Each edition of SMD features Sort-Of Soundtrack, an optional metal song that plays in a new window. Click HERE for some raw-dog heaviness.

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Is your workplace committed to making the same mistakes? What makes a good boss? Tell us in the comments section! Feel free to use a fake name.

As you get into the story of Scarlet, a girl who was shot by a corrupt cop just because he needed an out after killing her innocent boyfriend, Bendis and Maleev don’t try to subtly coax you into the story by slowly building it with plot and characters.  After Scarlet chokes the life out of a cop on the first page, she goes through his wallet and finds $600.  Quite literally turning to the camera, some of her first words are “Don’t be so quick to judge, ok?” as in she’s talking directly to her audience.  And she’s telling them not to judge.  Cast aside the reality that this is a comic book we’re talking about and you can see that Bendis and Maleev are doing something kind of interesting here; they’re making you an accomplice in everything that this crazy red head does.

While at least one other character in Scarlet breaks the fourth wall, it’s Scarlet, this crazy, messed up, deluded girl, who does most of the talking to the audience.  Bendis has her constantly talking to us, explaining who she is, what she’s doing and why she’s doing it.  This puts the audience in different role in this book.  We’re not the passive observers, reading an escapist story.  Thanks to Bendis’s easy, conversational dialogue, we become equal parts criminal and thief as Scarlet bears her soul to us and we go on this journey with her. Bendis uses this one-way dialogue between reader and character to try and make an instant connection between the participant of the story and the witness of the story.

Bendis writes Scarlet to be a dangerous character.  The problem is that she comes of as equal parts righteous and petulant.  In this day of Occupy Wallstreet and all of its various local iterations, Scarlet feels like it comes out of the same place.  Bendis and Maleev are channelling the discontent with the way things are and trying to enact on it on a social level.  Where the Occupy movement is more financially or socially driven, Scarlet’s actions and movement are motivated on a moral level.  It’s not about the haves and have nots but it’s about the good, the bad and the ugly.  Scarlet’s crusade is against corrupt cops who took part of her life from her.  And she strike back the way any kid today who’s grown up on video games and Facebook would; her snipers rifle speaks for her and to all of her followers on Youtube.

Scarlet is as much a character from a video game as she is a rebel who is taking back society.  That’s where Bendis falters a bit with the character.  Maybe it’s her brashness, maybe it’s the repugnant actions (no matter how corrupt they may be, brash cop killing still feels like cop killing none the less,) Bendis is walking a slippery slope along with his character.  As he’s explored in other writing, mostly in Powers, a hero and a villain are sometimes separated only by the point of reference of the society around them.  In his and Michael Avon-Oeming’s Powers, Deena Pilgrim comes close to being one of those cops that Scarlet would target.  After gaining powers, Deena’s dark side comes to the forefront as she kills the criminals she was charged with capturing. Both Scarlet and Deena perform morally ambiguous acts in the name of justice.

Reinforcing the confrontational tone of Scarlet’s monologues to the audience, Maleev’s artwork is shocking in its clarity of her actions. His documentary-style artwork frankly depicts acts of killing and brutality even as it gives Scarlet a sympathetic stage to explain herself. Maleev’s characters and settings are captured with the stark reality of photographs, creating images that you cannot ignore.

While Bendis plays with a double reality of Scarlet, showing us the difference between the life she lives and telling us her own justifications for that life, Maleev depicts it all to show the reality of both her deeds and her reasons. Through his concise images, he draws the audience into the story, reinforcing the witness/accomplice roles of the audience. Maleev pulls you into the story by plainly showing you Scarlet’s life and adventures. He’s documenting Scarlet’s life as much as, if not more than, he’s telling you a story.

Scarlet is far more interesting because if how it is rather than what it is. Bendis and Maleev’s revenge story feels like it’s trying to be a catchy and gritty story full of snappy dialogue and shocking visuals. That story is only getting started in this first volume and the substance of the book does not yet match the style of the story. The ways that Bendis and Maleev suck you into Scarlet are still far more interesting than the story itself.

Each edition of SMD features Sort-Of Soundtrack, an optional metal song that plays in a new window. Click HERE for some noise.

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Is your boss a pinhead? Tell us in the comments section! Feel free to use a fake name.

