the pages, I’m excited about owning a couple of small pieces of it.

The Apocalipstix: How I Learned To Love the Bombshells

When I met the guys from Oni at HeroesCon, I mentioned that I was really excited about Ray Fawkes and Cameron Stewart’s upcoming graphic novel, The Apocalipstix, and that I’d actually looking forward to it ever since the first time it was solicited back in May of 2007.

I’ll admit, when it was finally resolicited a couple months ago, my mood could best be described as “cautious optimism,” but it looks like the cautious part was unnecessary, since they sent me a review copy of the first volume to read once I’d gotten home.

And I can confirm that it is indeed super awesome

At its heart, The Apocalipstix sounds like a pretty simple pop-culture mash-up: Josie and the Pussycats meets The Road Warrior. In practice, though, it’s…

Well, that’s actually exactly what it is. And even better, if you don’t count the issue where Josie gets possessed, it combines the best aspects of both.

The plot goes like this: After World War III hits with a nuclear bang while Mandy and the Mittens are on tour, the three-piece all-girl rock group not only survive the firestorm, but emerge into an atomic wasteland full of mutants, street-pirates and a surprising number of other surviving rock bands, where the gas they need for their last great cross-country tour can only be obtained by rocking out, ditching their previous name and emerging as…

 

The Apocalipstix!

 

Me, I woulda gone with “Hooray For Gooba,” but whatcha gonna do?

That, of course, is Mandy in the front, who fulfills the combined Josie/Valerie role as the tough-as-nails lead singer/guitarist/rock goddess, with gun-slinging and perpetually subtitled drummer Megumi on the left. On the right is Dot, who, aside from playing guitar instead of drums, is pretty much a one-for-one analogue of Melody Valentine transplanted into a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which hijinx ensue.

And ensue they do, and Fawkes does a great job of keeping things moving at a pretty breakneck clip. The first volume–and according to the last page, it is the first volume, hopefully of a bunch–is divided up into three chapters, kicking off with a high-speed gun-toting chase on the ruins of a highway and closing out with a Thunderdomesque Battle of the Bands. And really, the fact that I just used the word “Thunderdomesque” to describe it probably makes this one of the greatest comics ever just on general principle.

As for the art, I think it’s pretty self-evident from the guy’s body of work that his art’s pretty awesome, and there’s nothing in The Apocalipstix that contradicts that. He’s one of the few artists I can think of that can pull off stuff that’s deceptively cartoony, but still incredibly expressive and detailed, and–especially in the last chapter–it’s all on display here. Even the neat tricks that I’ve seen before, like the skull-shaped mushroom cloud in the opening, are done just about perfectly.

But really, there’s pretty much just one thing you need to see to convince you that this one’s worth picking up, and that is this:

 

 

That is the lead singer of an all-girl post-apocalyptic rock band Dragon Punching a giant mutated ant, and by pretty much any definition of the word, that is radical.

 

A review copy of The Apocalipstix was provided by the just and benevolent publishers for the purposes of review and general enjoyment. It should be hitting your local comic book store soon with a list price of $11.95, and it’s currently available for pre-order on Amazon.

Harder, Blinder, Faster, Deafer

Those of you who have been paying attention might recall that a few months ago, Benito Cereno–who received a PhD in Awesomeology from a highly accredited university–pointed out a solicitation for a book called Helen Killer, and I promptly declared that this–a story where Helen Keller is given a machine by Alexander Graham Bell that not only lets her see and hear, but gives her super-human strength and agility that she uses to protect President McKinley–was the single greatest premise I have ever seen.

And that’s why I was pretty excited when I was contacted about getting a review copy from the publisher.

Excited, and pretty curious. After all, as much as I love that premise, I’ve read enough comics to know that a fantastic idea doesn’t always make for a fantastic comic, especially when it involves taking a look at historical figures in what I think we can agree are pretty unusual circumstances.

For every Tales From the Bully Pulpit or Five Fists of Science, there are other projects that fall flat because they take themselves too seriously and try too hard to come off as grim and badass. So while I’ve been pretty outspoken in my support of the concept, I’ve been withholding judgment on the actual product.

