Sharknife
Late to the party on this one. That's me.
There is more imagination and verve and power in three pages of Corey "Rey" Lewis' SHARKNIFE than there is in a hundred INFINITE CRISES.
LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH.
That is all.
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Late to the party on this one. That's me.
There is more imagination and verve and power in three pages of Corey "Rey" Lewis' SHARKNIFE than there is in a hundred INFINITE CRISES.
LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH.
That is all.
Chrysler Air Raid Siren, powered by a 180 horsepower V-8, capable of generating 138 decibels of sound. That's louder than... well, a lot of stuff, including The Who, circa 1980, who had the loudest rock concert on record at the time, registering 120 decibels near the stage.
Back to lurking.
you mix guys like Josh Fialkov, Kody Chamberlain, Tony Lee and Chuck BB together? You get something like Creator Direct, which has them all waxing philosophic and rhapsodic about all things great and small.
And maybe posting some art, too. Worth a look.
This blog interviews Mr. Stewart as well as gives a quick preview of his Vietnam War-era project for Vertigo, called "The Other Side." Go give it a look, 'cause you're not gonna see this stuff on Newsarama, sadly.
THE ENGINE is one of the best messageboards around:
This particular link should take you to Dave Gibbons' pencils and inks for a WATCHMEN pinup. Not something you get to see every day. And really, his pencils are so tight the inks aren't desperately needed. Well worth a quick look.
Ah, Howard Chaykin's SHADOW miniseries. How I love thee.
When I first picked up the book in 1986, I hadn't been back in comics long, and the most mature title I'd read at that point was probably something like WONDER WART HOG AND THE NURDS OF NOVEMBER, which was a paperback collection of a bunch of Gilbert Sheldon's WONDER WART HOG strips, which fit in well with my skewed view of the 60s as a kid growing up in the early eighties. It also wasn't particularly mature. I mean, yeah, it had mature subject matter (grafting SGT ROCK parody onto the complexities of Viet Nam, fer instance), but it wasn't a 'mature' work per se. And I'd been a bit of a Shadow fan, by way of my father, who had a few of the old radio shows on tape, and some books with collections of the covers and such. Seductive stuff.
I wasn't ready for Chaykin's take on THE SHADOW. It hit me in the frontal lobes like a semi-truck running over a hamster. Sex. Violence. Nobody liked anybody else. It was about as far away from the happy-go-lucky superhero stuff that I'd been reading that you could get and still be reading mainstream comics. It was a shocking slap in the face following a quick kiss. It was a bucket of icewater thrown on you just after a hot shower. It took no prisoners and laughed at you when you showed the slightest weakness.
Lamont Cranston? Lamont Cranston is a dissolute junkie rapist turned crime king. He isn't the heir to a Colorado silver fortune. He's a wheelchair-ridden telekenetic voyeur boffing his game-show hostess wife (who's crazier than a snake's armipt) by way of mentally hijacking his idiot vat-grown son. He's petty, venal, treacherous, murderous. He is not the Lamont Cranston you thought you knew.
The Lamont Cranston/Shadow you thought you knew is really soldier of fortune Henry Allard, spy turned oriental assassin, sent from the city of Shamballah as an ambassador and dispenser of justice. And by justice, we're not talking incarceration until redemption. Justice comes from the barrel of a gun, baby, or two mini-uzis in the Shadow's Case (though he seems to favor Mach 10s in the later series). Chaykin's shadow is also an elitist, chauvinist manipulator of those surrounding him. His loyal army of assistants? It's fairly clear that they're not there entirely of their own free wil. His two sons (by way of Shamballah) come closest, but even they are there primarily out of a sense of disbelief at the world that their father came from and more than a faint mockery lies there. Allard might be an unreconstructed bastard and pig, but he's also charismatic as any lead to grace the pages of a Chaykin comic.
And make no mistake, this is a goddamned CHAYKIN COMIC. This is a no-holds barred affair. Shotguns to the spyglass of a front door? Check. Septugenarian stuffed into a sparkletts bottle? Check. Mushroom-cloud obsessed ultravixen? Check. Style and panache enough to power a thousand lesser comics? You're goddamn right check. You want a taste of the eighties beyond the cliches of sitcoms? Get your taste right here. I'd say that it's a weakeness of the book, but it isn't. THE SHADOW is unmistakably of the middle eighties, fashion and culturewise. It out-Nagels Nagel. The Shadow is sexier than Simon LeBon (bonus points if you don't google the name to get the reference). Crazy sunglasses and Atomic Vampire style rolled up with Ernest and Julio Gallo jokes, all rendered in Chaykin's immaculate style.