This week, we’re looking at a new collection celebrating the utter genius of the dumbest comic strip ever created…

It’s hard to say just when and how the Cult of Nancy started. Oh, you’d always read the strip, but that’s just because it was always there, a lingering holdover from the mid-century, an era before the invention of such concepts as “taste” and “humor,” when the so-called “funny pages” served the merely utilitarian function of filling the space in between the TV listings and the classifieds. Nancy — which dates in its current form to 1938, and which sees nigh on a thousand strips from its mid-40s run collected in a handsome new edition from Fantagraphics — seems, at first glance, the very model of a placeholder strip, a daily four-panel gag machine with no discernible drive or development. No one, upon opening their morning paper, ever turned immediately to the latest Nancy the way they did with Calvin and Hobbes, the way some people do now with Mutts. Frankly, Nancy was always kind of dumb.

As it was meant to be. Writer/artist Ernie Bushmiller was creating with a broad and undiscriminating audience in mind — he referred to his readers, not dismissively, as “gum chewers” — and if Nancy hit the lowest common denominator, then surely that was the point. But after Bushmiller’s death in 1982, interest in his work began bubbling up amongst comics creators and cognoscenti. Nancy became the subject of scholarly essays; select strips were released in small-run collections. Comics theorist Scott McCloud, an avowed fan, created the surreal card game Five Card Nancy, in which players use random photocopied panels from the strip to create non sequitur narratives that, as often as not, were no more nonsensical than the genuine article. As cartoonist Dan Clowes (Ghost World) notes in his astute introduction to this collection, oftentimes affectation begat affection; what began for many as ironic hipster “appreciation” gave way, as readers delved into the mechanics an aesthetics of Bushmiller’s achievement, to a genuine recognition of his gifts.

Because Nancy possesses in spades the quality common to all great art: a singularity of vision. Bushmiller would often start drawing a strip with the final panel—the “reveal” of the gag—and work backwards, so that every element of the completed strip would lead toward the joke, with no extraneous elements. The effect was literally unmistakable. The clarity and unity of purpose made it quite impossible to miss a single punchline…

Read the rest of this article at Kirkus Reviews!

Each edition of SMD features Sort-Of Soundtrack, an optional metal song that plays in a new window. Click HERE fo ugly, heavy, subversive music.

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How does your boss do sandbag other people’s ideas? Tell us in the comments section!

This week, it’s a gritty exposé that spills the beans on a mysterious subculture of young people who participate in ritualized competition, a strange blend of music and combat, where the sequin-strewn survivors will envy the dead … ah, who are we kidding? It’s a book about show choir!

New year, new semester, and fresh episodes of Glee are on the air. And if the TV show is no longer the headline-grabbing pop juggernaut that it was in its earlier seasons, we have yet to see the extent of its true, long-term cultural impact—as the gateway, for a generation of high-schoolers, into the odd and wondrous world of show choir. Because the coming of the new semester also means that, all over America, real-life high school show choirs are getting ready for competition season.

Most of the kids taking their first tentative stumbles through song-and-dance routines set to “Carry On Wayward Son” (or “Paparazzi,” or “Only Girl in the World”) are unaware that they are carrying on a tradition that long predates Fox TV, Up With people, or the Fifth Dimension—a uniquely American artform with its own aesthetic, its own creation myth, its own subculture of rivalries, tribes, and factions. Mike Weaver and Colleen Hart blow the lid off this shadowy demimonde — for so long hidden in plain sight! — in their lavish text Sweat, Tears, and Jazz Hands: The Official History of Show Choir from Vaudeville to Glee.

I’m not sure what makes it official, exactly, but the authors have certainly made an effort to be comprehensive. Family tree-style diagrams of influential show choir directors and their protegés chart the development of different regional performance styles, which are analyzed with the passion and detail one usually sees applied to East Coast/West Coast hip-hop rivalries. Weaver and Hart trace the seemingly spontaneous emergence in the 1940s and ‘50s of what was then called “swing choir” to the heyday of Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians; largely forgotten today, Waring’s group was massively popular on stage and radio—even into the early days of television—and pioneered many of the artform’s conventions of technique, presentation, and repertoire. Likewise, the authors break down the minutiae of competition structure and scoring, in swift and breezy prose.

