Comix – Wis[s]e Words

Maybe check his hard drive?

Published on April 5, 2024Leave a comment

Why is Greg Smallwood taking a principled stance for the rights of abusers not to have their careers harmed by their own actions:

I’m done pretending that an apology or atonement gets you anywhere with these people. Tell me, Liam – did an apology change Warren Ellis’s circumstances? How about Jason Latour’s? Cameron Stewart? Brian Wood? There is no path and you know it.

Has Ed Piskor’s suicide unhinged him that much? Why does he feels so much sympathy for abusers but not their victims? Ellis abused, hurt and damaged the careers of literally dozens of people, many of whom had to leave comics because of it. Smallwood never mentions them, but he is very upset that people “bullied” Ed Piskor. Where the ‘bullying’ consisted of two women accusing him of secual harassment. Piskor committed suicide a week later and left a suicide note in which he blamed various cartoonists including one of the women who accused him for it.

Which on its own is a tragedy, but is also incredibly spiteful, to use your last action in this world to try and start a lynch mob, handing an excuse to people like Smallwood to start a harassment campaign. Maybe Piskor did have mental health issues that drove to suicide, but that doesn’t excuse this, nor does it make his accusers into retroactive bullies. In the end he turned to be somebody who couldn’t hack it that his own actions had maybe destroyed his career.

Smallwood is worse though, using Piskor’s suicide as an excuse to rehabilitate some of comics’ worst abusersm, trying to frame it as an antibullying campgain. You’d expect that from the comics gaters, the usual frothing rightwing assholes eager to attack women and people of colour and who indeed have joined in harassing the people mentioned in Piskor’s suicide note. Way to out yourself as being the same, when you could’ve just kept your mouth shut. The eagerness with which Smallwood insists people like Brian Wood or Warren Ellis should be able to “return to comics”, that somehow they still deserve a career despite ruining those of their victims, but that mean bullies won’t let them no matter how sorry they are, is vile. If anything it shows he’s not a safe person to be around.

Best Superman this century

Published on July 9, 2023Leave a comment

This is honestly the best Superman I’ve seen in years if not decades. He actually saves a cat in this first episode!

Superman, but he’s still discovering his powers and not yet invulnerable is always a ghood setting and having him, Lois and Jimmy be Daily Planet interns is even better. Loved the chemistry between Lois and Clark, who are clearly attracted to each other from the start. What I also liked is that she played as big a part in winning the fight against the giant robots as Clark himself. Jimmy was a bit of a third wheel but he was just as obnoxious as the original version. Which is great. Can’t have a Jimmy Olsen not be annoying.

Clark catches Lois when she falls down

There are tons of little homages and references hidden in this. Lois has a Vicki Vale article up on her bedroom wall. The Newsboys Legion reference. Having Superman fight actual giant robots, like in the Fleischer cartoons. That “who are you” at the end from Lois, surely a reference to the Christopher Reeve Superman movies. This seems to be a series that knows its history. Art and animation wise it’s all good. The action scenes all popped and the character designs are nicely streamlined. A good start and I hope My Adventures With Superman can keep it up.

Crisis on Captive Earth

Published on July 3, 2023Leave a comment

Logo for Crisis on Captive Earth

I was feeling nostalgic and rooting through my comics long boxes this weekend, when I came across Secret Origins #2, with the origin of the Blue Beetle, back when there were only two. My eye fell on a sentence in the letters page where it was claimed Blue Beetle “would play a role in the upcoming Crisis on Captive Earth“. Huh? Crisis on Captive Earth? Never heard of it? Turns out it was intended to be the next big event crossover after Crisis on Infinite Earths, to be published in 1986. Tom Brevoort has the details:

CRISIS ON CAPTIVE EARTH had been put together under the oversight of editor Bob Greenberger. It was intended to have been plotted by Paul Levitz, scripted by Len Wein, penciled by Jerry Ordway and inked by Karl Kesel. By November of 1985, this creative team had worked out their proposed storyline in enough detail for Greenberger to circulate this memo throughout editorial, in order to inform everybody what the story was going to be about and to set up the necessary character usages and tie-ins.

From the original proposal pages Tom has included, this looks interesting but a bit weak, not very well worked out. It lacks the edge and menace of the original Crisis. There are also a lot of loose ends that would’ve needed tightening if this was to be published. This is also clear from the response of DC’s then editorial and creative staff, as shown in a second article. From the responses it was clear there was little enthusiasm for this new crossover series. What we would get instead was the less ambitious Legends series, which would launch a revamped Justice League series as well as John Ostrander/Kim Yale’s Suicide Squad. For a little bit more about , the wonderful Dc in the 80s blog has a small article, which mentions:

Per Amazing Heroes #62 (January 1, 1985) which served as their 1985 Preview issue, this story was originally envisioned to take place in a twelve-issue maxi-series by Paul Levitz, Len Wein, and Jerry Ordway. Legends would only run six issues, and would feature Wein, as well as John Ostrander and John Byrne in the creators’ chairs… and it’s finished product may have only matched the scrapped maxis in when it would start hitting store shelves.

I love this sort of what might have been. This may not be as famous as e.g. the Alan Moore Twilight proposal, but still interesting to see what DC staff were trying to come up with after Crisis.

