Confessions of a Comics Shop Junkie: Footnotes in Gaza, Daytripper, and more

In his latest column, Johnny Bacardi takes a look at the latest from Joe Sacco, as well as DC/Vertigo’s Daytripper…and more!

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Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Confessions of a Comics Shop Junkie: “Doom Patrol,” “The Twelve,” and More

by Johnny Bacardi

Time once more for Confessions of a Comics Shop Junkie, in which I attempt to spotlight several works of sequential graphic storytelling that I find noteworthy and think you might too, many of which may still be purchased for your very own personal enjoyment at a comics shop, bookstore, or online merchant near you if you’re lucky. Or not, as the case may be.

Gonna be a short one this week.  I get my comics on a bi-weekly basis, and I won’t get my box till Friday, and I don’t really want to foist a bunch of reviews of two-week-old comics on you. Still, I managed to find a few things lying around the Internets…so let’s dance.

DOOM PATROL #8
Script: Keith Giffen, Art: Matthew Clark, Ron Randall
DC Comics, $2.99

There are some characters that publishers just won’t leave alone, even though the public continually votes in the negative with its wallets, try as they might to freshen them up with bold new directions and fresh new ideas. Most of the time, it’s fitting that these revivals fail; too often they reek of “perpetuating the license” aka “killing trees to keep the copyrights in order.” Once in a while, though, a revival/revamp attempt actually works, and works well — Robinson’s Starman, Andreyko’s Manhunter, and the Giffen/Rogers Blue Beetle are some of the more recent more or less successful examples, from DC at least.

Another of these characters, or teams, or concepts, what have you, is the Doom Patrol, which has averaged at least one revival per decade since its creation in the early ’60s. This one, the most recent, is eight issues in and for most, it has not passed muster, regarded as yet another downbeat and downcast modern angst-filled superhero opus. I say not so! Writer Keith Giffen surely does play up the always-present battered-psyche motif that the Patrol has always had, and yet takes time to show that the team is still tight-knit when danger threatens. (more…)

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Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Confessions of a Comics Shop Junkie 7: Marvel’s “Girl Comics,” DC’s “First Wave,” and More

by Johnny Bacardi

Here we go again with Confessions of a Comics Shop Junkie, in which I attempt to spotlight several works of sequential graphic storytelling that I find noteworthy and think you might too, many of which may still be purchased for your very own personal enjoyment at a comics shop, bookstore, or online merchant near you if you’re lucky. Or not, as the case may be.

SMILE
Script/Art: Raina Telgemeier
Scholastic/Graphix Books, $10.99

Many of the reviews I’ve seen have taken this to task for a perceived lack of conflict, or dramatic tension, or some something that the critic was looking for — some standard they usually apply to the sort of comics stories that they’re used to reading. Me, I think they’re looking for something that doesn’t need to be there, and are missing the forest for the trees, to coin a cliche.

This is no hyped-up saga of personal rediscovery and coming-of-age and struggling with inner and outer demons, a la Blankets (to cite, perhaps unfairly, one example). It is a quiet, unassuming account of a handful of years in the life of its (I assume, I’ve never met her) likable and unassuming author, and to dismiss it because it isn’t gripping drama isn’t really fair. Preteen Raina, already preparing to get braces, falls in her front yard one evening after returning from a Girl Scouts activity, knocks out one tooth and drives another up into her gums…and embarks on a six-year ordeal of orthodontics and dental work, as well as learning to cope with junior high and high school and all the attendant problems that many young girls and boys face. (more…)

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Sunday, March 7th, 2010

Book Review: Bryant Simon, “Everything but the Coffee: Learning About America from Starbucks”

by Jeff Giles

When is a cup of coffee more than just a cheap, quick pick-me-up? Pretty much always, if you’re the type of person who pays attention to where his food comes from and where it’s purchased — and if you are that kind of person, you’ll want to pick up a copy of Bryant Simon’s Everything But the Coffee: Learning About America from Starbucks, a thoughtful look at the Starbucks craze, its psychological roots, and what left the once seemingly unstoppable chain so vulnerable to the reversal of fortune that has led to the shuttering of hundreds of stores (and thousands of jobs).

It’s a huge topic, obviously, and one rendered even more unwieldy by Starbucks’ expansion into its many non-coffee enterprises; as Simon makes clear early on, Starbucks was selling a lifestyle from its earliest days, but by the time the company purchased Hear Music and started actively promoting Paul McCartney and James Taylor CDs, the store’s brew was just another part of the overall experience.

