Quarter Bin 78 "Seagle/Sale, Drew Melbourne, Archer & Armstrong, and Bizzare New World"

This is a back issues feature.  However, these particular comics were found in a quarter bin.

The Amazon #3 (Dark Horse)
From May 2009.
And, from 1989, because this was a reprint of a twenty-year-old comic, one of Steven T. Seagle's first projects, and only one project removed from Tim Sale's first collaboration with Jeph Loeb.  I find the latter factoid perhaps more relevant, because it might further explain how their overlooked masterpiece, which I know by its collected title, The Challengers of the Unknown Must Die!, came to be.  A few years back I noticed tonal similarities with Andrew Helfer's Shadow.  As it turns out, Sale and Loeb may have taken inspiration from Sale's own work, too.  Seagle, I think, has remained one of the true comic book mavericks.  A lot of creators try to wear that face, but Seagle lives it.  He's been able to, I think, do it quite successfully.  It also makes him hard to pin down, so every time I spot him, it's a nice little treasure. 

The title of this project refers to the Rain Forest, not the Greek myth that eventually gave birth to Wonder Woman.  It's an '80s environmental message (so of course it resurfaced again).  More significantly, at least creatively, is the unorthodox approach Seagle takes in telling the story.  As far as I could tell, because one out of three issues, even if it's the conclusion of the story, can't quite explain everything, the two sets of captions indicate that the narrator has presented both his initial thoughts and the ones he later publishes for the reader.  Whatever else it is, the story is the guy's reactions, which leaves an impressionist feel to the proceedings.  Those who like straightforward storytelling would probably just throw their hands up in frustration.  I loved it.

But the thing is, that's the kind of storytelling Loeb later adapted for his Challengers comic with Sale.  It's unorthodox, and you can tell how their relationship evolved, to better fulfill superhero expectations, as the years went by.  That first effort, to me, remains the most pure.  So it's nice to see a little more of how it happened.

ArchEnemies #4  (Dark Horse)
From July 2006.
I snatched this up as a reread, because I originally reviewed this mini-series when I first wrote about comics on the Internet (so this would be a ten-year-anniversary kind of deal for me).  The reason I read the comic was because writer Drew Melbourne had won a contest put together by Top Cow back in 2004, when I first pursued the task of breaking into comics.  Drew's winning pitch, Future Heroes, never got made, but I assume the connections he made by winning the contest helped make ArchEnemies happen. 

It's interesting to reread this.  Today, I know that Drew's comics career went no further than this issue, which is kind of sad.  I mean, I really started to root for the guy!  But that's the catch-22 about contests and/or new creators.  Just because you break in, doesn't mean you'll make it.  The guy maintains his fascination with steak (read about it here!), but I guess he fit in that model of trying to look at superheroes differently, that's so attractive to comic book publishers other than DC and Marvel (well, normally; you can never tell with Marvel these days), only too well.  Because that's what ArchEnemies is, a tale of roommates who unbeknownst to each other are actually a superhero and his arch-foe.  It's a great setup.  Drew decided that the villain was, perhaps, a more interesting character to explore.  This final issue makes him pretty human.  (I honestly don't remember the rest of the story at this point.  Part of the comic's marketing campaign was creating a Myspace profile for one of it's characters!) 

The art just makes everything so much harder to follow than it needs to.  Yvel Guichet, directly before this, had been working steadily in mainstream, DC comics.  After this, he didn't.  His last notable work was, once again for DC, Trinity of Sin.  Clearly the guy has mainstream chops, but he seems to have approached this particular project as obtusely as possible.  On the other hand, the covers cleverly acted as the first page of the issue, so that was pretty cool.

In the end, I think the whole idea wrote itself out of relevance.  I think if Drew had been a little more established, this could have been a cool little Image ongoing comic, where the premise itself would have worked.  But instead he convinced himself, or allowed himself to be convinced, that he could try for something deeper, which he just wasn't ready for, and neither was this comic.  But again, Drew still loves steak, so there's that!

Archer & Armstrong #4 (Valiant)
From November 2012.
At the opposite end of that spectrum is Valiant's latest incarnation, which has proven to be a fruitful platform to present the kind of comics readers of Marvel's Ultimates line, and maybe what DC's New 52 era was supposed to be, kind of expected to happen to superhero comics.  The thing that Valiant's done is not overstretch itself.  I can't say whether every project has been a hit, but this is a cohesive, clever universe it has constructed.  The more I read of it, the more, generally, that I love it.