Sometimes, though, the authors’ drive to be definitive leads them down some winding avenues. The late astrophysicist Carl Sagan used to say that “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Weaver and Hart don’t go quite that far, but their recipe for pie does contain a detailed exegesis of modern apple breeds,a narrative of the spice trade from the days of Marco Polo, and a treatise on the rearing, butchery and rendering of hogs for lard (for that flaky crust, you know)…

Read the rest of this article at Kirkus Reviews!

Each edition of SMD features Sort-Of Soundtrack, an optional metal song that plays in a new window. Click HERE for a flashback jammy that’ll  make your explode, for realz.

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From time to time in the Elephantmen series, which takes place roughly 10-20 years after this prologue book, Starkings has tried to show the true nature of these creatures. No matter how much they are nurtured or shown love, there are these back doors into their nature at weapons that have been briefly but dangerously exploited. Armed Forces focuses almost solely on what these creatures were made for; destruction and battle. A brief introduction to the origin of the Elephantmen, with oft seen but wonderful Ladrönn artwork, sets us up to remember the nature of these characters. They weren’t created to be the cops and businessmen that we know them to be. They were meant to be missiles, tanks and WMDs for a new generation of war. Starkings has spent years building up these characters but here we don’t see the characters we know. We see mostly unrecognizable soldiers and killers.

The characters have been a big part of Starkings’ larger story so to make them into these unknowable blank slates takes away part of the charm of the series. Instead of knowable characters, Starkings gives us a much broader sense of the world that he’s been creating The subtext running through the series has been one of mistrust- mistrust between mankind and the Elephantmen and mistrust between the Elephantmen themselves. That’s just the way that Starkings’ world has worked but in this book, he builds the foundations for that uneasiness between everyone. Starkings takes his characters who have seemed basically kind and gentle in past stories, if not a bit too easily manipulated, and gives us a reason to fear them as they are clearly the villains of this story. They’re big, scary weapons made even a bit more terrifying because they’re also big, wild and dangerous animals.

Starkings has a cadre of artists working on this book. The singularly named Ladrönn and Moritat are joined by Boo Cook and Axel Medellin, with a bit of Rob Steen and Doug Braithwaite thrown in for good measure. Starkings’ eye for artists creates a wonderful canvas for his stories. Each artist has a different style, from to Moritat’s wavy line to Cook’s scratchy pencil work. They have to blend realistic looking war stories with these incredibly outrageous creatures, making it entertaining and horrible in the same panels. Moritat and Cook, the main artists of this book, have this free and easy style. Their art looks quick and immediate, capturing the spontaneity and brutality of war.

Moritat's Elephantmen

Neither Moritat and Cook’s artwork has a finished or polished look to it. Moritat always seems more interested in getting the image down on paper than he does over noodling every line until it reaches some improbably perfection. Even on DC’s The Spirit and All Star Western, which he’s done more recently, his artwork looks quickly done but not rushed. Cook’s scratchy artwork, reproduced from his pencils, is similar to Moritat’s but looks more labored over. But since neither artist polishes, shines and rubs out all character from their art until it’s lifeless, they create a urgency to their artwork, like they are trying to draw the war atrocities as if they were happening right in front of them.

It’s obvious that Starkings thinks war makes monsters of all of us. As well as seeing the characters he’s spent so long building up reduced to killing machines, he doesn’t make the opposition appear much better either. In the opening of the book, he introduces us to Yvette, a French girl who should be doing anything else with her life other than fighting a war. She should be in university and spending her weekends hopping from one Parisian bar to another. Instead, her brother Gaston is introducing her to the hard facts of war. Starkings shows her changing from being an innocent girl into being a terrorist, carving her name into the heads of dead Elephantmen. She may actually be harder and crueler than the Elephantmen in this book.

At least with the Elephantmen, we get to see slight glimpses of the characters we know that they’re going to become. Starkings gives us brief moments where we see the Hip Flask we know trying to connect with Yvette or when Ebenezer sounds and acts like the calculating businessman we know he becomes. There’s hope in these characters because we know their future. There’s none of that for Yvette. Her trajectory is just the opposite because we see her transformation into a soldier and killer. We see the scared girl at the beginning who quickly grows up and almost suicidally hunts and fights the enemy at every chance she gets. In the Elephantmen series, Starkings shows us how war machines become human but in this book, it is about how a girl becomes a killer.