That was the root of Starbucks’ problem — which you knew already, and if that’s all Simon had to say, Everything But the Coffee wouldn’t have much value; people have been untangling the roots of Starbucks’ stumble from the moment the company’s fortunes started to fade. What makes the book worth reading is the way Simon uses its slim length (320 pages, including an afterword and an index) to tie Starbucks’ dominance into a larger framework: the fraying of traditional social networks, the erosion of various social safety nets, and a growing American thirst — not for coffee per se, but for things that make them feel good and honest and tied into real tradition.

Simon correctly identifies Starbucks as savvy fakers in this area — something that won’t come as a surprise to most consumers, many of whom purchase with an overall distrust of any promises brands make, but it’s nonetheless fascinating to read just how fine-tuned the company’s quest for “authenticity” really is, right down to the placement of those big purple overstuffed chairs and the art on the walls. I doubt there are many Starbucks shoppers who don’t know, on some level, that the softly played jazz and natural earth tones in the stores are part of a marketing game, and Simon is gentle but firm in his insistence that the store couldn’t have succeeded without a happily complacent consumer base. The book isn’t really an indictment so much as it is a lamentation — of what we’ve lost, and of the misguided ways we try to get it back. It’ll only take you a few days to read Everything but the Coffee, but once you’re done, you may not look at coffee — or at anything you buy — the same way again.

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Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Book Review: Tony DuShane’s “Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk”

by Scott Malchus

“One lone pubic hair sprung from my baby smooth pelvis area. I didn’t even see it start to grow. It just made its appearance and told me more were coming.

“I raised my hand to my cheek and felt for hair and there was no stubble. One pubic hair below. Adulthood cometh.”

So begins the novel, Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk (214 pgs. Soft Skull Press), the first novel by author Tony DuShane, a darkly funny and bittersweet coming of age story about Gabe Dagsland, a teenager growing up a Jehovah’s Witness in the 1980’s. Gabe is a teenage boy, with hormones raging through his developing body and one thing on his mind: sex. There’s only one problem, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have a strict belief system and impure thoughts about sex can lead to eternal damnation when the Armageddon comes, which, according to them, was right around the corner.

Gabe lives in a run down apartment with his parents. His dad is an elder at the hall where they worship; his mother suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome. Gabe’s dad works at the mechanic’s shop run by Gabe’s grandfather. Gabe doesn’t have much of a relationship with his grandparents because they disowned Mr. Dagsland once he converted.  However, Gabe does hang out with his Uncle Jeff, a “worldly” musicianship who is constantly trying to better himself, thus making it okay for Gabe to associate with him.

There are many rules that Gabe is required to follow, most significantly for a maturing young man: he is not allowed to act “worldly” with girls. Intimate relations are forbidden until marriage. Most Jehovah Witness teenagers get married at 18 just to explore their sexuality after years and years of suppression. While Gabe is trying his best to be a good, practicing Witness, he can’t stop thinking about girls and their breasts and what lies underneath their dresses. Moreover, the kid can’t stop jacking off in the bathroom, wasting his “seed.” In other words, Gabe is a typical teenage boy obsessed with girls. Actually, one girl in particular: Jasmine, who is a year older than him and whose strawberry scented shampoo haunts him.

After a brief introduction of Gabe when he’s in the 8th grade, and the people in his life, the story quickly shifts to high school. Because of the strict rules of being a Jehovah’s Witness, Gabe is reluctant to talk about his religion for fear of being ostracized by the rest of his schoolmates. Among other things, he isn’t permitted to salute the flag and he can’t take sex-ed. Gabe’s best friends are other Witness kids. Peter is a rebellious skater who lives in an abusive home with his mother and asshole stepfather. Peter is constantly being grounded, and beaten for mistakes he makes. Gabe and Peter hang out with Jin, overweight Korean kid who is a junk food junkie. The three of them try to their best to fit it, but it’s difficult.

