Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #68 by Drew Barth

Post-Friday

It’s the final Wednesday in this April that has felt like it’s lasted maybe a week, and we are getting reports that Diamond Distributors will begin shipping again come May 20^th. But in this interim, other avenues for distribution have opened. DC has completely forgone Diamond entirely to begin shipping select titles this week as many small publishers are finding ways to get comics into readers’ hot hands.

Two of the best right now are working with an entirely different model from the rest of the industry by offering incredibly high-quality work at a name your own price point: ShortBox and Panel Syndicate. While ShortBox’s work is going to be temporary due to COVID-19 circumstances (and is something I’ll write more on later), Panel Syndicate was created with the express intent of delivering comics at whatever price the reader wanted to pay. And their newest release, Friday by Ed Brubaker, Marcos Martin, and Muntsa Vicente, is the kind of work that you don’t just want to pay for, but you want to pay for it in gold bars.

Brubaker describes Friday as a “post-YA” story—works about teenage protagonists becoming adults while dealing with their teen adventurer past—and from the first couple pages the reader can already feel the long history between the two main characters, Friday Fritzhugh and Lancelot Jones. Friday has returned to her hometown of Kings Hill for her winter holiday from college and is immediately brought back to the mysteries of her adolescence fresh off the train. What Friday as a story does so well throughout its first chapter is to establish everything. Friday and Lancelot as characters, the unsaid conflict between them, Kings Hill’s child sacrificing past, and the current mystery Friday has been drawn into bloom within a few pages. As a reader, you sit and marvel at the precision of storytelling to show us so much so quickly.

This comic is filled to bursting with wonder. From Brubaker’s pitch-perfect third-person narration, to Martin’s utter precision in in his lines and panels, to the utter gorgeousness of Vicente’s tone-setting colors. It is near impossible to find flaws in this work as all three of these creators are currently some of the best in the medium. To take a moment for the coloring in Friday, Vicente works absolute magic over Martin’s line work. There is a moment early on in the story that shows a vignette of Kings Hill’s past with child sacrifices. Vicente creates what looks like a new palette for those couple pages by taking the existing palette and weathering it to the point where it looks like an EC horror comic on old newsprint. That is the power Marin and Vicente have—their evocation of hints of the past to precisely capture the mood of the story. Like I said, some of the best in the medium.

As the distribution networks of the past can completely stop, creators need a way to keep themselves going. When we have outlets like Panel Syndicate, and stories like Friday, we’re able to see where our models could potentially go in the future. And now is the time to look to the future and how we can support each other as best we can.

Get excited. Work together.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #67 by Drew Barth

Deep Time

It’s about mid-way to Halloween, so you know what that means: it’s time to talk about ghosts. The history of ghosts in comic fiction is long, storied, and paved with some of the best characters the medium has to offer. Everything from House of Mysteryand Eerie to characters like Gentleman Ghost and Deadman have created this wonderful canon of spooks. And we’re coming upon that again with a bit of a twist. Spectre Deep 6 is the first in a fresh series of graphic novels by Jennifer Brody and Jules Rivera.

Spectre Deep 6 takes the idea of ghosts and weaponizes it. We’re introduced to Captain Bianca Vasquez and the Spectre Program—a secret military program that takes the recently deceased and transforms them into spectral covert operatives. As a team, they get their orders, complete their missions, and receive “day passes” for just a few hours to exist near their old lives. And while it could just be ghosting around Brody and Rivera incorporate what all good ghost drama needs: restraint. The six members of the Spectre Program are still ethereal—if they are not contained by means of a personal bell jar, their operative suits, or the “day passes” they receive, they can simply dissipate into nothing.

These restraints are what create some of the most interesting character aspects in Spectre Deep 6. Through the characters initial introductions, we get small glimpses into who they were before the Spectre Program. But once they’re given their day passes, who they are starts to unfold and much of the personalities we had been introduced to originally begin to fall away. We have characters like Bart Bartholomew, someone who on introduction exudes a surfer-slacker archetype. But then we see what he does with his day pass and how he died. What we know of him is stripped down to its core where Brody and Rivera reveal this sadness and longing that we wouldn’t have seen in his original introduction.

And much of this emotional weight is helped along with Rivera’s expert paneling and composition. Many of the strongest moments in Spectre Deep 6 are when traditional panels fall away and the page is allowed to become as ethereal as the characters. Many flashbacks use this style and it really helps to create this sense of the world being intangible—the characters are cut off from the past completely and must exist in this ghostly present.

