Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #145 by Drew Barth

Guess We’ll DIE

Let’s reach our way back to the second thing I ever wrote for this article and talk about what is now one of my favorite comics of this century: Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’ DIE. It’s been over two years since the first issue released and, with the final issue releasing recently, it’s time to re-immerse ourselves into the roles of writer, readers, and passerbys as DIE takes a look at all the roles we play and finds a way to grind them down until only the purest part of our humanity remains.

As writer Kieron Gillen originally described it, DIE is like a “goth Jumanji” as a group of friends play a tabletop role-playing game and find themselves trapped in the world their friend and Game Master had created. This happened when they were all teenagers in the early 90s. Now it is 2018 and they are forced into the game again by invitation of the friend that was left behind in the original game. Things happen. People get hurt. People die. A city is leveled. A nation is manipulated. Problems upon problem. But all of that isn’t instant. A twenty issue series with creators like Gillen and Hans at the helm know was escalation should feel like—from five friends trying to figure out how to get back home to causing a city to be destroyed to helping prevent reality from distorting, everything builds. Background stakes remain the same—escaping—but everything else ramps up more and more in such a perfect arc that there’s likely an equation I can punch into my graphing calculator to match it.

One of the main things DIE asks us as readers is: How do we approach playing games? Do we recognize right away that we’re involved in a game and mentally divorce ourselves from consequences? Or do we embrace the world before us, embody our roles, and play them as though our lives were dependent on our actions? It is one of the more interesting aspects of playing RPGs—that chance to explore a different version of ourselves. But there’s a difference between playing the adventurer and playing a piece of yourself that you’ve left long-buried because you’ve had no other opportunities to examine, let alone acknowledge, that part. It’s what the characters in this series go through as well—will Ash embrace parts of themself that they’ve been burying or can Chuck look at the world of DIE as something meaningful even though he himself will die soon? Every character deserves their own deep examination as their arcs are just as splendidly done as the plot.

All of that and I didn’t even mention that the world of DIE is also in part the creation of writers like the Brontes, H.G. Wells, J.R.R. Tolkein, and H.P. Lovecraft. Or, at least facsimiles that the world of DIE needed to develop. There’s so much to DIE as a comic and a world that it’s difficult to condense it down into a few hundred words. But it is the kind of series with such deep thought put into so much of its pacing, characters, world, tension, and plot that you want to see it reflected in every series you read.

Get excited. Get DIE.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331 & 485) 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 #143 by Drew Barth

Ripping Through the Future

It’s been a few months since I last talked about James Harren and Dave Stewart’s Ultramega, so I’ll have to fix that. One of the most kinetic series in the last few years, Ultramega’s first issue was the kind of series that wore its influences proudly—from Ultraman to the sentai shows of most millennial childhoods in the 90s—along with a dollop of incredible violence. But what about the rest of the series? As the first volume of the story ends, influences fallen to the side to allow its creators to chart a different path in the Kaiju genre.

The majority of the series, after its first issue, is about how the world is reacting now that the titular Ultramega have been killed and the kaiju that had threatened the world have become minuscule compared to their former, larger-than-buildings selves. The city of the first issue has also been split—a walled-off portion that houses anyone without the kaiju virus that caused people to transform into the beasts, and the Drowned City—the refuge of anyone not allowed in the city, built from the ruins of the final Ultramega battle. Noah, son of the last Ultramega, is captured by a gang of kaiju cultists—humans who worship the remaining kaiju as gods. After nearly dying in a coliseum-esque brawl with multiple small kaiju, he merges with the eye of the first Ultramega to become the first of these heroes in nearly twenty years.

There’s a peculiar thing about Ultramega that Harren and Stewart skirt around for most of the series. The Ultramega and the kaiju have been fighting for as long as the universe has been. Locked in an eternal fight, one can never be totally rid of the other. But without the Ultramega, the kaiju are small—a mere fraction of the selves we have seen. They cannot be born anew from human hosts and don’t seem to be able to infect anyone else. All they do is feed on the blood of humanity in their cults.

As soon as Noah transforms, however, the kaiju return to their full destructive capabilities. Like an immune response, one tries to rip the other apart. But they only ever become horrific when in contact with one another. It’s the kind of detail that has yet to be explored, but it definitely has enough connective tissue with the rest of the story to be explored fully in later volumes.