As the book progresses, Gabe begins to have secret, fleeting “worldly” experiences that begin to make him question this religion, the only way of life he’s ever known. Halfway through the novel, Gabe helps out a drunk girl who has followed him back to his Uncle Jeff’s apartment after a wedding reception. Gabe gets her out of her puke-covered dress and places her in her uncle’s bed while he crashes on the couch. This relatively innocent act gets twisted around and Gabe is brought before the elders. He is disfellowed for a year after the girl makes it appear that Jeff took advantage of her (to make herself look more innocent). For one year he cannot communicate with any of his fellow Jehovah’s Witnesses, even, to an extent, his own parents. To escape the torment of being shunned by the people he loves, Gabe hangs out in the library where he discovers a world of literature that he otherwise would not have been allowed to read. Kerouac, Henry Miller and Bukowski become his guides to the adult world and Gabe becomes a new person. Yet, there is still a part of him that wants to belong; a part that wants to be good in the eyes of his church, so he commits to do what he must to return to the congregation.

Gabe’s journey would seem like any other teenage boy’s, especially his obsession with girls and their body parts. Yet the pressures to conform to his religious upbringing and to try and please his parents makes Gabe’s story, and Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk, a fascinating and often, heartbreaking read. DuShane has a knack for writing from a teenage boy’s point of view and really allows us to see inside Gabe’s head. He’s a funny kid and a good soul. By the time the book ends, you’ll feel that pang of sadness you get when your friend goes one way and you go another, just like the end of high school.

DuShane is a journalist who lives and works in San Francisco. Besides writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones and Crawdaddy!, he also hosts the radio show, Drinks with Tony, interviewing writers, musicians and filmmakers. DuShane was raised a Jehovah’s Witness and drew from his experiences to write the book. Instead of writing a memoir, he decided that a work of fiction would make for a more interesting read. If Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk, is an indication of what DuShane has in store for the literary world, his is a welcome voice.

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Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Confessions of a Comics Shop Junkie No.6

by Johnny Bacardi

Continuing to take the opportunity to point out various releases of the graphic narrative-type variety that I deem noteworthy for this or that reason, some of which may even be on sale at a comics shop of retail bookstore near you if you’re lucky…or not, as the case may be.

THE WEIRD WORLD OF JACK STAFF #1
Script/Art: Paul Grist
Image Comics, $3.50 per issue

Jack Staff began as a pitch for a series starring Marvel’s Union Jack character; when that didn’t happen, Grist decided to rework it and put it out on his own after he put his excellent Kane series on hiatus. It gave us the exploits of one John Smith, who fought evil during WWII in a Union Jack-style costume and a staff through which he channels energy, hence the title, along with a large cast of characters that include a host of WWII-era Invaders simulacrums, one Becky Burdock, Vampire Reporter, a pert young lady in big glasses and a penchant for wearing the same outfit day after day- and oh yeah, she’s a vampire. Who writes for a small town scandal sbeet newspaper. There’s also Bramble and Son, Vampire Hunters, Tom Tom the Robot Man (who’s actually neither), the Q Divison, which investigates the “question mark crimes”, Ben Kulmer alias the Claw, The Spider (who Jack fought in WWII), Charlie Raven, the World’s Greatest Escapologist, and…well, you get the picture.  After 10 years, which included 12 self-published black and white issues, as well as a much-hyped color relaunch via Image which has come out on an infrequent bases for 20 issues, with so-so sales figures to boot, someone decided another relaunch was in order. Thus we have Weird World, which is being presented as something of a return to the character’s roots, indeed, to the point where the author almost seems apologetic in the inside cover editorial for the complexity of the tale he’s presented so far. Grist is a wildly imaginative storyteller with a daredevil sense of page design and storytelling chops; he also has a nicely understated writing style, dryly witty and never lapsing into comicbookspeak. If you’ve never read a Grist story, then you’re missing out. That said, there were times in the previous run when it seemed like he was spinning his wheels and not really advancing/resolving all the multitudes of plot threads/characters he had introduced over the course of the decade, and the book was losing momentum, between that and the increasingly-infrequent schedule on which the comic was released, in part because he is such an exacting craftsman. Weird World opens with a scene almost exactly like the first issue from 1999 did, and even the other multiple storylines seem to be presented in such a way as not to lose the (hopeful) first-time reader. Yes, kids, this is one of those “good jumping-on point” issues you hear so much about, Grist wants to establish that while Jack is on the cover, he’s just the hub around which everything else spins. And I do suggest you do jump on, if you haven’t already; this is intelligent superheroics, presented with a maximum of panache and a soupcon of wit, and if you’re the discerning type of reader that I think you are, start here. It’s a good introduction which launches a typically oddball storyline, and if you like this, it’s easy to get caught up- all the previous issues are collected and available for purchase.

