Zip! Bang! Zot! It's The Librarians!

One of the old TPBs in the Last Shortbox is Zot! Book One (Eclipse Books:1990), which collects the first half of the original ten-issue color run of Zot!, Scott McCloud's whimsical-yet-thoughtful take on the Flash Gordon style of adventure story. I have always liked this series, mostly for its mischievous tone, as it apparently alternates between parody and hommage of its source material. McCloud's talent is clearly in its developmental stage here: the illustrations are as masterfully expressive as any of his art, but he doesn't seem to display the same easy command of line and form as in his later work, and the plot can be pretty pedestrian. It's well worth a read, however, and not just for its historical value.





I recently acquired another Zot! collection:


Zot!
The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991
By Scott McCloud (HarperCollins: 2008)

This is a heckuva book: 576 pages of the second, black-and-white run of the title, much of which I have never seen before. It includes some commentary, some never-published art, and extras like that. I think there's some manga influence going on, in that it has been published in a sort-of digest-size (6" x 9") rather than tradition comic book/TPB size. (Am I just demonstrating my calcification when I prefer my graphic books in the "proper" size? I suppose I am.) I haven't had a chance to read all the way through yet, but I am looking forward to further exploring the early work of someone we may forget is an important comics creator as well as theorist.

The reason I mention the book now, rather than waiting to provide a full review later, is to highlight my source: Leslie, one of the librarians up at the University of Washington - Bothell / Cascadia Community College library, on the campus where I teach. This is not the first time a librarian has turned me on to a good graphic book: you may remember when Venta drew my attention to The Invention of Hugo Cabret. But this time, not only did Leslie draw my attention to the book, she gave me a copy - a signed copy she had picked up at the ALA convention. Truly, our school is blessed with the coolest librarians on the planet.

Yesterday, I took a ride up to my campus (even though I have taken the summer off) to return a library book (Fun Home, actually). As usual, I stopped in to chat with my librarian pals, and in the space of a few minutes of corridor-convo, we had discussed the movies Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and The Fall; Julie's cartoonist cousin, who may have found a publisher for his work; a possible conference paper to write on comics in the classroom, the lack of attendance at ALA by both DC and Marvel, and the perils of dogsitting. And I had a brand-new graphic book to add to my summer reading stack.

You can't beat that.

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Follow-up department:

Speaking of libraries, here's the review of the book Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow from the library-based and library-themed webcomic Unshelved. (Click the pic to go to the site for a readable version.)

In light of a prior conversation about descriptions of this book as a "graphic novel without the pictures," I found it amusing that a review done in comics format, on a webcomics site that often reviews graphic novels, refers to the volume as "a book of poetry" and "a novel in verse," and doesn't mention graphic novels at all. I would figure that if anyone was going to see that metaphor, the guys would.

Bangs, not Bams

I have been seeing stuff talking about Evan Dorkin's new book, Biff Bam Pow. The title rang a bell but the comic didn't look at all familiar (although it does look promising). It only took a second to remember what I was thinking of, and it was the work of moments to find it in the Last Shortbox:





BIFF BANG POW! #1 and #2
1991 & 1992: Paisano Publishing Company
Edited by Ivan Brunetti, with various contributions

I'm sure I picked these up new at Zanadu Comics in Seattle, In the nineties, I wasn't buying much regularly; the grim 'n' gritty, Liefield/Image era held no interest for me at all. This kind of oddball publication would have been the kind of thing that I sought out.

And it was oddball: an anthology title with a few continuing stories, it has an aggressively hip, art school, anti-establishment vibe to it that seems (from the perspective of fifteen years or so) a little contrived and pretentious.

The Fine Art Force, by Brunetti and Thad Doria, was a JLA-esque group of superheroes-based-on-art-styles (Impressionist Girl, Ms. Minimalist, Dr, realistic, Captain Cubist, and so on). It combined traditional spandex antics with art-based puns and in-jokes; it could have been insufferable, but it had a breezy charm that was hard to resist. They had adventures in both issues: "Hello, Dali!" and "Lend Me Your Ear" (and I'll bet you can guess who that one featured).