Now, though, I can say it with certainty: Helen Killer is awesome.

The story’s presented as a serious affair, but there’s an underlying self-awareness that Andrew Kriesberg and JLD Rice bring to the table that showcases the fantastic goofiness of the project. I mean, for one thing, the review copy included an extended solicitation where you find out that Bell’s Omnicle also grants Helen the power to “see into men’s souls” (which is rad), and for another, this is a comic where Helen Keller has berserker rages.

I’ll repeat that, as it bears repeating: This is a comic where Helen Keller has berserker rages.

 

 

So awesome.

It all plays out in the first issue like a tribute to Man Without Fear, and when you find out that Kreisberg’s been a writer for Boston Legal and Justice League Unlimited, it starts to make sense that he’d come out with something that’s essentially Frank Miller’s The Miracle Worker. What’s shocking about it is that it all works, and as funny as it is to see the story hit those same beats, it feels like more of an homage than a parody, and it makes for some very entertaining comics.

As for the art, Rice is better than I ever would’ve expected, and considering that the centerpiece of the book is a six-page fight sequence, it’s all I can do to keep from just posting scenes from that and calling it a night.

Ah, what the heck. Here’s one:

 

 

And that’s the least of it. And yes: Leon Czolgosz does make an appearance.

So yeah, consider this a wholehearted endorsement from the ISB, and if the rest of the series can live up to the promise of the first issue, then this is unquestionably the first great mini-series of 2008. Ask for it by name, and tell ’em I sent you!

Relatively Serious Comics Reviews: North World and Life Sucks

Every now and then, a comic book publisher gets the idea that I’m someone people go to for advice on purchasing their comics, and not just a guy who talks about Destro all the time. When that happens, they send me comics to review, and because there’s nothing I like more than getting free stuff, I try to provide an honest opinion on them while doing my best to avoid making jokes about Marvex the Super-Robot or something.

Let’s see how I do this time.

 

 

To be fair, though, I think I’ve got a little room to work with, since both of tonight’s subjects involve some comedy. And, interestingly enough, they’re both stories where traditional fantasy elements have been paired with a real-world slice-of-life setting for pretty awesome results.

First up is Lars Brown’s North World, which hit the shelves last week from the good folks over at Oni Press.

As you might expect from the title, North World‘s distinguished right off the bat by its setting, which–if you’re into labels, man–could be described pretty accurately as “Modern Fantasy.” Conrad, the hero of the first volume, lives in a world with mass transit, telephone poles, burrito stands and all the other trappings of the 21st century that we all know and love, but it’s also a world where picking up your family sword and going off to the woods to fight Dire Rats is a pretty good career option. And that’s where it all starts for Conrad, a young adventurer with a knack for dealing with oversized animals who gets called back to his hometown to deal with a nasty bit of demon-summoning that also coincides with his ex-girlfriend’s wedding.

If you’re a regular ISB reader, you may already be familiar with North World from when I linked to its webcomic version back when the trade was first solicited (when I heard about it from Kevin), and honestly, if you haven’t already checked it out, do so. After all, Brown sells his own work better than I ever could with scenes like this:

 

 

And that’s within the first twelve pages.

Like all good comics, though, North World is more than just the sum of its parts, which aren’t just limited to a modernized fantasy setting and bear-punching. In fact, the beats of the plot are so familiar that they’re almost cliché: A guy who leaves home to escape bad memories and a dead-end small-town life looking for the one big score that’ll finally make it possible (which, now that I think of it, is the plot of every Bruce Springsteen song), the strained relationship with the father that thinks he abandoned the family, the ex-girlfriend who wants him to see how happy she is without him. It’s all stuff that we’ve all seen before, but Brown does a great job of making it fresh and engaging, and not just because he puts it in a different setting, and it all adds up to a pretty fun read.

But again, you can find that out for yourself by reading it online as a webcomic, and while that’s all well and good, I’m one of those people who prefers to get long-form story arcs like North World in complete chunks that I can sit down with. This is also why I love Phil Foglio’s Girl Genius but only read it in trade, and as a bonus to guys like me that goes against the trend of how webcomic collections usually work, Brown’s included a complete story that actually goes beyond what’s published online.