HELLBLAZER: PANDEMONIUM
Script: Jamie Delano, Art: Jock
DC/Vertigo HC, $24.99

Jamie Delano, who wrote the first couple dozen or so of the ongoing John Constantine: Hellblazer series way back in the pre-Vertigo late 80s-early 90’s (and had actually returned to script a fill-in issue or two at different times since), is back with a hardcover graphic novel that on the surface seems like the run-of-the-mill sort of situations ol’ Conjob has been dealing with since Delano’s previous tenure- demonic doings and conflicts with authority- but manages to transcend that. Delano teams up with Jock, of Losers fame and more recently, filling in for J.H. Williams III on the Batwoman feature in Detective, to bring us a longform account of Constantine, coerced by British Military Intelligence into helping them with the threat of some sort of demonic presence that they’ve apprehended in Iraq, but isn’t taking his captivity well at all, driving his interrogators to illness, terror and even suicide. With the assistance of the agent that was also coerced into drugging him and setting him up for a bombing and theft of Iraqi artifacts, John eventually gets to the bottom of what’s happening, and even ends up in a high stakes game of poker, yes, poker, with their souls, along with hundreds of innocents, on the line. What results is just part of the most entertaining Constantine tale I’ve read in a good long while, and I’ve been reading ‘em since day one; Delano gives John a cutting, nasty, biting wit and sardonic sense of humor that I just don’t remember him giving him back in the day, and Jock, with his angular, sloppy, but always nicely staged for maximum dramatics art enhances the script, making the occasional infodump or clumsy line palatable. Jock also does a nice job with the whole desert/military aspect of the visuals as well (unsurprising for the artist of The Losers); combined with his saturated color palette, all crimsons, golds and browns, they succeed in evoking the whole Iraqi war experience, at least what we’ve seen in films such as The Hurt Locker and the like. I don’t have a clue why this couldn’t have been serialized in the Hellblazer comic proper; the price tag is daunting enough. As I understand it, this was completed in 2008 and held back until the 25th anniversary of the character. If you’re a fan, you’ll want this.

POWER GIRL  #9
Script: Jimmy Palmiotti
Art: Amanda Conner
DC Comics, $2.99

Although there are many that would hold that the superhero genre of comics is mostly creatively bankrupt, and I can’t say that I’m not one of them on many occasions, here we have an enjoyable exception. After a tentative beginning, Palmiotti has settled into a very good groove with this title, which stars yet another DC character with an enormously confusing backstory and whose costume is an offensive symbol of sexism to many to boot. By emphasizing the ordinary, everyday existence of Power Girl (she’s even shown sitting on the toilet- from the shoulders up, get your mind out of the gutter- at the beginning of this issue), not only at home, but in her job as a civilian and as she encounters weird menaces too, he succeeds in making her identifiable and even more likable than she already was, despite decades of continuity shenanigans at the hands of various writers. Of course, a big part of the reason he’s been so successful is Amanda Conner’s art, a clean, accessible, and eye-pleasing style that’s as adept for spandex slugfests as it is for the lighter moments. This issue, she has to deal with a threat from the colleague/girlfriend of the Ultra-Humanite, with whom she tangled back in issues 1 & 2; Satanna (I keep either scanning/pronouncing it as Santana, or even worse, confusing it with Marvel’s Satana character)  is her name, she wants revenge, and she shows up with a posse of intelligent man-animals in order to achieve that goal. What ensues, after all the slice of life stuff, is several pages of orchestrated mayhem…but Conner draws ‘em so purty that all resistance becomes…well, if not exactly futile, then a lot more difficult than if your Ivan Reises or Tony Daniels were drawing it, that’s what I’m saying. Here’s proof, I think, that superheroes can still be done well, even by DC. The first trade is scheduled for release in April.

SUGARSHOCK
Script: Joss Whedon
Art: Fabio Moon
Dark Horse Comics, $3.50

Remember Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space? Well, Joss Whedon does, and last year he teamed with the prolific Mr. Moon to bring you an edgier, more out-there take on the concept of a all-female pop/rock group having adventures out in the cosmos. Between this and the Earthbound, post-apocalyptic Josie-meets-Mad Max saga The Apocalypstix, I think this sort of thing is well-covered. This was originally serialized on Dark Horse’s MySpace Comics site, and now it’s all collected with some production notes and sketchbook extras and so on, so you can have a physical souvenir of the experience. I may sound sarcastic, but I’m not trying to; this is tremendously entertaining and fun, and Moon does his typically stellar job. Whedon’s trademark witty repartee is in evidence, as well. Hardly essential, but a good time just the same. Maybe Whedon should have developed this instead of Dollhouse…

Thanks for reading, and see you next Tuesday!