Even with all of the character work and questions of morality that shore up the story in Elephantmen Volume 00: Armed Forces, Starkings writes a story that’s ultimately a huge adventure. It’s a comic book war story in the great tradition of Sergeants Rock and Fury but fought by rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses. Thanks to Richard Starkings’ excellent lettering fonts and skills, it’s a loud comic that works in really subtle ways. It’s full of brash characters and actions but Starkings always manages to work in just enough nuance with the characters and their world. He gives this story just enough subtext so it works as more than a monsters vs. humans story.

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What does your XO do to drive you crazy? Isn’t the chicken song awesome? Tell us in the comments section!

Welcome to the first Confessions of 2012! I really meant to have this up two weeks ago, but life sometimes gets in the way of my writing “career” and this was one of those times. Anyway, as always, this is where I opine on various recently released publications of the sequential graphic nature, some of which may be sitting on the rack at a comics shop, or awaiting the click of a button on some online merchant’s web page, near you. If you’re lucky. Or not, as the case may be.

PROPHET #21
Script: Brandon Graham; Art: Simon Roy
Image, $2.99

Don’t really know about this this title’s previous history (it was an early 90′s Rob Liefeld Image/Extreme- which says it all- title, as I understand it), don’t really care. This is a reimagining (and relaunch, continuing the original run’s numbering, which is kinda rare these days) by the monstrously talented Brandon (King City) Graham, script only this time, with Simon Roy (who I was previously unfamiliar with) on art . Graham concocts a scenario in which our boy, one John Prophet, who has apparently been genetically engineered to be a super-soldier of some sort, is awakened from cryo-sleep and heads out into a future Earth, which now apparently is populated mostly with monsters and aliens, looking for his contact to find out what his mission is. Which is a dry recap, I know, but believe me that it’s the details which make this comic as remarkable as it is…Graham has imagination to spare, and delivers a truly weird and offbeat world of bizarre creatures for Prophet to interact with, and artist Roy does an excellent job of maintaining that otherworldly verisimilitude, in his somewhat sketchy style that reminds me a bit of a cross between Geoff Darrow and Guy Davis. The ability to take a run of the mill premise like this and make it into something special is the hallmark of the greats, and Graham demonstrates that ability here. Hope he keeps it up, and I’m not betting against it. A preview can be seen right here.

FATALE #1
Script: Ed Brubaker; Art: Sean Phillips
Image Comics, $3.50

Ed Brubaker sure loves his noir, yes he does…and even though he’s as good at it as anyone currently pressing keys, I’m sure that the inherent limitations to the whole genre must test his patience sometimes. Or perhaps I’m just projecting my own frustrations with the genre on him, who knows. With last year’s Criminal: The Last of the Innocents we saw his willingness to play around with the format, as he grafted noir tropes with Archie comics and came up with something pretty unique, in its way. So it stands to reason that Ed would want to color even further outside the lines, so here we have Fatale, which promises to be the great Mickey Spillane/H.P. Lovecraft mashup that nobody even knew they wanted. At its base, it’s got the typical elements- young fella at his novelist grandfather’s funeral, meets a mysterious dame. Goes to grandpa’s house later, discovers a manuscript that dates from before his first novel was published. Big goons in dark coats, bowler hats, and sunglasses arrive, straight outta Dark City, with no good intent. He’s saved by the same mysterious dame, and they flee in her car, which she drives off a cliff, and causes young fella (Nicholas, not Nick, Raines) to lose a leg. In the hospital, he begins to read the manuscript (which said mysterious dame thoughtfully left for him) and observes that it seems to be an account of another Raines (his dad?) and his encounter with that very same apparently eternally youthful mysterious dame, corrupt cops, and the occult forces who seem to threaten or assist everyone. It’s an ambitious mashup of stuff, and while I must admit to losing my place a couple of times as Brubaker kept feverishly adding new people to the mix, it does seem to be gearing up for quite an adventure, along with the inevitable unhappy ending for almost everyone concerned. Phillips does his usual reliably solid job- he can spot a black like nobody’s business- with only a few odd faces (most likely the product of rushing, I’d say) to mar the proceedings- e.g. page three, panel five, which kinda looks like it was painted by numbers. Be that as it may, this promises to be yet another series that I’m sure will find its way onto many best of 2012 lists, maybe even mine. Might as well get in on the beginning!