Even with all of the story in each of Ultramega’s massive issues, there’s still more to be explored in its world. And that just shows the strength of Harren and Stewart as creators. There is so much more going on beyond the panels we see and that just contributes to the living being that a story can become. As we’re only focused on a single story at the moment, there’s more than enough room to go into how the rest of this universe works, what the Ultramega and kaiju are, and just what the world will come to.

Get excited. Get big.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331 & 485) 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 #142 by Drew Barth

Another Day, Another Crisis

Since the early 60s with the “Flash of Two Worlds” story, the idea of the crisis would come to define every major event in DC’s history. With Infinite Frontier by Joshua Williamson, Xermanico, Tom Derenick, Jesús Merino, Paul Pelletier, Norm Rapmund, and Romulo Fajarado Jr., we’re seeing the most current capping of a Crisis, with the lead into another.

The idea of the crisis in DC canon has always been a point of change. From the creation of the Multiverse to its destruction over and over and over to that one time Identity Cris—wait, no, never mind that one.

But the crisis is where the bloat of comics canon can converge on a point and wipe itself clean, for the most part. Post-Crisis, New52, DC Rebirth, and now the Infinite Frontier—all of these points have been a simplification of canon and new points for readers to jump into the larger DC Universe. But where those points of post-crisis had their own foibles, Infinite Frontier has seen to ease itself more into what has already been established. The events taking place in the series are still massive—there’s the revolt of Earth-0 against the rest of the Multiverse and the reveal of an Omega Lantern being controlled by Darkseid—but with the short series of Future State stories earlier in the year, these new stories spinning out of the event can feel more organic.

But what’s most interesting about Infinite Frontier as a series is how it has begun to re-introduce elements of the DC Universe at large that have either been absent or handled in less than stellar ways. With the most recent Crisis in the form of Dark Nights: Death Metal, the Multiverse has once again become infinite—even if the focus is still only on a core fifty-two worlds. But with all of these parallel worlds comes similarly larger threats. Threats like the return of a Darkseid that looks closer to his original incarnations. While some of his more recent appearances have shown the god as a more capable Doomsday, Infinite Frontier has him as this scheming entity—a being whose machinations are unknowable to mortal minds. It’s always good to have a dark god act like something inevitable and unknowable instead of just a punch machine.

But a post-crisis can still feel like a crisis on its own. Infinite Frontier is an interesting precipice on the edge of future canon. It does what any good event book should—tell its own story, lay out some large stakes, and set things up for the next inevitable crisis to shape the universe.

Get excited. Get infinite.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331 & 485) 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 #141: Last Witch Standing

Earlier this year, I took a look at a new series from Conor McCreery, V.V. Glass, Natalia Nesterenko, and Jim Campbell: The Last Witch. As the year has wound down, the series ended and the series has now been collected as a trade. But that’s not the whole story. Literally. Although this was solicited as a five-issue miniseries, the story is not yet quite over. And what makes this interesting is that this isn’t the first series I’ve looked at recently that has ended a miniseries on a cliff-hanger with the hopes for more to come later.

Since we had last talked about The Last Witch, Saoirse has discovered her latent witch abilities, is now on a quest with her brother, Brahm, and their Nan to defeat four powerful witch sisters and their leader to prevent them from opening a door to the fae realm and unleashing the world-eating Fairy King. More or less, from playing in the woods to preventing the end of days—the story has escalated its stakes quite a bit. And even by the end of this volume, three of the four witch sisters has been met and dealt with by Saoirse and her ever-increasing magical skill with the ley-lines pointing her where to go for the final sister. But there is also doubt. McCreery, Glass, Nesterenko, and Campbell have set up a background menace to the whole thing—even at the end of this story, we don’t quite know who we’re supposed to be rooting for.

And it is this ending that comes with an implicit promise of more story sometime in the future. Nothing yet, however, has been announced for the series continuation. This collected edition isn’t listed as a volume one or a book one or anything like that, though. But why? This has been the trend for a few other series in the past like Outer Darkness and Chainsaw Man, but it does leave readers unsure of the story’s future. It does make sense from a production standpoint—creators can get a break between these volumes instead of continually worrying about making monthly deadlines and having the story suffer as a result. A series like The Last Witch would benefit from this spacing out greatly as Glass’ artwork is a thing to behold on every page. But we’re all still wondering when we get to see their art and the rest of the story continue.

Comics are in a weird place at the moment. Many of the best-selling series are some of these larger volumes sold in bookstores and away from the direct-market comic shops. But then monthly issues are the lifeblood of every comic shop as that keeps people coming into the store every week. When a series is as good as The Last Witch, waiting doesn’t feel too bad if it was switching to volumes instead of monthly issues. But then I like receiving my stories in those small, quick little floppies every week. We don’t know if this kind of comic serialization is going to continue, so we’ll just have to see if more series stick with this kind of model or not.