Review inquiries? Send to johnnybacardi AT gmail DOT com.

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Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Confessions of a Comics Shop Junkie: Mercury, Nola, Supergirl, and More

by Johnny Bacardi

In which I take the opportunity to point out various releases of the graphic narrative-type variety that I deem noteworthy for this or that reason, some of which may even be on sale at a comics shop of retail bookstore near you if you’re lucky…or not, as the case may be.

Big news in the World of Comics this past week, as DC Comics announced the new management team that people had been speculating upon since former President and Publisher Paul Levitz stepped down, in the wake of Warner Bros. Entertainment initiating the company-wide restructuring that led to its rebranding as DC Entertainment, Inc., presumably to get serious about making inroads into creating successful motion pictures that don’t star Batman. The appointment of a five-person team has led to much discussion throughout the Comics Internet, with reactions being, to put it kindly, mixed.  I think that Dirk Deppey’s remarkably even handed take (unless you’re Levitz) makes a lot of sense, and many other more-astute-than-I pundits have weighed in as well.

Me, while I am a bit disappointed that the “Five Swell Guys”, as one wag has dubbed them, are firmly in a middle of the road (Golden Age fetishist and Black Lantern creator Johns and Image co-founder/artist specializing in hypermuscled and slickly inked superhero titles Lee are talented, but aren’t known for their innovation or groundbreaking tendencies in the slightest; neither is Didio, and he doesn’t even have the benefit of producing any worthwhile creative works to date) tradition, they still represent a inter-company continuity that should (one would think) make decision making and progress towards whatever goal they have established for themselves a smoother process, and hopefully will at least result in a few less fiascoes like the Minx line, a line of graphic novels targeted at teenage girls, but not getting the benefit of getting creators who had an affinity for that genre…it was canceled after just shy of two years, a casualty of a misreading of the bookstore market demand for such material, among other things. The others seem to have solid credentials in the disparate fields from which they come. Anyway, like I am so fond of saying, we shall see what we shall see. A successful DC is a good thing for comics in general, I believe.

Hope you guys don’t mind me getting all topical…there are dozens of great sites for comics news out there, if you don’t follow them already, so I won’t try to be Heidi MacDonald or Tom Spurgeon each week. Still, I think this column description is broad enough to let me hold forth if a sufficiently interesting topic rears its head. Just let me know in the comments if you agree or disagree! And now…REVIEWS! (more…)

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Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

The Chronicles of DOOM: “The Lord of the Logos”

by Ben Wiser

My copy of Lord of the Logos arrived just after the monstrous snow storm hit. While the snow drifted six feet up my stairs, some mysterious messenger braved the winter-choked wasteland to deliver it to my doorstep.  Actually it was probably just Hugo, my FedEx guy. I hurriedly sat down in front of the crackling fire and opened the leatherette-bound book that faintly radiated an aura of menace.

Lord of the Logos: Designing the Metal Underground is a collection of the works of Christophe Szpajde. Szpajde painstakingly creates logos for extreme and underground metal bands.  The pages of this sinister tome are crammed with thousands of band logos, all of them distinctive, strangely compelling and with an astonishing level of detail.  A tangle of Fraktur characters dissolve into streaks of gory pointillism.  Gothic letters burst into spirals of thorns.  Fluid lines metamorphosing into bat wings or chains, adorned with swords, wolf heads, and lots and lots of upside-down crucifixes and pentagrams, like a hellish crossover of Stanley Mouse and Ghastly Graham Ingels.  In others, there is an art nouveau influence in the fluid curves and arcs that blossom within the work that lends a stylistic elegance to these grim illuminations.  Others show an architectural influence, with letters forming structures of symmetric patterns like some art deco pagoda in the uptown district of Mordor. (more…)

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Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Confessions of a Comics Shop Junkie: Footnotes in Gaza, Daytripper, and more

by Johnny Bacardi

In which I continue to take a look at select bound-and-published sequential narratives of recent vintage, some of which may still be on sale in a comics shop, book store or online merchant near you, if you’re lucky…or not, as the case may be.

