Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #175 by Drew Barth

Criminal Compendium

I just finished up moving which means I just finished hauling my comic collection to a new house. This also means that some of the books that have been on my shelf for a good few years are being looked at for the first time since the last time I moved. One such book, The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics edited by Paul Gravett, is likely the oldest as it came about around the time I first started buying comics. As a compilation, though, it’s one of the most interesting books on my shelf.

What The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics is is right in the title: a massive, nearly five hundred page tome of crime comics from 1930s King Feature strips to 40s and 50s pre-code stories to a fold-out comic included in a single from Alan Moore’s band, The Sinister Ducks, in 1983. It runs the gambit of secret agent stories, tales of counterfeiters being brought to justice, and murders gone terribly wrong. But we find a comfort in these noir tales of stark black ink on newsprint that almost always end with someone being betrayed or caught by the law. Crime comics, for the most part, are some of the earliest stories in the medium to really gain attention next to their more gruesome horror counterparts. And yet, in a collection this comprehensive, it feels like there’s something missing.

Where’s Batman? The Question? Some of the original pulps from The Shadow or The Phantom? We do, luckily, have Will Eisner’s Spirit and Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond’s Secret Agent X-9, but that’s about all we would normally recognize. Compilations like this do help to showcase some underappreciated stories, namely a story from the 40s by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, but it does point to a larger issue in comics study. I can look on my book shelf and see compilations of short stories, poetry, and essays, but outside of Best Crime Comics, I don’t really have any comprehensive comic compilations. And, as so many creators have some of their best work in superhero comics garroted by IP piano wire, how often can we see a more complete look at the best in the medium outside of the occasional character compilation? Long-running arcs and character-focused stories are more popular in comics currently, but these shorter stories are where comics initially gained their popularity. When are we going to see them again in these compiled formats for a broader audience to see the best of the medium without crate digging?

Having series like The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics, or the now defunct Best American Comics, gives the medium a chance to really showcase what it can be. Nothing helps to get someone into comics more than just a couple really good short stories. But, as things are now, I can’t see a way for that to happen outside of buying a few dozen digital issues and picking out the best from those to give to someone. To really shine, though, comics needs a good way to shows its best to a new audience.

Get excited. Get compiled.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides 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 #174 by Drew Barth

Reaping Benefits

As anyone who is a fan of the classic The Mummy (1999) film or its subsequent roller coaster can attest, death is only the beginning. Every myth and religion and folklore has something to say about death and the loneliness that can come with it. But it doesn’t always have to be so lonesome. In the first issue of Grim by Stephanie Phillips, Flaviano, Rico Renzi, and Tom Napolitano, we get to see the facet of death being a kind of ending for some and a new beginning for others, whether they want it or not.

Jessica Harrow is a reaper and is one of many. Trusted with ferrying the recently departed to the grand waiting room, she is on a routine reaping for Bryan Andrews’ soul. He experiences, like the reader, what this entails. From the doubt of being dead and the grappling of his own mortality to sailing down a river of punished souls, we get to see the slow process of a new soul being transported and having to wait for whatever comes next for them. But there’s a complication. The multitude of reapers all have a device, an incorporeal scythe, which they use to traverse the river of souls and open their way into the afterlife. Jessica’s scythe, however, was pick-pocketed by Bryan shortly after their arrival. He uses said scythe to escape to the living world to yell at his former girlfriend while Jessica hunts him down but, in the process, can now be seen by the living around her.

What Phillips, Flaviano, Renzi, and Napolitano excel at throughout this first issue, though, is the idea of the reapers. We’ve seen similar aspects in other media, but those have typically been similarly uniformed teams or the odd one out among their contemporaries. But here we have each reaper as individuals—each one with a personality and a style unique to themselves from across time. It helps to reinforce this idea of the afterlife as this grand waiting room with the reapers just being there to do a job. While they don’t clock in and out, they’re basically the office workers of the afterlife. And, in a way, it works to demystify this aspect of death and dying. It’s regular. It’s routine. These reapers can stand out as individuals, but they’re only there to help the process of death run smoothly.

For a first issue, Grim works well in establishing the world and tone it will likely follow throughout the series. As a comic about death, there is that sense of melancholy, but there’s this streak of oddity that comes with the reapers that we’ve seen so far. Having this balance between the idea of death and all of the weight that carries with the gallows humor of those tasked with enforcing it is going to be important, but from what’s been shown here, Phillips, Flaviano, Renzi, and Napolitano can absolutely make it work.

Get excited. Get dead.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides 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 #173 by Drew Barth

Lingering

A long while ago, I wrote about the first issue of Friday by Ed Brubaker, Marcos Martín, and Muntsa Vicente. It was one of the best examples of the post-YA genre at the time of publication and another piece of Panel Syndicate’s ever-growing digital publishing wheelhouse. But that was two years ago. Since then, there’s been a few changes. A few more issues have released and the first three have been compiled into a physical collection for your bookshelf. In that time, these few issues have shown that they’re still some of the best comics to come out this decade.

The last time we had seen Friday, we were introduced to Friday Fitzhugh and the town of Kings Hill. Friday was returning to her hometown after a couple months in college for Christmas and was immediately roped into another mystery by her friend, Lancelot Jones. The pair, before Friday left for college, had been inseparable. They had solved mysteries around Kings Hill for years together—many more than should be possible for a town of less than a thousand people—and went back into the same groove upon Friday’s return. But that groove also let Lancelot avoid having any kind of discussion with Friday about what happened between them before she left. Or that the case they are working on is somehow linked to dreams Friday has been having. Or that there are other forces outside of their typical scope looking to ensure they don’t solve this case.

Friday, as it is right now, is easily some of the best illustrative work Martín has put out. And with Vicente on colors, the pages of this story fully envelop the eye. And some of this comes with the idea that nearly every major moment in the story has its own color palette. Much of the story takes place with an interplay between blue and yellow—a contrast that creates a more muted mood as these are primarily utilized in the woods of Kings Hill. But there are interruptions of that palette. A sudden red sky in the middle of the night or a panel of a character with the background a singular color snaps the eye into attention. It is drawn in and enveloped as the yellows and blues blend into reds and purples before this chapter of the story closes. Those specific moments are stitched into a reader’s memory as a result of the colors that become so strongly associated with them.

It’s difficult to overstate just how good of a comic Friday has become since that first issue. It was already some of the best comics of the year when it came out, and this collection of its first three issues only proves that Brubaker, Martín, and Vicente are some of the best creators in the medium. Friday is also the kind of series that you can’t help but want to dive more into, but the wait for each issue has become worth it every single time.

Get excited. Get mysteries.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.