Spectre Deep 6 is a haunted sci-fi spectacle and this is only the first volume. There is such a massive depth of character and setting throughout, and with the story ending on a cliffhanger, you immediately want to reach over for the next volume. But that’s going to be a bit of a wait: 2021. That wait, however, will probably be worth it.

Get excited. Get ghosts.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #66 by Drew Barth

Crate Digging

We find ourselves in week three of Diamond Distributors’ hiatus from weekly comics, so it’s time for some catching up. Personally, I’ve been going through a backlog nearing two hundred issues, but during this isolation I’ve also had time to dig through my long boxes. There’s easily a dozen or more series in there that have been forgotten, but one in particular stood out from 1993: Sebastian O. A quick three-issue run from Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell, Sebastian O exists as close to a thematic prequel to The Invisibles as that pair could create without outright calling it a prequel. Touching on themes of alternate realities, dystopia, and societal control, both Sebastian O and The Invisibles explore Morrison and Yeowell’s comic rebellions at Vertigo, but the latter did things a bit more Wilde.

Sebastian O asks an essential question: What if Oscar Wilde was an exquisitely trained killer with a murder mansion? Sebastian O begins with our titular character imprisoned in an asylum in a time vaguely similar to Victorian England with more computers and machines than the time allowed. After breaking out of this asylum, Sebastian takes to committing quite a few murders in order to determine who had him put away and for what reason. The mystery begins to unfold and the world we’re present for takes its shape.

It wouldn’t be a Grant Morrison story if there wasn’t some mention of alternate realities. The story here begins its bloom with the introduction of the Magic Lantern and the idea that this reality isn’t the first or last the characters have experienced. Hence the computers, the teleconferencing with Queen Victoria, and finding out that Queen Victoria is basically just a controlled video on a handheld computer. We have small comments here and there about the oddity of the world, but they’re whisked away like dirt on Sebastian’s suits. Was this reality ever really the one everyone had been born into? We simply don’t know. But knowing Morrison’s past and future work, Sebastian O could very well be a part of the many multiverses and realities he’s conjured over the years.

As good of a story Sebastian O is, nothing is more enjoyable than digging around in a pile of comics and pulling out something neglected and forgotten for so long. And there is also little more enjoyable than opening up a comic from the 90s and seeing ads for already doomed products (oh Coneheads: The Movie, did anyone want you?) because hindsight is fun. But as we wait to hear more from the monthly comics world, we all have books we’ve yet to get through. Let’s make a small dent in that TBR pile.

Get excited. Get dandy.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #65 by Drew Barth

Detective of the Century

John Allison is one of the most consistent comic writers of the past twenty-five years. Starting out with Bobbinsin 1998, his characters and story evolved into Scary-Go-Rounda few years after (around the time I jumped in), which led to Bad Machinery, and a later return to Bobbins. But what makes Allison’s work so good and so consistent over these many years is how he is able to take a character from Scary-Go-Roundlike Esther de Groot and expand into a new series, Giant Days, without losing anything from her original voice or character after ten years since her inception. And he is working with those same skills with Charlotte Grote in his new series from Boom! Studios, Wicked Things.

If you’re at all familiar with Bad Machinery and its mystery kids, you’re already familiar with Charlotte and her companion, Claire Little. If Bad Machinery is a series you’re not familiar with, then now is a great time to get caught up as it is a stellar work of comics. And luckily, as Allison had done with Giant Days, Wicked Things is a new story and setting with a couple existing characters—you don’t need all of the previous work to understand who they are as they’re established within a few panels. And those few panels help establish the story here: Charlotte Grotte is nominated for “Teen Detective of the Year” before going to university and must travel to London to attend the award ceremony and, while in attendance, a murder occurs. From this first issue, we’re going full Agatha Christie in the best way possible.

What truly elevates all of these characters and their moments of humor and absurdity is the wonderful line work of Max Sarin. Every panel is packed with fluid motion, expressive faces, and the kind of keen sense for detail-packed composition that makes a reader never want to miss anything on the page. They help to establish a different mood and feel from Bad Machinery while still maintaining the heart of what made characters like Charlotte and Claire so memorable and endearing. At times, it’s like reading through storyboards for a cartoon as the fluidity sings through the bleed-space into each moment.

When I say that John Allison is consistent, Wicked Things is one of the reasons why I say it. Sometimes it’s hard to find a first issue I want to look through over again and again like this—for the Charlotte being the same Lottie I’ve been reading for a decade, for the art that springs forth with so much life—and it makes me so excited for how this medium can express so much on the page. And there is still so much to this story for Allison and Sarin to explore with the cliff-hanger the first issue ends on that I’m shaking with excitement for it to return. This is what good comics can do and it’s always time to read as much as we can now.

Get excited. Solve a mystery.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.