FOOTNOTES IN GAZA
Written/Illustrated by Joe Sacco
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company, $29.95

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that this is my first exposure to Sacco’s long-form work; while I’ve certainly been made aware of it in a multitude of places, the subject matter hasn’t intrigued me enough to make me want to sample more than the occasional piece I’d see from him in the odd anthology or website here and there. That said, I have been seeing his latest, Footnotes in Gaza, praised far and wide throughout the internet, in both long-form reviews and in a plethora of 2009 best-of lists- so when the opportunity to get a review copy of this work presented itself, I figured I’d better get with the program. I am not the most political creature in the world; I remain woefully ignorant, except for just the barest minimum of facts, of the whys and wherefores of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that informs this book. It just seems, in my unenlightened outlook, like a bloody, no-hope, senseless conflict that will never end. Sacco seeks to go back to the perceived roots of the conflict, by shedding light on two incidents that occurred as far back as 1956, and tying them in with the strife the region knows today. (more…)

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Sunday, February 14th, 2010

How Bad Can It Be?: “Neil Diamond Is Forever”

by Jack Feerick

In the abstract, Neil Diamond seems like somebody I should dig. Smart dude; good work ethic, fairly self-aware, tries a lot of different things. Steeped in the classics of pre-rock music, both the Great American Songbook — what a jazz cat would call “the standards” — and the Brill Building pop of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Impatient. Devoted to his craft.

And yet.

For whatever reason, I could never warm up to the guy — couldn’t even muster the heat to fire a decent hate; towards Neil Diamond and all his works and all his empty promises, I Was mired in savage indifference. A hard-working mediocrity, I’d concede — but a mediocrity for all that. Nothing to get excited about, for good or ill.

I suspect that even his fans know that, deep down, judging from journalist Jon Bream’s handsome new coffee-table book Neil Diamond Is Forever. (Oh, that title: really, Jon? Dude, for serious?) From the get-go, there’s a curious defensiveness to the enterprise. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

Everybody’s read one: a review deriding Neil Diamond as the “Frog King of Rock” or the cheesiest purveyor of pop on the planet. … The keepers of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame haven’t thought enough of Neil to put his name on the ballot, let alone induct him.

And that’s the opening paragraph, friends. That’s how Jon Bream chooses to start his celebration of the man and his music. Can you imagine a biography of any other star of Neil Diamond’s stature (and he’s still a pretty gaddam big star, even now) going to such great pains to point out how unfashionable its subject is — and then do nothing to refute it? (more…)

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Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Confessions of a Comics Shop Junkie No.3: “Demo Vol.2,” “Valentine,” and More

by Johnny Bacardi

In which I continue to take a look at select bound-and-published sequential narratives of recent vintage, some of which may still be on sale in a comics shop, book store or online merchant near you, if you’re lucky…or not, as the case may be.

INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #22
Script: Matt Fraction
Art: Salvador Larroca and various
Marvel, $2.99

Fraction is an insanely talented and imaginative writer who, when left to his own devices via works for smaller companies such as Casanova, can write some of the most convoluted and hard-to-parse scripts that I’ve encountered, anyway. Too smart for the room and eager to prove it, and if clarity suffers, well, that’s your problem, buddy! But playing in Marvel’s sandbox, he’s adaptable enough to be able to play it straight and keep himself honest, and this reining-in makes his run on this particular Iron Man title, launched in the wake of and based on the hugely successful film you may have seen,  successful as not only action-oriented entertainment, but character-driven drama as well. This particular issue is the penultimate chapter of the “Stark: Disassembled” arc, which follows up on the “World’s Most Wanted” storyline, in which Tony Stark was forced to delete critical information from his brain (it’s a complicated procedure, just work with me here) in order to keep it out of the hands of the sinister government agency that wants it for no good reasons. Of course, I’m simplifying this- it’s really all a part of the whole company-wide “Dark Reign” thing, which itself was a continuation of “Civil War”…which, well, you get it, I think. All this information overload can be daunting, but believe me, it’s not really a problem with this particular series; plenty of explanation is given at various junctures. Anyway, the corporeal Stark is now in a brain-dead catatonic state, and Doctor Strange is tasked with entering his mind and bringing him out again. In the meantime, a super-powered mercenary killer is closing in.

I’m not quite as enthusiastic about the art; there’s a certain stiffness to Larocca’s sometimes underdrawn figures that calls attention to itself more often as not. Still, he does keep the action moving along  at a decent enough clip, with good layouts and staging, so he gets a pass. Fraction’s run on Iron Man is well worth your time; you probably won’t want to start with this particular single issue, though. The first two arcs are collected, and I’m sure this one will be soon as well. Recommended, especially if you liked the Downey film. (more…)

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