Brunetti contributed to a lot of the features. Here's his illustration of a slice-of-life story by Joe Schmitt:



And here's some early work by the great Jessica Abel:



Besides arty superheroes and the dread b&w autobiographicals, the series had all kinds of weird stuff. Ben Spide, Arachnid Investigator cast a big round spider in a hardboiled detective role; the Hanson Family Circus modified Keane panels in gruesome ways; Hitler's Sunday Comics gave Calvin's dad, Dagwood, Hi Flagstone, Dennis the Menace and others the dictator's hair, mustache, and evil personality; and It's the Precocious Little Shit was about -- well, you probably get the picture by now.

There were other, less crass features. Thad Doria tried some formalist tricks in a totally graphic story that had not word-balloons, but rather glyph-balloons: Agent C.:



My personal favorite was Lone Wolf and Bob, by Ken Hite, Doria, and Schmitt. Starting from sound-play with the title of the seminal series, the strip gave us the premise (without explanation) of a 16th Century ronin traveling in the cab of a contemporary semi driven by a tough trucker. In their brief career, they meet ninjas, a rival samurai clan, and an alien, coming out on top by a combination a eastern and western ass-kicking tactics. It was full of rollicking action and some surprisingly dry humor. Here's a sample joke, after Bob shotguns some evil samurai to help Lone Wolf out:



Overall, the books haven't aged extremely well: while the writing is sometimes inspired, it is often merely shocking for its own sake and generally undisciplined. The art demonstrated promise and potential, but occasionally careers into crappiness, and little details (like the lettering!) are often amateurish. In point of fact, there probably weren't a whole lot of resources available to Paisano Publishing (which I suspect was just Brunetti) and in that context, the books represent pretty good product. Check them out if you happen to run across any copies.

Note: Issue # 2 contains a house ad for issue #3, but I'm not sure it ever came out. The Great Comics Database Project has no listing at all.

Saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock...

A dip into the Last Shortbox this week for a look at an unusual hero, Retief of the CDT:





Keith Laumer's Retief, #1 - 3: Mad Dog Graphics,
April 1987 - August 1987
Adapted by Dennis Fujitake and Jan Strnad

When I was young, I devoured the Retief books and stories by Keith Laumer. For those not familiar with this source material, they chronicle the escapades of minor foreign officer in the futuristic Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne as he attempts to keep the peace despite the best efforts of his hidebound and petty fellow diplomats. Thoroughly suffused with early-sixties impatience with with The Organization, and informed by Laumer's own diplomatic experience, the stories showed how one man in a gray flannel spacesuit has to use his own initiative and bend - heck, break - the regulations to achieve his objectives.

I ate it up.

Don't get me wrong: the stories don't have any kind of counter-culture vibe to them; Retief is a loyal career diplomat. He just doesn't have any patience with form over substance or rules before results.

The comic books capture this sensibility just perfectly. Retief struggles not merely against the usually boneheaded, often selfish, and sometimes evil machinations of the various parties with whom he interacts, but also with his CDT superiors, whose by-the-book plans are at best useless and and worst counter-productive. In order to save lives, prevent war, and maintain peaceful interspecies relations, Retief must use wit, guile, and cunning, all of which he has in abundance.

Which is not to say that Retief isn't above the shrewd application of a little personal violence from time to time. Whether it be in ritual combat



or more in action hero style,



Retief can handle himself pretty well, thank you. But more often than not, he spends his time snooping around and asking questions,



figuring stuff out, outsmarting his opponents, and hoisting them by their own petards.



And in the end, Retief wins not just by beating someone up or stopping a plot, but by actually doing what foreign officers are supposed to do:



Each of the three issues I have is a done-in-one, but there's enough plot, action, and dialogue in thirty-one pages for them to be called graphic novels (well, at least novellas). This books are just dandy, every bit as good in their way as the original paperbacks I read, with the added benefit of Fujitake's exquisite linework. His draftsmanship is magnificent, and his retro-tomorrowland art design for the series is perfect.