WALT DISNEY’S DONALD DUCK: LOST IN THE ANDES
Scripts/Art: Carl Barks
Fantagraphics Books, $24.99

Here’s a shocking confession…I have never been what you could call a big fan of Barks’ celebrated Duck books. There, I said it. It’s not that I don’t recognize Barks’ superior talents, or understand why many revere him, and his work, so much…but I think the fault lies with me and my relative lack of interest in funny animal type scenarios, which peaked sometime around the time when I was in first grade…it’s not that I didn’t read or like “funny animal” comics (and I fully recognize that there are many for whom that term is complete anathema), but they always just seemed to me like kid’s stuff, and therefore beneath my notice. Of course, this is far from the reality of it, and (I like to think) to my credit I did eventually catch on to Barks’ brilliance as a (theoretical) adult…but to this day I generally tend to overlook this sort of thing. But, Fantagraphics is doing their best to get me to change my ways, reprinting all sorts of great stuff, including last year’s fine Mickey Mouse collection. Now, here’s this, a nicely packaged collection of a handful (four long form, and nine shorter ones) of Barks Duck stories from the prime of his career, and best of all, they’re new to me save one, which I read a handful of times as a grade schooler and remember fondly. That one is the second story in this collection, titled “The Golden Christmas Tree”, and it’s every bit as lively and imaginative as I remember it, and it was a stone blast to read again. The other stories are a fun read, too- things happen at a breakneck pace most of the time, and even the occasional down period is there to advance the story one way or another. Best of all, in the back of the book we’re given story notes, which are well-written and fascinating, and I learned a few things, duck-ignorant as I tend to be. One caveat- those who are sensitive to issues involving depictions of race or gender attitudes in our popular entertainment should be aware that one or two of these selections, which date from the late Forties, definitely uses the stereotypical depictions and attitudes that enrage those who get in such a snit about Will Eisner’s Spirit and Ebony White, to name but one example. I hope that people can get past that and check this overall hugely entertaining, and yes, important collection out.

STEED AND MRS. PEEL #1
Script: Grant Morrison; Art: Ian Gibson
Boom!, $2.99

I was fortunate, as a child, to be able to watch The Avengers when it aired here in the US on ABC back in the 60′s, and even though I was every bit of 8 years old, I just loved the whole daft package. Debonair, indefatigable British supersecretagent John Steed and his dynamic, witty, drop dead gorgeous partner Emma Peel (my first crush), along with the dry, understated humor, action and adventure, and the whole Jolly Olde English otherness of it all. Of course, resources being what they were back then, it took me a long time to find out the whole story, which I pieced together via articles and reference books, about the beginnings of the show, and how there were other agents that were teamed with Steed (such as the also-fine-in-her-way Honor Blackman, most famously known as Goldfinger‘s Pussy Galore), and how it was influenced by what was happening in Swinging 60′s London and all that. I even watched when Rigg left and the game but overmatched Linda Thorson signed on, and well, the less said about the mid-70′s revival the better. There are collections available, of which I have a few (I long to own the multi-disc Complete Emma Peel Megaset), and I still watch the odd episode to this day. Which, of course, is only tangentially related to this particular adaptation, which began life as a series of graphic novels back in 1990 from Eclipse Comics (now there’s a name to conjure with!), and which I bought back then as they came out. Of course, Grant was the madman behind Doom Patrol at the time, and I was very interested in what he would do with the duo. I had also, at about that time, acquired the three Titan Books volumes of The Ballad of Halo Jones, and had enjoyed Ian Gibson’s art on that Alan Moore-scripted series very much as well. So, it stands to reason that I’d like it very much, right? Well…no. My memories of reading that series were of mild disappointment; Morrison’s modern, albeit Scots/British, voice just not quite hitting the sweet spot insofar as the oddball Albert Fennell/Brian Clemens-imagined vision of Steed and Peel and their world, and their dialogue was a bit off as well. Gibson did a fine job of visualizing the proceedings in his stylized, somewhat loose style, but it lacked a certain something that I was looking for in my Avengers, and so while I dutifully completed my run, I remember being happy when it was done. So now, what do I think some twenty-odd years later, rereading the first chapters after all that time? Well, I’m thinking I was a bit harsh on it, actually. As the years have gone by, I’m more used to Morrison’s quirks, which back then could be almost as twee as Gaiman’s, and I kinda like his more authority-wary and cynical Steed. Guess it takes 22 years to achieve objectivity. Gibson’s work hasn’t aged as well, sorry to say; he has such an odd way of drawing faces, poses and feet that it distracts more than captivates me. It worked well in the straight SF world of Halo Jones, and not so much in the whimsical pseudo-reality of The Avengers. When it comes to the adventures of John and Emma, the TV series is still your best bet, in whatever format you can access it in. Still, this adaptation is not without its merits, and will do in a pinch.