Love in a Time of Covid — Friday Funnies

Published on June 2, 2023Leave a comment

It’s 2020, the Covid pandemic has hit Japan and even the black company Nokoru Mitsuhashi works for was forced to send him to work from home. Working from home has its perks for Nokoru: no more commuting, not being forced to wear a suit, getting to slowly know and having a chance at romance with his graduate student neighbour, Natsu Izumi…

Natsu Izumi leaning over Nokoru Mitsuhashi, almost kissing him

Telework Yotabanashi is a short, twenty chapters long adult romance manga by Yamada Kintetsu. And when I say adult, I mean this is a romance story about actual adult with actual adult concerns and which is honest about how actual romance works in the real world.

Nokoru orders condoms online for the first time his neighbour stays the night as a gentleman must be prepared for all eventualities

What I like about Telework Yotabanashi is how realistic it is in how Nokuru & Natsu’s relationship evolves from casual acquaintances to lovers. They get to know each other, there’s a bit of romantic tension almost from the start and when they make it official, it’s by talking about it like adults. She borrows his manga, he her books on Angor Wat. The snacks she brings him as ‘payment’ for the loans he starts stocking himself as finds he likes them. When they’re playing games together, she brings her chair over. Little things like that.

It also impressed me that there were no over the top romantic gestures or impulsive actions that made their relationship official, but rather that they talked about it to make it so. It makes so much sense considering their characters. Nokuru is one of those people who need to understand things completely before committing himself — he works in IT after all — but he’s not willfully ignorant. Natsu is the more forward one of the two, more of an extrovert, but not a manic pixie dream girl by any measure. From the start you know these two will end up together even if Nokuru, who’s narrating all this, hadn’t announced this was the story of how he met his wife.

Nokoru reflects on the benefits of being able to get out of bed ten minutes before work starts and reading a bit of manga with breakfast

In all, a smart, cute little romance story you can read in an hour or two and one that feels contemporary. The usual high school romances that manga is full off can give off the feeling of being set in a largely unchanging world where only the model of cell phones (or lack thereof) betray in which year the manga was created. Here, you’re in no doubt that this is set in 2020. I rarely felt so seen too as in that panel above, because that’s one of the main benefits for me too, that extra time not spent commuting.

Mombassa Road — Friday Funnies

Published on May 19, 2023Leave a comment

For those looking for an artist to scratch their Hugo Pratt itch, may I recommend Attilio Micheluzzi?

The first page of Mobassa Road shows an African landscape in the background while two shady characters argue in the foreground, all rendered in black and white and plenty of shadows

From the first page of Mombassa Road (1989) Micheluzzi’s qualities are obvious. Like Pratt, he owns a debt to Milton Caniff and the great American adventure strip tradition and even in this early work it’s clear he’s a master of his art. To be honest, when I picked this up last year at the Haarlem stripdagen it was only because it was only a Euro and the cover looked interesting. Micheluzzi is an artist I knew little about otherwise, just one of those vaguely familiar names that popped up in comics zines and the like back in the eighties but I never paid attention to as I was into superheroes at the time. Having broadened my tastes in the decades since, I end up buying books like this just on the off chance, if they’re cheap enough. Didn’t read it though, until last Saturday.

Micheluzzi it turns out was a contemporary of Pratt, born in 1930, three years after Pratt and died in 1990, five years before him. He started his career much later than him though, when he was already in his forties, in the early seventies. From what I’ve found of his he specialised in the same sort of historical adventure stories as Pratt, working for the sort of Italian comics magazines that were a bit more quality than the blood ‘n tits fumetti series. Both working solo and with scenarists, he created several such series for various magazines, as well as several stand alone, longer stories about actual historical incidents, like L’uomo del Tanganyka, about the German struggle in South-West Africa during WWI.

Johnny Focus

Mombassa Road is a Dutch translation of three of Micheluzzi’s earliest stories, Starring Johnny Focus, whom he created in 1974. Focus is a photo reporter in post-war but still colonial Kenya. Square jawed, blonde and unshaven he’s your typical hero moving through typical pulp plots. In the first story of the three he gets caught up with a pair of thieves who stole diamonds from a local Masai tribe. One of them shoots the other but fails to kill him, while he himself ends up in quicksand, which is where Focus finds him. The rest of the story is a game of cat and mouse between the surviving thief and Focus, until the Masai come to get their diamonds back. The remaining two stories pitch Focus against an ivor smuggling ring, while he also has to rescue a young woman from being devoured by a crocodil. She immediately falls in love, he’s not interested.

Even for 1974 this is old fashioned stuff. All the main characters are white, with the few actual Kenyans that we do encounter there as either victims for the villains or as deo ex machina as in the end of that first story. If not for the helicopter featured in the second story this could’ve just as well taken place in the thirties. You wonder why the Dutch publisher chose this series and these stories from it to feature in this collection. Especially because they’re from the middle of the original series and the last story ends with the ivory gang still on the loose. Micheluzzi had been published in Dutch before, e.g. the aforementioned L’uomo del Tanganyka, but these had been part of a broader reprint of the original Italian series L’uomo del Tanganyka had been a part of. This however was a deluxe standalone volume with no real editorial justification offered of why they choose these particular stories. As far as I’m aware this was the first and last time any of the Johnny Focus stories were translated into Dutch. The same publisher would instead start reprinting Micheluzzi’s Ross Benton series instead, not long after this was published.

Was there enough name recognition for Micheluzzi at the time that this made sense? Or did they bank on his art’s resemblence to that of Hugo Pratt, who they had published in the same Création series previously? As this was never covered in Stripschrift or any other Dutch fanzine as far as I can tell, I’ve got no idea even of how it was received. It can be very frustrating as a Dutch comics fan to retrace the history of why and how something got published.