If you ever have a chance to pick any of these up, do so.

Notes:

According to the GCD, there were a total of six issues of the title put out by Mad Dog, plus another one-off called 'Retief of the CDT.' Amazon lists a 1990 paperback, but I haven't found exactly what is collected in it.

Doesn't that recording device Retief has up there look just like an iPod Nano?

And I so want a jacket like the one he's wearing in the two-panel clip.

(The title of this post is Will Rogers's definition of diplomacy.)

More Glam than Amazon

Another dip into the Last Shortbox brings forth an unabashedly pseudo-intellectual (it says so on page one) comic which might have been an inspiration of sorts for the previously discussed Metacops.


Portia Prinz of the Glamazons #1
Eclipse Comics: December 1986
By Richard Howell

As the cover indicates, this was a revival by Eclipse of a small-press indie from the late seventies; I don't know how much of a "cult classic" it actually was, but I can easily see it following in the footsteps of Kurtzman's Little Annie Fanny, O'Donahue & Springer's Phoebe Zeitgeist, and strips of that ilk.

The Glamazons are immortal(-ish) men and women who hang out on an island they inherited from the "real" Amazons. Like some idyllic planet in the original Star Trek, they seem to do a lot of lolling about; each resident is distinct and individual to the point of idiosyncrasy (a gossamer-gowned nymph, cowgirl, and cigar-chomping lady soldier mix and mingle) and making bad puns seems to be the common pastime.

Portia is the daughter of the current queen and an Atlantean scientist; she is smug, snarky, and the closest thing in the book to a superhero, since she thinks (perhaps rightly) that she is smarter and more competent than everyone else. Here is she with what passes for an uncharacteristic display of modesty:



The story in this first concerns several Glamzons being mystically abducted and dropped, respectively, into Dante's, Sartre's, and Milton's versions of hell. Portia, of course, goes on a rescue mission, travelling by astral projection:



(That kind of breaking-the-fourth-wall schtick happens all the time.)

Portia travels by turns to each literary hell, first visiting The Inferno with Beatrice and then dropping in on the trio of would-be lovers in No Exit:



In each case, Portia rescues the missing Glamazon, gets to show off her knowledge of letters, makes bad puns, and is pretty insufferable the whole time. While not as unlikeable as the new Ant-Man, she's definitely not a warm and fuzzy heroine. Besides actually being competent, her redeeming qualities include her grad school intellectualism, which in this case shows at least as much familiarity with the canon of Western Lit as the Metacops did with history. Her confrontation with Satan in Paradise Lost includes this exchange over the often-attractive-to-freshmen notion that he is the actual hero of the poem:



I'd love it if my students engaged with texts to that degree.

Anyway, Portia rescues the abductees and wraps everything up until the next adventure, the title of which is announced in the story's final pun: Seven Years before the Past.

I guess the title didn't catch my fancy enough to continue collecting it; the internets don't have much information on it but they tell me it went to at least five issues. Looking back on it now, it seems a little to cute for its own good, but still provides an entertaining read.

And quite a read it is: I don't know if it shows so much in the clips, but this comic has a lot of words in it. I mean a lot of words. Between exposition, plot, literary explication, and bad puns, this book probably contains as much text as a whole year's worth of any current mainstream monthly. If nothing else, you sure get your money's worth in reading time alone. As a capper, there's a text page "Secret Origin of the Glamazons" that seems to be printed in about six-point type!



Creator Richard Howell is currently editor of Claypool Comics and is producing a "vampire soap opera" called Deadbeats; he has done a significant amount of work for the major publishers and looks to have built a pretty nice career for himself. I don't know if there are ever going to be Glamazons for the new millennium, but I'd probably check them out if there were. In the meantime, this one stays in the Shortbox.