Now, why is this book the template after which all superhero revamps are modelled? You were wondering when I'd get to that, weren't you? Let's take a look at a few things that THE SHADOW does that others have emulated to lesser effect.
Build. We don't see the Shadow until the last page of the first issue. And even then, it's just the dapper Allard. We get a sense of what the Shadow is, seen through the eyes of others. By the time we get to him, we're desperate for even a glimpse of him. The entire second issue is basically flashback, to Allard/Cranston's shiny-new-minted origin, but we only get a panel or two of The Shadow proper. We don't get action until the third issue, and most of that is in disguise. But when he hits the page, he EXPLODES.
Everything You Know Is Wrong. Cranston isn't the Shadow, Allard is. The Shadow's arch enemy is actually Lamont Cranston, under a variety of assumed names. The Shadow himself, yeah, he's an ultrabastard. But he's a compellingly and believably-written ultrabastard. He's on the edge of being un-sympathetic, and empathy is a long ways away. He doesn't love and cherish the world that he's protecting. He's largely mocking of it, superior in every way, which makes it easy for him to do what he does, whether that's mowing down mooks or blatantly manipulating his inner circle with his ability to Cloud Men's (and Women's) Minds.
Maturity. This is where most folks fall short, but Chaykin shines here. He's written a comicbook for adults, thinking out how the situation would really play out in the modern world, and not simply changing fashions or giving things a new look. Harry Vincent is an aging Lothario, performing parlor tricks under his old boss' assumed identity. Cranston is a reclusive and insane billionaire with a psychotic trophy wife. Vincent's daugther is a burned out FBI agent who's refused field assignment after field assignment and allows herself to be swayed by the Shadow, even though she outright loathes him for his stuck-in-the-thirties outlook. This is not an *easy* book to read. It'll make you squirm. It's respectful of the source material, but not reverent by any stretch. It is a nearly perfect reimagining of the source material into the time which it is set.
But it ain't for the kids.
Reading it and skipping over the period references, you'd swear it came out this year. Maybe last. Maybe. It has not lost any of its bite or become dulled in the slightest. Like a finely made knife, lovingly preserved for twenty years, THE SHADOW can still cut and make you bleed, even to this day.
To all of you who are swinging by for the first time thanks to a link in this week's LitG. Traffic has, as they say, kicksploded! I sure wish I had something to keep everyone's interest. Maybe I'll talk about the 1986 Howard Chaykin SHADOW miniseries and why it's a) so damn good and b) this weird, singular kind of event that's never likely to happen again, but has had huge repercussions in the industry. I'd even go so far as to say that it's had more influence than books like DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and WATCHMEN.
Am I crazy? Probably. But I'll try and back up some of those wild assertions a ways down the road.
Three hundred sixty-seven point five three three zero two.
That's how many times better the Emerald City Comic con was, as compared to the lackluster Wizard World Los Angeles show a couple of weeks back. This is what happens when you base a comic show around a diverse lineup of guests, give the show a local flavor with area artists and writers coming out to show off, get a venue that's roomy but not like junior trying on his dad's coat and place it in an area where you've got a lot to do after the show.
Okay, so that last part is a blatant lie. There's not much to do right next to Qwest Field. Sure, there's the Yelling Kielbasa Guy (who makes a better sausage than you're going to find on the inside--but I'm tasting the grilled onions thirty-six hours later) and the Pyramid Brewery. But there's not much else unless you're going to take a cab to downtown or have a car of your own. That much, this show had in common with WWLA. But the vibe was 180 degrees away from the oversize desperation of the Top Cow and Spike TV booth-dominated show floor in LA. I think the biggest single booth there was Image or Slave Labor's, both laden with wares and artists eager to talk with fans and get some comics into the hands of readers. This is a good thing.
Biggest lines at the show on Saturday? That's easy. Tim Sale/Matt Wagner/Bob Shreck/Diana Schutz doing signings and portfolio evaluations respectively. There's no no shortage of grist for the mills, no siree. Plenty of people wanting to get into the business. Hell, some of 'em had completed western/horror OGNs to shop around. Pity them the most, my friends. Pity them the most. Plenty of portfolios with fresh art, plenty of minicomics by local artists. Some of 'em were even pretty good.