THE DEFENDERS #’s 1,2
Script: Matt Fraction; Art: Terry & Rachel Dodson
Marvel Comics, $3.99

Marvel’s gone back to this well once more, keeping the “Defenders” name out there in print. It does have some heavy hitting talent behind it; Fraction is firmly entrenched at the House that Stan and Jack Built, carving out his niche slowly but surely over the last few years, and the Dodsons are among the go-to artists for stylish, snappy superheroics with a hint of cheesecake, (cf. Adam Hughes, Frank Cho). This is mostly boilerplate team-comic dynamics; a terrible, world-threatening menace is loose, and Dr. Strange, at the behest of the green Hulk, seeks out Namor (callback to the 70′s #1, y’see), as well as the Red She-Hulk (how damned many Hulks are there at Marvel these days? I haven’t been paying attention), Iron Fist (I like Iron Fist, and his participation is one reason why I wanted to read this), and the Silver Surfer to combat said world threatening menace, which is heading straight for Wundagore Mountain. When they arrive, their reception is less friendly than they had hoped for, not in small part to the machinations of old FF (and original Defenders, too, if I’m not mistaken) villain Prester John. By now, I think you may be noticing a trend here, and it’s not exclusive to this or any one particular Marvel comic these days…back in the classic era, Stan and Jack and Steve and Roy and whoever else might be involved created new properties, or at least recycled old, fallen-into-disuse ones. These days, and again I stress it’s not just this but most Marvel books, it seems to be all about taking the set of blocks that have previously been established and tweaking them into whatever configuration the writer or editor seems necessary to capture the fleeting fanman interest. As Seinfeld so famously said, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that”, but it just struck me how there is so little that’s actually new under the Marvel sun…and the presence of a red She-Hulk is just one example. Anyway, back to this particular revival, it’s pretty well done- Fraction always writes snappy dialogue, and the story moves along briskly without the tendency towards self-indulgent convolution on display in Casanova. Characterization is mostly well done, especially Danny Rand and Namor, but his Doc Strange displays some rather dickish tendencies that I’m not sure I like very much- albeit that is a cute scene in #2 in which he tells Red She Hulk something apparently really ghastly/disgusting that makes her change back to human form and enables her to escape from the cage she was in that was designed to contain her alter-ego. The Dodsons acquit themselves nicely as well; everybody really looks good, and penciller Terry can do some dynamic action scenes. All in all, so far this is a perfectly good, serviceable cape comic…I don’t know how it stacks up to, say, current issues of the three dozen Avengers spinoffs that are out there or any of the two dozen X-Men, and I’m not ready to put it in the Thunderbolts or Daredevil tier just yet. Bears watching, though.

The Return of the All Purpose Review Writing Music List! This one’s been so long in the making that I can’t possibly list all the albums I’ve listened to since the end of December, but here’s some of the ones I’ve had on lately: Badfinger- No Dice; Wendy Waldman- Gypsy Symphony; Wilco- The Whole Love; Trombone Shorty- For True; The Rolling Stones- Some Girls (Deluxe Edition- the bonus disc is killer); Harry Nilsson- A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night; Michael Nesmith- Pretty Much Your Standard Ranch Stash.

Thanks, as always, for your patience and for reading. Review inquiries: johnnybacardi AT gmail.