They can't all be gems, I guess

Part of the intent for the inventory of The Last Shortbox that inspired this blog was to gain some understanding into my relationship with comics. I reckoned that looking at what from my once-extensive collection I had felt was worth keeping would give me some insight. With this title, all I got is "What was I thinking?"


Dino Island, 1 and 2 (of two), Feb-Mar 1993
by Jim Lawson; Mirage Publishing

I think I originally picked this up as part of my interest in non-superhero genre comics that were being published in the nineties with some frequency (things like Topps's Zorro series and Rascals in Paradise also come to mind).

The story begins in what I presume is some alternate 1942; our plucky heroine, Amelia (no last name given) is "attempting a trans-Atlantic speed record" in her P51-D Allison (a Mustang fighter) when she flies into the Bermuda Triangle.



In short order, she lands safely on an island, finds dinosaurs, stampedes a herd of triceratops to save them from some velociraptors, adopts one of the triceratopses as a kind of horse, and finds a community of other lost travellers based around the battleship Sturgis, which is moored on the coast. Along the way, she encounters a heart-of-gold resident (who acts as bartender), the hard-as-nails battleship captain (who runs the community), and the requisite professor-who-explains-stuff (who is, of course, short and bespectacled).

The comic does have some neat Dinotopia-style visuals of tame dinosaurs, like this scene of the community salvaging Amelia's plane:



In the second issue, Amelia and the professor investigate a massive monolith in the desert and an alien is captured near town. Amelia enters the monolith in a Heavy Metal-esque sequence illustrated by this (partially cropped) two-page sequence:



Amelia discovers another alien, who reveals that they are on an artificial planet (explained as a competing technology to terraforming) which is generated and maintained by the monolith as a kind of "model home" for prospective buyers. When Amelia returns to town with this news, she finds the alien has been accidentally killed and a flying saucer is attacking. She downs the saucer with her Mustang (although why she took a fully-armed plane on a speed-record flight is beyond me) but the community is practically destroyed. She checks out the monolith; it is sort of melting and not working anymore, and it is starting to get hot on the island.

The end.

That's it: the story doesn't conclude; it just stops. I had to check the issues themselves to see it was a mini-series and that I hadn't just stopped buying it. Maybe it was set-up for a project that never happened.

I don't know why this is in the Shortbox, actually. Unless it's here to show that the spirit of Bob Kanigher was passed on to some indy projects, there's really not a whole lot to recommend it. The art is pretty cool, with a cartoony funk to it, and some of the dinosaur scenes are engaging, but the story is ragged and desultory while the characters are unoriginal (even the aliens are uninspired).

It was probably just that the heroine is an aviator named Amelia.

Back to the Shortbox: It's about time

The original conceit (and name) of this blog involved a tour through the one shortbox of comics that I had kept after more-or-less disassociating myself from collecting accumulating. That concept as a driving force has gone by the wayside, since I discovered all sorts of other things to talk about and because participating in the interblogwebosphere actually enticed me (for a while) to buy more singles. But I've been meaning to dip back in, and here's a great title to break the dry spell:



Metacops #1 - #3, February - July 1991
Link Yaco & John Heebink, Monster Comics

This oddball title chronicles the adventures of the Metaphysical Police (the titular Metacops) as they travel the time stream to prevent those who would manipulate time for their own ends from changing history. This is a pretty common concept in science fiction and comics (cf. Van Damme and Jughead Jones), but this series puts a particularly anarchic spin on the idea: these guys turned the weird up to eleven. Take a look:

In the first story, Captain Jayne Mansfield, and Officers Leonardo DaVinci, Albert Einstein, and Delmore Schwartz discover that some BEMs (Bug-Eyed Monsters) have made a deal with LBJ (President Lyndon Baines Johnson) to help him win the Vietnam War by reversing the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. The BEMs send female Foreign Legionnaires on Stone-Age moas into the battle to defend the city; they are countered by the Metacops and their AK-47-wielding were-centurions, who help the attacking Ottomans. After some reverses, Captain Mansfield leads her troops to victory, although the BEMs in their flying saucer escape the Metacop zeppelin.



