There were comics! We liked them! A lot! Whatever, I’m busy.
WHEREIN NO AVENGING OCCURS
Kittens: annoying.
Strong words for the internet, I know. It could get me stabbed. By some of my friends. But hey, at least I’ll have She-Hulk on my side.
The best thing about Avenging Spider-Man #7, by Kathryn and Stuart Immonen, is that it’s not trying to create another world-threatening disaster for Spidey and his friends to stop. This is, at its core, about a simple night at a museum fundraiser gone horribly wrong, because an Egyptian goddess and her embarrassment of kittens think an easily-annoyed, muscly, green lawyer is her servant, and only our titular hero can save the day by pretending to be someone even more important using a ridiculous costume just long enough for things to calm down. Basically, it is an episode from a mid-to-late 90s TGIF sitcom except with superheroes cast in the roles. Which is to say: it is amazing.
Therein lies the strength of Avenging Spider-Man. A month after Spider-Man teaches Captain America the importance of being true to yourself using the superpower of schmaltz, and only a few after the mole people’s mole people threatened to destroy New York, two of the best creators in the game can tell a funny, silly story about an odd couple and the cats who love them. Between Kathryn‘s skill for wordplay and Stuart‘s incredible talent for physical comedy, the result is one of the funniest comics of this or any year. Needless to say, I couldn’t be happier to give Avenging Spider-Man #7 the Gilded Erik Von Detten in the field of Yuks. (J)
STRANGER DANGER
More than any other book on the shelves, the Courtney Crumrin series typifies how much the comic book industry has changed over the past decade.
When the character was first introduced, she hit the shelves in a series of black and white mini series, each spaced out to give creator Ted Naifeh the time to craft each new offering. Each of those volumes were subsequently collected into YA sized collections designed to fit on book shelves, giving the series quite a longer shelf life than it had in the single issue format.
After the third volume was published in 2004, both Ted and publisher Oni Press thought that the series would be best served through the release of larger offers equalling the size and shape of two single issue comics - the reason being you could give the longer books a spine and have them sell from the shelves like you would a graphic novel - and then at a later date, you could bind the parts into collections along the line of what they had been doing all along.
Then somewhere along the line, things shifted. It probably started when regular prose publishers really started to push into the graphic novel business, the primary example being what Scholastic accomplished by colouring the Bone series and sticking them on the shelves for a scant $9.99 a pop. (Note: the price of these collections have been slowly creeping up since then, but the point stands.) In addition to this, the industry started to become more and more resistant to black and white books - especially those that seemed to ship on a slapdash “it’s ready when it’s ready” schedule. Much of Oni’s line was plagued with lateness, books often getting solicited more than once before finally showing up… if they showed up at all. In response to all of these shifts, Oni really got their stuff together, became the kind of company that would thrive within the new paradigm. They started making sure books would hit the stands as solicited, on the dates they were promised. They began to run most of their single issue series in full colour, which was quite a rarity for the company up until the introduction of the full colour Resistance series and The Sixth Gun. And now, on the tenth year anniversary of the series’ debut, a new Courtney Crumrin series is seeing release on a regular basis, as promised, in the monthly full colour format.
What a difference a few years makes.
So. History lesson over. What of the contents of this book?
Simultaneously introducing new readers to the series and the characters and providing subtle winks and nods to those who have previously experienced the world, Naifeh has crafted what could be Oni’s next monster series. Yes, as stated before, the series has been around for 10 years, and has gathered its own little following. However, it’s not a series that does Scott Pilgrim numbers… though it definitely has that potential. Crumrin follows the same patterns of, say, a Harry Potter, featuring a young girl learning the ropes of witchcraft while she deals with some extraordinary circumstances. Where it diverges from being a typical story of that ilk, is the tone. There’s a very dangerous sense to the series, even when the narrative sticks to an almost fairy tale type narrative, stating various horrors with a charming simplicity. The mix of the two feelings and tones works quite well - and that’s even before you approach the actual content of the story itself.
This second issue features nearly the same story as the first, told from the perspective of the new character within the series. Presented with the same series of events in just a slightly different way, you can see they way the rest of the world sees Courtney - and it is quite unlike the way she is generally presented in the series up until now. Old plots are revisited (with more than enough information to let new readers ride along unencumbered) and cast in a different light, and you can’t help but feel a little… scared? Which is incredible, considering how well you get to know Courtney herself over the course of all of her adventures. To be able to turn everything over in the course of an issue like that takes an incredible amount of talent - and makes for a stunning read. If you haven’t read any of Courtney’s adventures before, I highly recommend checking them out, either by grabbing the first couple issues of her new ongoing, or by grabbing the full colour re-issues of her earlier stories, which they are putting out in gorgeous looking hardcovers with built in ribbon book marks for about $20 a pop. A great deal.
As for the award we are bestowing onto this book this week… let’s go with the J.K. Rowling Ain’ Nothin’ To Fuck With Award - if only because we’re pretty big into the whole “self sabotage” scene, and not no one will send eyes towards this review of an all ages book because we cussed at the end.
Comics! The Blog: shooting ourselves in the foot since something something something something. (B)
In some ways, I feel like Morning Glories is a victim of its own buzz, its success and… itself. That’s not to say that the book isn’t good, or that it doesn’t deserve every single accolade that’s been proffered. Month to month, it is unquestionably one of the best books on the stands, and that is a real testament to the skill of Nick Spencer and Joe Eisma, who have succeeded in creating this ambitious, experimental, twisting world that keeps on building without ever getting too top-heavy. The thing is, though, in a comic where there is a giant spinning machine, a ghost, time travel, long-lost identical twins and prophecy, all wrapped in some explosive high school melodrama, it can be easy to overlook that the reason all this matters is because Eisma and Spencer are so incredibly good at the little things.
Jun (Hisao) has always been the most enigmatic of the Glories. He’s more reserved and withdrawn than the rest. He’s there for his own reasons. Before Issue #18, we’d seen a little bit of this, but in this issue, we got a good look at the kind of place Jun/Hisao found himself before heading to the Academy, a little bit about his mission, and a romantic encounter that both shifts the reader’s view of him considerable and yet fits exactly into what we know about him. This is the kind of little thing that Spencer and Eisma do so well. All the Big Stuff is important because of scenes like the ones with Jun and Guillaume, the stuff that doesn’t answer any of the big mysteries or introduce any new ones. And yet, it matters most because it’s about the characters as people. What Issue #18 did was give Jun reasons for what he does, and the reason give everything a sense of consequence. If something goes wrong with the mission, something goes wrong for Jun and Guillaume. After this issue, that matters. Jun was the Glory that took the longest to get this kind of set-up, but after this long, it’s also maybe the most rewarding.
A giant part of this is due to the superhuman efforts of Eisma. As good as his action scenes have been throughout the series and as well as he sells the mysteries and supernatural aspects, the big scene with Jun and Guillaume is probably his best in the series yet. It’s emotional, it’s passionate, and it’s surprisingly tender, coming from someone as driven as Jun. In a series that is so frequently brutal, this kind of shift means the world, and Eisma pulls it all off through a series of powerful images, culminating in two hands, intertwined. It’s a respite from the horror and the fear, and that means something not just to Jun and Guillaume, but to the reader. It means that there are stakes – real ones – to Jun’s story, more than we knew before. It’s easily one of the series’ best issues, as it causes everything else to shift ever so slightly. Well done. (J)
This is Comics! The Blog. We now commence our broadcast week.