So take a look, read, enjoy, and then swing by your friendly local comics retailer (or use the handy Amazon link above) and check it out. It’s well worth it.

 


 

Next up on the agenda is an upcoming book from our old friends at First Second, and seriously? It’s pretty close to being the most enjoyable comic they’ve published since Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese.

Not too much of a surprise there, since Xeric winner Jessica Abel’s involved, and they tend to give those things out to people who know what they’re doing. I mean, she did do the art for the This American Life comic, which will no doubt stand as the greatest NPR tie-in to comics until Marvel finally decides to approve my pitch for Sarah Vowell Super Stories. Anyway, Abel, Gabe Soria and Warren Pleece’s Life Sucks is pretty easy to boil down to a one-sentence pitch: In essence, it’s Clerks… with vampires.

The story follows Dave, a college student who had the misfortune to wander into a convenience store while looking for a job, where he was promptly bitten by the shop’s owner, a vampire who now demands that he spend his undeath as assistant manager, shelling out lottery tickets and beef jerky to the night shift crowd forever.

It is, therefore, the closest approximation of Hell that I have ever seen.

 

 

There’s a lot of inherent comedy in the idea of a mid-20s slacker trying to balance his life as a minimum-wage Nosferatu–and there are a lot of really good sequences to that effect, especially at the beginning–but like North World, the team behind Life Sucks uses that as a backdrop for more mundane drama. Dave has a job that he hates that he can’t get out of, a crush on a girl that he can’t bring himself to do anything about, and an omnipresent nemesis who seems like he’s had everything handed to him while Dave himself gets stuck with the leftovers. I don’t know about you guys, but those are all things I can identify with–especially that last one–and for the most part, it’s all blended with the thin metaphor of the undead for some very enjoyable comics.

The problem is that the plot takes two sharp turns before it finally ends up. Halfway through, Dave and his aforementioned nemesis, Wes–a classic villain in every sense that at one point literally bites his girlfriend’s head off in a scene that’s pretty jarring given the lighthearted, off-panel nature of the violence that leads up to it–make a bet regarding the object of Dave’s affections and who can get through to her first, the conniving prettyboy or the earnest John Cusack stand-in. This is a conflict that ought to be familiar if you’ve, you know, ever seen a movie made for teenagers, and it plays out almost exactly the way you’d think, until the second sharp turn that leads to an extremely depressing ending.

It’s a shame–for me anyway–because there’s so much about the book that’s really enjoyable, and while it’s a pretty far stretch to say that the last few pages “ruin” the rest of it, it certainly seemed wholly unnecessary and thoroughly disheartening. To stretch out the Clerks metaphor to its logical conclusion, it’s a lot like the original ending where Dante gets shot and killed, and seems every bit as out of place here as it does in the film.

But then again, that could just be me and the eternal hope that you can one day break the chains of comics retail a menial job, and there’s more than enough that I liked about this one that it was worth reading.

And since I’ve made my opinions on vampire-based comics prettty well known in the past, that might as well be a stirring endorsement.

 

As mentioned above, review copies were provided by the publishers. That’ll show ’em.

Relatively Serious Comics Reviews: Courtney Crumrin and Wonton Soup

Despite the fact that my usual method for critical assessment seems to be grabbing whatever’s within arm’s reach, scanning a panel and calling it a night, I occasionally find myself in contact with someone who’s mistaken me for what the boys down in Marketing refer to as “a reputable influencer.” Thus, they send me something to tell you guys about, and in a tribute to my love of getting stuff for free, I try to get through an entire review without making jokes about monkeys.

Let’s see if I can manage it this time.

 

 

It’s funny how things work out sometimes: When it first hit shelves a few weeks back, Courtney Crumrin and the Fire-Thief’s Tale, was recommended to me by a reader, and I mentinoed being curious about it, but not having the chance to actually check it out. Cut to this week, and there’s a package on my doorstep from the friendly folks at Oni Press with a copy to enjoy at my leisure. Seriously, those cats are on the ball.