In the backup story, Officers Jimi Henrix and Nicola Tesla accidentally broadcast Purple Haze through an experimental amplifier, destroying the asteroid Ceres and disturbing Queen Boadicea, a renegade Metacop in exile in a suburban Mars community of 3,000 A.D. Boadiciea steals a time machine and goes on a rampage, trying to kill the human ancestor of her Martian neighbor (who looks a lot like Tars Tarkus), whom she believes was responsible for the noise. Captain Mansfield, Hendrix, Tesla, and Amelia Earhart chase her through time as she sinks the Titanic and the Lusitania and destroys the Hindenburg in futile attempts to kill her hapless victim before being caught.



Issue two contains what the Silver-Age considered a "novel-length" story. Commander Makeda (The Queen of Sheba) and Delmore Schwartz are stranded in 19th century North America while returning from a triceratops hunt with Hendrix and Einstein; history seems to have been changed, however: bison-riding Chinese are in a war with forces from higher-tech New Rome. The Metacops intervene on the side of the Chinese in order to obtain kerosene from New Rome to fuel their time scooters; they discover that this version of reality is the "true" one, and that the one they (and we) knew was an illusion. They decide to change things back anyway, tinkering with Chinese fishing ships and Christopher Columbus's diet to put things back to "normal" before returning home.





Issue three shows how Ada Lovelace, Hannibal of Carthage, Tesla, and Earhart, with the aid of Agent-in-Place Queen Kristina of Sweden, pit T-Rex-riding Aztec mercenaries against World War I-era fighter planes to keep Pan-galactic Weasels from preventing the concept of zero from moving from India to the west; the forces fight to a stalemate, but the Metacops successfully mitigate the damage to history.

The final back-up story in the series starts with the recruitment of Boadicea into the Metaphysical Police by Marie Antoinette, Sigmund Freud, and Leonardo. While accompanying Captain Bourbon to visit Agent-in-Place Kleopatra, the druid queen is tempted by access to Atlantean technology to seize power, and recruits three stewardesses in a plot destroy Tesla's lab in 1936 in order to prevent the Metacops from ever coming into existence (Tesla invented the Time Engine.) The incompetence of her associates sends her back to ancient Sumeria, where (when?) she is captured after a brief struggle and exiled to the 31st century Mars, winding up exactly where we met her in issue one, right down to Hendrix playing on the neighbor's radio.

Whew!

That little bit of chaotic plot summary doesn't even begin to get across the psychedelic nature of the series. Did I mention that the elephant Mansfield and Schwartz ride on at Constantinople talks, for no particular reason? Or that Amelia Earhart, for all her presence as a supporting character, never speaks and has blank thought balloons?



Or that all the time-displaced warriors keep up a constant stream of background chatter?



Or that we get a throwaway scene of Gilgamesh and Jesus Christ having a chat?



And one of Albert Einstein on mushrooms?



Or that the interstitials make Stan Lee's hyperbole sound shy and retiring?



None of this quirkiness is ever explained; neither is most of the history. While early issues held some biographic information on the main cops, the creators seems to expect the readers to have some familiarity with major figures, events, and tends in world history; I had to look some stuff up just to do the summaries. I like stories that presume some intelligence on the part of the audience.

I also like that most of the leads are strong women who are portrayed realistically - well, as realistically as anyone in this strange universe is. But the creators generally eschew the usual "good girl art" tropes: there are no gratuitous costumes and no pin-up posing, no "women in peril" stereotypes, and the main protagonists (and apparently all the commanding cops) are women. Somehow within this sensibility of anarchic fun, there's a more balanced treatment of gender roles than in is found most current mainstream comics.

But don't let that all good sense and intelligence stop you from just joining the party and enjoying a wild time! These books are not history lessons or social tracts; they are ripping yarns, full of action, adventure, puns, slapstick, and fun!


From my favorite panel: an exasperated Captain Mansfield.