Spoke with the nice folks at Mercury Studios first off. Steve Lieber is a sketching machine. "Fantastic four in a snowball fight? -- Can do!" "Fantasy elf woman? -- Can do!" "Thelonius Monk-inspired organic robot right out of the pages of MAGNUS? -- You bet!" Also met with David Hahn and was inspired by his inspired use of blacks on the BITE CLUB pages he had out to see (this work looks great in black and white.) He's also a heck of a nice guy to boot. Chatted with Paul Guinan about the finer points of artistic forgery and hoaxery, by way of Orson Welles' F IS FOR FAKE.
Did some wandering of the stocks. There was a bounty of cheap comics to be had. Some expensive ones, too. Cosmic Monkey Comics took the lion's share of my cash, but then they had copies of ROGAN GOSH and #20 (the benefit issue) of PUMA BLUES. But I'd been looking for both for a very long time, so I was a happy little geek. Picked up copies of the latest (gulp!) SUPERMAN books on the say-so of Graeme McMillian. Haven't read 'em yet, but if I find that they're not any good, I'm going to kill him. Kill him dead.
Ran into Ed Brubaker signing books over at the Splash Page Art booth, where Sean Philips was sketching. Chatted with Ed for a bit, got a look at his new project, which looks just wonderful with Sean on art. I'm really looking forward to it. And I have to say that I wasn't completely sold on his DAREDEVIL run. The first issue was solidly written, but didn't *move* the way I'd hoped. However, I'm completely sold on it, having read the third issue via photostats. This is gonna be good stuff and I have to say that I'm sorry I doubted where it was going.
Flipped through the pages of SLEEPER art (as well as some of Chris Weston's INVISIBLES and Cameron Stewart's CATWOMAN pages) and cursed the fact that I had to do things like pay artists and mortgages and things. Really, I think that money would be better spent on setting up an original comic art museum, but my family seem to think differently.
Oh, and on Saturday I ran into something that may indeed be a major turning point for STRANGEWAYS, but I really don't want to jinx it by talking about it in public. But really, could be a very big thing if it comes through. Hopefully by summer I'll have some news on that front. Earlier, would be ideal, but I've had to learn patience in this business.
Alas, no post-convention drinking or sushi for me. Just a simple dinner with the family on the shores of Lake Union and a pretty amazing sunset to go with it. Not bad.
Too bad my daughter decided to wake the room with a bloodcurdling scream riped from the bowels of Hell at 5:30 the following morning (with not much sleep the night before.) That turned Sunday into a sort of zombie shambling affair. Though I did run into Mr. Parker finally. That's Jeff The Interman and Marvel Adventures Parker. He's a good egg and the big two could use a couple more like him, able to write stories that kids and adults both can enjoy. I know, the comics industry is FINE with the readership that it already has! We don't NEED to worry about recruiting new readers young! Even so, the ability to do so is a good thing. Heard a couple of plots for the upcoming AVENGERS book he's working on and they sound pretty damn funny. I know. Funny funnybooks. We don't need any of those either, but again, having 'em around is nice.
Bought a bunch of cheap comics on Sunday (Chaykin's SHADOW and the Simonson/Muth/Williams MELTDOWN and some issues of SHADE and some Charlton horror comics for a total of about seven bucks.) I loves the cheap comics. Ran into John Layman and cursed that I hadn't brough his run of GAMBIT for him to sign. I joke. But his first PUFFED miniseries is still well worth reading.
I'm sure I'm skipping stuff. Oh yeah, the fire alarm that got tripped on Saturday that fazed precisely no one. People continued milling and buying as if nothing was going on and there was just the soothing sound of distant bees on the springtime air. I managed to take in precisely zero panels (of which there were only five or so) and only got one sketch, from Corey 'El Rey' Lewis of SHARKNIFE and PENG! fame. I meant to ask him if PENG! had gotten its title from the Stereolab album or not, but completely spaced on it.
All in all, a great show, and a good way to kick off a weeklong vacation. Of course, it's now a working vacation, due to some stuff that happened during the show, but I'll take it where I can get it. Pictures may be forthcoming, but I don't think I snapped a one at the show at all, sticking to subject matter like the rescue mission in Pioneer Square and sunsets through taxicab windows and the skeletons of decayed piers. Oh well, I'm sure someone else likes that sort of thing...