I’ll admit to being only passingly familiar with Ted Naifeh’s work, because let’s be honest here, the gothic romance that is Gloomcookie is probably as far away from being my thing that it possibly could be, even if there is a Christmas issue. That said, last year’s Polly and the Pirates was not only an incredibly enjoyable comic, but was easily one of my favorite books of the year.

It was Polly–and specifically its title character, a proper young lady turned Pirate Queen–that made me more curious about Naifeh’s other work, and all things considered, I probably should’ve jumped on earlier.

And not just because The Fire-Thief’s Tale is a fun story, either–and it is, which I’ll get to in a second–but because just from reading through this one, it’s pretty obvious that I’m missing out on a lot as latecomer to the story. Don’t get the wrong idea, though: Naifeh doesn’t make it hard for a neophyte to jump right in and find himself having a good time with a the story of a little girl’s vacation in a town plagued by werewolves, but he doesn’t shy away from slightly oblique references to what’s gone before, either.

But then, those same references to Courtney’s past are what offer up my absolute favorite moment in the book. For context, here’s the plot: Courtney, an aspiring young witchity type who manages to be utterly charming despite a complete lack of a nose, and her creepy, Crowleyesque Uncle Aloyisius take a trip to see a friend in small-town Eastern Europe, where the gun-happy locals are beset by a gang of gypsy werewolves–only that the ruthless townsfolk, led by the mustachioed Petru, are the ones doing the besieging.

Further complicating matters is the fact that Petru’s fiancee, Magda, is in love with Jan, a traveling fiddle-player who happens to be the werewolf that Petru’s chasing after with a shotgun every night, thus creating a love triangle that features both gunplay and lycanthropy, and is thus eighty percent more awesome than the standard model. In any case, Magda’s too timid to leave Petru and follow her heart to go with Jan, to the point where she’s willing to stand by and let her future husband track down and murder her lover and his whole family, which is when Courtney sets out to do it her own damn self if she has to.

And that’s when we get this:

 

 

That’s a great line to begin with, but having it delivered to a grown woman from a little girl right before she sets off alone to try to stop a massacre? That’s fantastic.

And the art’s no slouch either: Courtney herself is essentially a cartoon character–big eyes, little mouth, no nose, a bat-shaped barrette in her hair–but the world around her is done in a detailed style that’s reminded me more of Mignola than anything else. Admittedly, that could just be the subject matter coming through, but have a look for yourself, and keep in mind that these are sequential panels:

 

 

Hellboy-ish or not, it works, and not just because it makes for a very appealing design. The contrast just reinforces Courtney as an outsider among everyone else, and the emotion that Naifeh’s able to show with those simple lines–especially in the last few pages–is just incredible, and it’s the kind of thing that makes me want to see more. Which, lucky for me, there’s plenty of, just waiting to be read.

It’s a fun read, and really, with 56 pages for $5.99, it’s well worth picking up, either from your local shop or from Oni themselves.

 


 

There’s a scene in James Stokoe’s Won Ton Soup where the main character says:

 

There’s that old saying: “Everything’s been done, nothing’s original.” That’s just what people with no passion say when they’ve run out of ideas.

Fuck those people.

 

…and considering that the guy delivering this soliloquy is a renegade master chef/space trucker using a sentient spice that only wants to become a delicious meal while he’s cooking on an illegally modified plasma oven, I think it’s safe to say that Stokoe himself doesn’t suffer from any such limitations.

At first glance, Wonton Soup reminded me an awful lot of Corey Lewis’s Sharknife, which made a lot of sense once I got to the end and found out that Stokoe’s actually part of Lewis and Brandon Graham’s YOSH Collective. But it’s not just the similar art style that tipped me off, and for that matter, it’s not the nigh overpowering emphasis on food that you see in those guys’ work, either, even if one of them did make a book about a guy who turns into a super-hero when he eats a fortune cookie.

Instead, it’s Stokoe’s practice of just bombarding the reader with idea after idea after idea like the target of a unrelenting high-concept machine-gun. Within the first third of the book, you’ve got Space Ninjas, sentient spices, angry redneck pandas, secret alien cooking techniques, and a dozen other great throwaway gags that Stokoe uses to keep the story moving. Heck, there’s even a part where someone’s constructing a catapult designed to throw planets into each other, and that only gets mentioned in passing!