PS: There is a fourth issue, that was put out by a different publisher, but I prefer to consider it non-canonical, because it pretty much sucks. Same creators, but the story seems rushed and feeble, and they went for some cheap T&A stuff, and there was a lot of filler included - not to mention that the cover has the crappiest registration ever seen on a "real" comic. So let's just pretend it doesn't exist, okay?

PPS: Sorry this post is late (although what else is new?) - I started it Saturday night back in Seattle and am finishing it Monday morning on the beach in Maui. Yowza!

A rumination on rumination

This week, I have been making by way through Locas and Luba: The Book of Ophelia (both graciously provided by a Generous Benefactor). I was comparing the work of each hermano Hernandez in my mind; I am a little partial to Jaime over Gilbert, although I think they are both masterful. I noticed a difference in their narrative style, and thought that it might be that Gilbert used more unmarked scene-to-scene panel transitions (type 4 in Scott McCloud's closure schema). Here, take a look:

The first transition is type 4, from the ex-girlfriend to a meteor in space (that had been a constant metaphor in the story); this transitions to the next sequence of three panels, which have close to action-to-action (type 2) transitions as the new girlfriend (in drag) beats up the ex and changes back to regular clothes; then there's a type 4 transition to an explanatory scene; then a type 4 transition to a denouement scene.

What is interesting to me is than none of these transitions are assisted by captions; there's no "The next day" or "Later..." to help the reader out. There's sometimes visual help - you can see the disguised assailant in the background of the first panel - but overall, Gilbert's style requires a lot of engagement and attention to detail on the part of the reader, who must note clothing changes, background changes, subtleties of dialogue, and other specifics to determine the movement through time and place in the story, and to make sense of the plot. McCloud would say that the reader is required to add a lot of closure.

I'm not sure where I will be going with this analysis; I suppose with both Locas and Palomar at hand I could do a substantial quantitative analysis of panel transitions for each brother, and see if that makes meaning happen. What I thought was more interesting, perhaps, was that I couldn't remember the numbering in McCloud's scheme, so I pulled out my copy of Understanding Comics. While I found the information in a heartbeat, it took me about a half-hour to finally pull myself out of the book: I was re-reading it yet again. Of course, I then dipped into Locas and Luba to look for a sample page or two. There went another half-hour, as I read a story I hadn't yet gotten to. So I guess the upshot is that if I am going to do a formal analysis of this stuff, I had better block out a lot of time.

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With all the obscure characters showing up in 52 (not that I'm buying it, mind you, just reading blogs), I just wanted to throw in my nominations for resurrection, The Protectors of Starzl:

Terrane, Ocana, and Etheran originally appeared in Justice League of America #18 (March, 1963); their story was reprinted in Giant JLA #93 in October 1971. After neutralizing the League, these dudes were eventually beaten by Snapper Carr, because their invincibility was based on hyped-up autosuggestion rather than the actual magnitude of their powers. I still always thought they were pretty cool, even if they were androids*.

Here they are calling out the League, and calling for a revival:

*The original story actually included a footnote to the word android and explained that it referred to "an artificial human being, made in a laboratory."

Totally... something

Not too long ago, there was a bit of discussion on the comix-blogs (Progressive Ruin, as well as other places) after Infinite Crisis on the (dare I say it?) artistic merits of Giant Company-Spanning Crossover Events, as well as their efficacy as marketing tools. Some of the discussion centered on the audience for these tales; were hardcore fanboys and fangirls the only ones who could appreciate - or understand - them anyway? Or would a newcomer to the [fill-in-company-name] universe be captivated by the breadth of characters and the sweep of the story and become a permanent fan?

This got me thinking about a different GCSCE, one that is in the Last Shortbox. It is a five-part prestige format miniseries, graced by superb Bill Sienkewicz covers:

Total Eclipse Nos. 1 - 5, May 1988 - April 1989, Eclipse Comics
Writer: Marv Wolfman;
Penciller: Bo Hampton (et alia); Inker: Rick Bryant (et alia)

Eclipse Comics was an independent making a run for the big time back in the eighties. They had some very interesting properties: the whole Airboy family of golden-age aviation-related heroes, including Sky Wolf, Valkyrie, The Flying Dutchman and others; original stuff from the mainstream Spidey-esque Prowler to the oddball time-traveler Aztec Ace; disparate insider characters Miracleman and Destroyer Duck; supergroups like New Wave; and the one-of-a-kind Beanworld were all published under the Eclipse imprimatur.