I read the first issue of this particular series digitally a few weeks back, and loved it.  Previously, I had no idea what Archer & Armstrong was supposed to be about.  I thought it might be fairly throwaway buddy nonsense, like Quantum & Woody turned out to be.  But as it turns out, it's actually essential to that core narrative that Valiant has been building.  Concepts like Ivar, the Time Walker (which is another concept that I previously had no idea about) or The Eternal Warrior, or the Geomancer, which was key to the excellent The Valiant mini-series, come from this.  Armstrong is a long-lived guy who's trying to project ancient secrets that bad guys would just love to get their hands on.  Archer is an adept who's been used by the bad guys to get the job done.  Together, they realize they are a great combination, once they sort their differences out, and so goodness ensues.

This is the kind of buddy comic Quantum & Woody only wishes it was.  (Quantum & Woody is a thing because it was the most popular thing from that era of '90s Valiant comics.)  The writer, Fred Van Lente, is a guy I always like to see at top form, because at top form, he's a true pleasure to read.  Valiant tends to collect writers like him (Matt Kindt, Jeff Lemire, Jen Van Meter), who in the best of all possible worlds would be the most sought-after writers in the medium, but for whatever reason don't tend to connect at the Big Two.  So it's Valiant's gain, and Valiant knows exactly what to do with writers like this.  And Valiant, in turn, gets to publish some of today's best superhero comics.

Bizarre New World #1 (Ape)
From 2007.
This is another flashback from a decade ago, Skipper Martin's baby, about an average man who learns he has the ability to fly.  Like Drew Melbourne's take on the traditional superhero archetype, Skipper chose to skew the topic.  In an essay at the back of the issue, he somewhat uncomfortably makes a case that the superhero formula, today, probably looks ridiculous.  This will, of course, be the argument for anyone who no longer subscribes to an opinion they once held, or perhaps never held it.  It's also a textbook case of a fan (he references a closet-full of comics) who perhaps never understood it.

I have no beef with Skipper.  Like Drew, his career went nowhere.  I maintain Facebook contact with him (the sucky thing about social media is that it's a lot of illusion), and so it's especially weird to be talking about the project where I first heard about him, and having to question his thought process.  Then again, it's kind of how the Internet goes.  I don't think he'd be the type to stumble upon this and flip out, but you never know.  (Then again, what did I just do with Drew's comic above?)

The problem with presenting an average's man's experience with learning he has the ability to fly, in the real world, is that it can quickly spiral out of control.  Later comics saw the whole world gain the ability.  This issue sees the lead character grapple with the implications, and then, more directly, how it might affect his relationship with his son.  It ends up being a bonding experience. 

That, I imagine, is what set Skipper's story apart.  Sometimes, writers can't really tell where the heart of their story is.  It happens all the time.  Some of the writers responsible are bad, and that's the reason why, and others just didn't really think about it.  Skipper, in the essay, talks about the six years it took for him to develop the story, and he seems to have focused almost exclusively on how the guy got the powers, if that was even relevant, and none on what the story, ultimately, should be about: an intimate family drama.

Live and learn?  Well, maybe some day, Skipper can learn from it.

Reading Comics 186 "Free Comic Book Day 2016"

So, Saturday was National Comic Book Geek Day, otherwise known as Free Comic Book Day, which to further clarify (because every time I bring up to my sisters, they assume you can pick up just any comic for free), is when pretty much every publisher puts out a special release that's absolutely free.  It's the best comics advertising of the year, and what they provide often gives you keen insight to what they consider important.

Take DC, for instance.  This year they published a special reprint edition of Suicide Squad, somewhat obviously because the next DC movie is...Suicide Squad.  But more importantly, because DC's next big event is DC Rebirth...which is just around the corner, and the big reveals are waiting to be discovered in Justice League #50 and DC Rebirth Special.  So this year there wasn't really much point in doing something other than what it did for the freebie.  The company has brownie points to earn for its next movie, because no one actually thought Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was as cool as DC did, and Deadpool looked like it just created a revolution earlier this year, and so yeah, the somewhat tonally-similar Suicide Squad looks like a pretty good horse to back.

But enough about that.  But a little more about movies!  Because after visiting my local haunt, I went and saw Captain America: Civil War.  It was a pretty good movie, all told.  It's my favorite Avengers movie, somewhat easily, I might add.  Although plot-wise it's full of holes (about as many as people tried really hard to see in Batman v Superman), it does the Marvel method better than any other in that franchise to date.  So that's pretty cool.