I mean really, you guys: There’s a character in this comic with an extra robot hand, and I’m almost positive that its only function is giving high fives.

 

 

Needless to say, it makes for a fun read, but while the crazy concepts are unquestionably its biggest strength, there’s a lot of places where they become the book’s biggest drawback. In fact, there are a lot of places where it seems like they’re just ornaments thrown into the book to disguise the fact that the actual plot is razor-thin:

Boy (or at least, Johnny Boyo) leaves his home and life of tedium to seek adventure, but returns unexpectedly to the arms of his lover, only to be challenged by rivals from that very same life he left behind. With the help of a mentor, he triumphs over adversity in the form of a sporting competition of some kind (Spoiler Warning!), but forsakes his winnings to return to a life of adventure away from his beloved, because he’s as free as a bird now, and this bird you cannot change.

See what you’ve reduced me to, Stokoe? A Skynyrd reference! I oughtta slam this freakin’ book for that.

But I won’t, because even though it features the same plot–sans endangered rec center–as virtually every single movie made in the ’80s, it actually is a lot of fun. There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that Boyo’s going to win the cooking competition, and there shouldn’t be. After all, Stokoe’s under no illusions here:

 

 

And it certainly is. But it’s a fun gimmick, and sometimes, that’s all that matters.

As for the book itself, it ought to be hitting shelves pretty soon, or–just like Courtney Crumrin–you can skip to the source and order one from Oni.

 

As mentioned above, review copies were provided by the publisher. I really did like ’em, though.

Relatively Serious Comics Reviews: Laika and Elm City Jams

Despite the fact that my usual method for critical assessment seems to be grabbing whatever’s within arm’s reach, scanning a panel and calling it a night, I occasionally find myself in contact with someone who’s mistaken me for what the boys down in Marketing refer to as “a reputable influencer.” Thus, they send me something to tell you guys about, and in a tribute to my love of getting stuff for free, I try to get through an entire review without making jokes about monkeys.

As you’ll see tonight, it doesn’t always work out that way.

 

 

With Robot Dreams and Notes For a War Story hitting shelves this week at finer comic shops everywhere, the good folks over at First Second have started in on their fall line of graphic novels. There’s still plenty to come over the horizon, though, including the one that first caught my eye when I saw it in Previews a while back: Nick Abadzis’s Laika.

As the Communist aviation history buffs among you might’ve already guessed, Laika is based on the true story of the first animal ever launched into space, and given the inherent dangers of being the first anything to do something like that, it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that Laika doesn’t make it home for a happy ending. Upon reflection, I maybe should’ve put a spoiler warning up there for that, but seeing as we’re dealing with matters of historical record, I think I’m safe.

Besides, it’s best that you find out now, Abadsis is utterly shameless in his emotional manipulation of the reader. It’s a tearjerker almost from the first page, as he shows not just the direct events that lead up to the launch of Sputnik 2, but crafts an entire life story for Laika, who is known throughout most of the book by her original name, Kudryavka, which translates from Russian to “Little Curly,” owing to her curly tail:

 

 

See? Adorable! And if Laika’s adorability wasn’t a matter of public record, there’d be no doubt in my mind that it was just another tactic to wring an emotional reaction out of the reader for a story that, at its heart, is essentially about a cute little puppy that is shot into space to die needlessly in the name of science.

As it stands, though, the first section of the book–a fictionalized account of Laika’s early life before she was brought to Moscow’s Institution of Aviation Medicine–already reads like a litany of cliches gleaned from stories of heroic dogs. There’s the sweet, loving girl who wants to take her in but can’t, the cruel master who tosses her into the river, and–in the most abjectly cartoonish segment in the book–a maniacal, murderous dogcatcher who views Laika as his own personal nemesis.

 

 

It is, for about twenty pages, like a really, really depressing episode of Heathcliff.