I read some of their offerings back in the day, but I wasn't a big fan, by any means. I probably bought Total Eclipse because I wanted to sample the line, as it were, and kept it mostly as an historical document. It has been over fifteen years since I first read it and likely ten since I last looked at it; the long span of time between 1988 and now is enough for me to have forgotten most of what I might have known about the characters. I figured this would be a good test of the appeal of the GCSCE: would this epic be accessible to a relative stranger, someone who was unfamiliar with the characters and the motifs, even if predisposed to the form?

Well, in a word, no.

To tell you the truth, I couldn't even really read the thing - it's nearly incomprehensible. There's some kind of plot about a reluctant immortal named Zzed who wants to commit suicide but can't, and who somehow gets involved with a bad guy named Nine-Crocodile, and there's some sort of cosmic maguffin that everyone is after, and different realities are blending into each other, and heroes meet and punch stuff to set things right. Whatever. In any event, there's so much that has to happen to make all these people meet each other that is just seems too complicated to follow or care about, especially if there's no special resonance with the characters already in place.

On top of this, there's just too much else to do while trying to tell the story. First of all, every character has to be introduced with his or her shorthand background story, so we get deathless internal monologues such as this one from the Prowler:



Shades of the Silver Age! Scipio would love it, but it sure gets old as character after character is introduced.

Even worse than the introductions are the juxtapositions. While the book tries to stay with a core group of heroes that seemed to complement each other, trying to shoehorn in every character published (that was the total in Total Eclipse, see?) at some point was an unworkable self-restriction. (I think it worked okay in DC's Showcase #100, but that was just really just a 64-page stunt.) It lead to a lot of dissonance, as this page with Spirit-homage Masked Man, Millie-the-Model-homage Max and Mo, and noir heroine Ms. Tree all responding to the same eclipse shows:

I think as a dramatic device, that worked about as well as that time that the cast of Friends was caught in a blackout that Kramer caused on Seinfeld.

But of course, it's really all about the tights 'n' fights, so we are treated to specatular battle scenes such as this one:

The bad guys aren't the only ones who are confused - I needed to flip back through the pages to see who was who, because I couldn't tell a lot of the time.

The upshot? I had fond, if vague, memories of this series and wanted to like it. Looking at it somewhat objectively, I have to say that if its task was to lure in new readers, it wouldn't have worked with me. There are a few moments of grace and humor, but overall it just seemed like a relentless crossover engine that just kept chugging along, shoving a new character into my face every few pages or so, characters who, however lovingly crafted by their creators, were reduced to stereotype in these pages. What this means in the context of Infinite Crisis or Civil Wars or whatever is next down the pike, I can't say for sure, but I think I'll likely give the next GCSCE a pass, as I have done for most of them.

But Total Eclipse sure did rock some great covers:

Definitely not in Kansas

This was going to be a review post, but it was transformed by circumstance into sort-of a hybrid review / link-post.

It started when I tripped over, I think via Comics Worth Reading (although I've lost the reference), a project that's been being published for a while now called Dorothy. This is a series of graphic novels, I guess, that feature a retelling of the Wizard of Oz story. It looks like a straightforward modernization / updating, with a pretty hip-looking Dorothy, but the most unusual aspect of the project is that it is a photo-comic (the 'model' for Dorothy is promoted as a bit of star). Don't go thinking Comic Life or cheap fumetti crude, either; the gallery shows a great deal of talented rendering work on top of the source photos. I think I would like to get my hands on one of these.