Getting back to the comics, my local haunt put a three-book maximum, and so I had to be pretty careful.  The first choice was really obvious, and so that left two.  I'll walk you through my thought process:

Avatarex FCBD Special Preview (Graphic India)
This is Grant Morrison.  You know Grant Morrison, right?  Chances are, if you've read this blog at all, you'll catch a hint that he's one of my favorite comic book writers.  So this was the gimme.  Avatarex is something I first learned about last year, but it was a pretty exclusive affair in 2015, being available only through a special online bundle (I assume it was digital, but Graphic India did not go out of its way to make this easy to decipher).  Once I'd read this preview, I found out what Avatarex is all about.  Basically, it's Morrison's modern 18 Days, featuring Superman as depicted in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman.  The whole thought process is very clearly spelled out in the preview.  Also included in the preview is an excerpt from 18 Days, which is a project I've wandered from recently but fully intend to read completely at some point, because it's fascinating.  This is the primordial superhero epic, the Crisis in Ancient India, as it were.  Morrison himself isn't writing the complete story, which is part of the reason I've found it easy to stray, but it's such powerful stuff, a vision Graphic India would really have needed to screw up.  And thankfully, from everything I've read to date, the company really hasn't.  Which is really good.  It's also good that we're getting a writer of Morrison's caliber presenting comics from a totally different landscape than we're used to.  And bringing his A-game...

Civil War II FCBD (Marvel)
Brian Michael Bendis and Jim Cheung present this preview of the upcoming sequel (-ish thing).  In terms of what they present here, I'm glad I read, and relished, Charles Soule's Secret Wars effort, because as of this material, I have no idea what the fight will be about.  This is more like random material they tossed in (which is kind of how most of Captain America: Civil War plays out, but again, I say that out of admiration, because eventually, weird logic ensues), including completely downplaying Thanos.  (Somewhere along the way, I have to assume someone making the movies decided Thanos wasn't as important to the overall arc as Joss Whedon suggested, because he's been almost completely insignificant, even in Guardians of the Galaxy.)  Unlike the reprint synergy DC brought to FCBD this year, Marvel's just reads cynically.  Which is weird, because Bendis is literally one of the chief sources of inspiration that brought about the hugely successful movies, and his work subsequently just looks like afterthought.  Even weirder, the special also slips in a random All-New, All-Different Avengers excerpt, which is Mark Waid literally riffing on last year's Ant-Man.  I just don't get it.  Here's Marvel doing exactly what DC usually does, and ending up looking like it wasted the whole thing.  But at least it reminds everyone that Marvel's got comics, too...

Valiant 4001 A.D. FCBD Special (Valiant)
This is a company I've grown quite fond of in the last year.  I haven't been reading a lot of it lately, but it made for an easy selection, because there are various previews of upcoming projects, including the titular latest crossover event and Divinity II, both from writer Matt Kindt, who is easily the company's greatest steal, if nothing else than for his Divinity.  The second volume of this saga looks just as fascinating as the first, with Kindt pulling back the curtain a little and having a look at the two cosmonauts left behind last time and maybe more about what's really going on.  I look forward to reading more of that.

And finally, I was also to slip into another shop later in the day.  Predictably, the pickings were slim, but I came away with:

Camp Midnight FCBD Special (Image)
In the spirit of Lumberjanes (which is a huge buzz book I've sampled thanks to comiXology), Camp Midnight is a young readers adventure set in summer camp.  The writer is Steven S. Seagle, whom I'd shockingly not yet made a label here, despite his rather formative accomplishments (including the seminal if sparsely-referenced It's a Bird... Superman graphic novel).  He's part of the creative group behind Ben 10 and Big Hero 6.  And his writing chops are in evidence here, which is an excerpt from a graphic novel.  A lot of times, material aimed at younger readers tries to be too clever, so that it ore represents Adult Swim-inspired material like Archer, or the caffeine-inspired cartoons that kids have today.  Seagle wisely backs off from that approach, but still maintains an edge.  Glad I had a second chance to catch a look.

It's also worth talking a little about the character of FCBD as I experienced it this year, in Virginia.  My last two experiences were in Maine, and waiting in line there was a little like experiencing riffraff congregating (plus some Stormtrooper cosplay).  This year I had a better sense of the comic book fans who saw this as a special occasion.  I got to overhear, and participate, in some of the better chatter I've heard at a comic book store.  These places can sometimes be a wretched hive of scum and villainy (it's no wonder geeks largely define the dialogue of the Internet), so it was nice to experience something better for a change. 

On the whole, it was a pretty good day.