What’s surprising about it, though, is that it gets a heck of a lot better. Abadzis begins and frames the book not with Laika herself, but with Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, an honest-to-God rocket scientist, opening with him being released from a gulag in the dead of winter after a six-year stay courtesey of Stalin’s 1938 purge. It Sergei that has the strong idea of destiny and purpose that drives the book, to the point where he’s the one to give Laika her new name, selecting her himself for the spaceflight he was comissioned by Kruschev to design in a little more than a month.

 

 

And he’s just the first member of an interesting, complex cast of historical figures that Abadzis uses to tell his story, which quickly shifts from Laika’s puppy misadventures to Yelena Dubrovsky, the animal technician assigned to prepare the dogs for their flight. She imagines herself as a Dr. Doolittle, speaking to the animals and imagining their responses as she goes through her workday, calming them down and reassuring them, then feeling the intense heartbreak that goes along with becoming too attached to test animals. It has the same sort of tear-jerking quality as the first bit, but the cheesiness is swapped for emotional content with characters that you’ve been through the book with, and it makes for a prety compelling read.

The problem with all this is that Laika is coming out three months after James Vining’s First In Space from Oni Press, and while they are by no means the same book, there are certainly a lot of similarities. The Xeric-winning First in Space tells the American side of the story, but–as one might expect from something rooted in American history rather than Russian–involving a much happier ending, relatively speaking. And there are also monkeys. In space. Which is pretty awesome.

In essence, though, it avoids Laika‘s main problem because it’s a happier story, and therefore doesn’t require the amount of sentiment and emotional manipulation that a puppy being left to die in the cold, dark expanse of space contains just on principle, which frees it up to present the facts in a much breezier way.

There is, of course, room on my shelf for both of these books, as they tell different stories in different styles in different ways, but there’s always going to be that odd coincidence of having two slightly fictionalized accounts of the true stories of test animals during the Cold War space program being released in the same summer, and there’s really no way around comparing the two. With Laika, though, the emphasis is definitely on sentiment spiked with science, detailing Laika’s life in a way that naturally leads to its ending, but it’s sentiment done well.

If it sounds like your cup of tea–and it is a very well-done book–you’ll be able to find it in comic book stores starting early next month, or you can pre-order it on Amazon right this very minute.

 


 

The last time I did a Relatively Serious Review, I mentioned that mini-comics aren’t really my thing. This is, of course, in spite of the fact that my pal Phil and I actually made one a couple of years ago where a fictionalized Jack Kirby fought a Nazi Robot and got blasted into a dimension of dog-people, but that’s beside the point, which is this: I may have to revise my standard line pretty soon, because ever since David Morris sent me his bootlegged final issue of OMAC, every mini-comic I’ve been sent has been off the chain.

Case in point: Elm City Jams.

 

 

This bright yellow bundle of joy was sent over–along with a few others–by Isaac Cates of Satisfactory Comics, and it’s built on the absolutely genius premise of getting a bunch of cartoonists together and forcing them (possibly at gunpoint, Isaac wasn’t really clear on that) to draw one-page strips based on titles drawn completely at random. It’s a great idea for something like this, allowing the participants to show off their skills and letting everyone involve have fun.

Because really, how could you not have fun with titles like “Don’t Mess With Hexes,” “Damn Tree-Hugging Robots,” or…

 

Hezekiah Sugata, Hillbilly Shogun

 

And that isn’t even the best one.

In total, Isaac sent over four of his mini-comics, including ECJ #s 1-3 and Satisfactory Comics #7, and while there are some great bitss in those–including a great two-page bit on slightly adjusted opening lines from classics of Western literature that’s just fantastic–but the real star of the set was the one pictured above. It’s a great sequence of gags from start to finish, with the high point being a jam from Tom O’Donnell, Mike Wenthe, and the omnipresent Isaac Cates called “Jared Fogle Kills A Prostitute” which features the Subway pitch-man not only getting up to the action you might expect from the title, but doing it as a member of the Green Lantern Corps.

Admittedly, I’m saying this as someone who got it for free, but it’s well worth whatever Cates is charging for it. It’s very, very entertaining stuff, and you can find out more and see about getting your own at the Satisfactory Comics Blog.