Well, this project made me think about an item that is actually in The Last Shortbox: The Oz Squad, a different kind of spin-off of the Oz myth. This was an action series from the early nineties that featured a superspy Dorothy, a not-so-cowardly Lion who was also able to transform into a human, a Tin Man who was essentially Robot Man (real close to the Cliff Steele variety, in fact), and a Scarecrow who was a chain-smoking, punk-styled, nihilist detective-type. No, really:

Now, being a scholar-type, I did a lit review prior to starting the post and found that Dave across the Sound at Dave's Long Box did a write-up on this series a year ago. Check it out, then come back; I'll wait.

First of all, I have to say that I beat Dave's collection because I have the first four in issues in the series. Hah!

Now, I think Dave's review got the series down well; his line about its being an intersection between Wizard of Oz and Commando is pretty accurate. But it was neither of those things that attracted me to the series; I am not a particularly big Oz fan and I don't like excessive violence in my comics (or movies). What was (or could have been) cool was the alternate reality that writer Steve Ahlquist created.

The heroes are members of Gale Force, a division of the CIA whose charter it is to investigate incidents related to U.S. - Oz relations. Apparently, Oz has joined the community of nations to some extent; travel and trade may be infrequent, but they do exist, and someone has to respond to the social, economic, and political consequences of intercourse with a magical realm suddenly existing in the 20th century.

And Oz isn't the only magic around: when Rebecca Eastwitch (the current Wicked Witch of the East) is auctioning off stolen Tik-Tok technology, the bidders include representatives of mainland China and South Africa, as well as one of Santa's elves and a delegation from Liliput. It is this last group that provides the most charming visual of the entire series:

The idea of Lilliputian' riding service dogs, complete with "Please do not pet me" signs, is genius. Unfortunately, there's not enough of this genius to go around: the world is not nearly as well-developed as Will Shetterly's, (it's even a bit unclear if Dorothy works for the U.S. C.I.A. or an Oz C.I.A) and all too frequently the story wanders into standard nineties grim 'n' gritty mayhem.

Speaking of which, look at the cover again: doesn't that have more a goofy feel to it, from the Charlie's Angels pose struck by Dorothy, and Face from the A-Team standing next to her (that's actually the Lion, not Dirk Benedict), to Cylon-eyed Tin Man and the comically grumpy Scarecrow? I think that's the note this comic could have struck more successfully.

And perhaps it did - one of the things I found out in my research was that the series actually lasted ten issues altogether. The artist changed with number five, but apparently the stories didn't get much better. Who says this? The same site that says the Oz Squad is making a comeback!

Apparently, the original writer and a new illustrator are readying a new version of the series for the 21st century. It looks pretty cool, and the site was updated last just a few days ago, so it's not dusty. I wonder if Dave knows?

Well, that revelation was not the last surprise on the yellow brick road leading to this post. The site that had the Oz Squad news was actually an Oz comics compendium page; as such it talked about Lost Girls, Alan Moore's reportedly pornographic story about Dorothy, Wendy (from Peter Pan) and Alice (the Wonderland / Looking Glass one). Now, I hadn't paid this project much mind (since I think Moore is a great writer but a crazy man who gets enough attention from the rest of the world and doesn't need any more from me), so I was only vaguely aware of its content; when I read a summary, though, something clicked: I had seen these three women meet in another story. It's a web comic called Cheshire Crossing, and here's a grab:

The premise of the story is that the young ladies are being kept in some sort of institution that wants to make use of their unique abilities; rebellion and hijinx, of course, ensue. There are some nice touches - one of the warders at the institution is a hardcore Mary Poppins - but generally, the girls have grafted-on generic action story personalities, the writing is pedestrian, and the art hurts my eyes, so I never really read it. Somehow, I'm guessing Moore's version will be more popular.

And now we have reached the Emerald City.

Bonus note: I own a DVD copy of the Wizard of Oz, and I don't know why. My brother gave it me one birthday. It is not one of my favorite movies, nor, to my knowledge, one of his; it was never a family tradition to watch it and as far as I know it has no significance in either of our lives in any way. I have no idea why he gave it to me.