Get excited. Get witchy.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331 & 485) 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 #140 by Drew Barth

Black & Blue & Gold

Anthologies are an oddity in comics. They used to be the most popular formats for telling stories—many beloved pre-Code horror series were anthologies—but then they seemed to drop off. Anthologies still exist, to some extent, but they’ve become rarer as the years go on. That’s why it’s been so nice to see DC continue the anthology tradition for the past twenty-five years. Starting with the first volume of Batman: Black and White in 1996 to its recent relaunch in 2020 to the establishment of two new anthologies in Superman: Red and Blue and Wonder Woman: Black and Gold, their commitment to anthologies seems cemented.

But why anthologies? Both major publishers have dozens of series running concurrently with long-running story lines with many beloved characters. But that’s the snag, isn’t it? Many of these longer running series are rather impenetrable to the outside reader—if you haven’t been a fan for the past few years, there’s not a lot of space to jump into unless you want to do some Wiki-diving for a few hours. This is where anthologies come in. As many of them are single stories told over less than ten or so pages, anyone who is new to a character can jump in and find something to enjoy.

And it isn’t just for the benefit of audiences that anthologies exist. Almost every creator out there has a Batman, or Superman, or Wonder Woman story they want to tell in them, but as great as they all would be, even major publishers can’t support thirty issues of a single character each month—even though it does seem like that with Batman most of the time. These anthologies allow many creators to really flex their storytelling abilities as they have such a confined space to work with. You could tell a great Batman vs. Bane story in a hundred issues, but how much better could it be in eight pages? And for many creators, this is a space to not just mine those story ideas they may have been sitting on for years, it’s a place to showcase their talent to readers who may not be familiar with their work. There is so much in each issue of these series that is new and refreshing that it’s hard to think that they’re not on regular pull-lists.

While anthologies seem to go in and out of style depending on the year, having the two major comic publishers keep a commitment to putting out anthologies is quite nice. While many longer series do allow creators to really dig into a story, these anthologies let creators breathe a little more and experiment with what their version of many of these long-running characters can look like. And, of course, seeing these characters in different situations can act as a jumping-off point for creators in the future to go back and dig deep into different aspects of the character. What are comics and anthologies like this if not opportunities for even longer-running collaborative storytelling?

Get excited. Get anthologized.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331 & 485) 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 #139 by Drew Barth

A Wide Range of Magic

Comics, for the most part, come in a couple forms. There’s the monthly floppies that open up like a pamphlet; the newspaper strips read horizontally every day; and the graphic novels that cozy up next to the rest of the books on your shelf. And, as readers, that’s what we’re used to. It’s what we’ve been used to for a while now with the exception of some special issues and formats. Echolands by J.H. Williams III, W. Haden Blackman, Dave Stewart, and Todd Klein is one of those special issues, but this time extended into a full series and bound just a little bit differently.

If there was ever a time to use the phrase “widescreen comics” it would be in the case of Echolands. The comic sits on its side and open horizontally—creating a single image on each page of more than twenty inches across. So, what’s being told across all this real estate? A story of thieves, wizards, and the kind of urban fantasy that takes whole chunks of cities and tropes and smashes them together into a small space. It’s fantasy, but in such a way that we can see bits and pieces of the modern world poking out. Hope is the thief and we first find her running through this fantasy city after having stolen a jewel so precious that the entire city begins to look for her. As clever and connected as she is, she’s found by the daughter of the wizard she stole the jewel from—a strange being made more of magic than anything else. And, for a first issue, that’s all we’re given.

What’s most captivating about the story from the outset is both the formatting of the book and the way its art plays with the space. Williams III and Blackman are known for their work on Batwoman  a few years ago and are taking all of those lessons into Echolands, but have made some adjustments. Due to its shape, the story itself feels constant—it moves as a pace that many other series can’t hope to match with their traditional layouts. Much of this first issue is a chase scene and the length of these pages only adds to that feeling of continual movement as we run by this new world that unfolds before us. It’s an incredible use of this space that I’ve only ever really seen in digital comics like The Private Eye by Brian K. Vaughn, Marcos Martin, and Muntsa Vicente, and to physically hold the series gives it a completely different dimension.

Right now, Echolandsis a series that wants you to pick it up and thumb through these widescreen pages physically. There’s an impact from seeing the pages unfurl across such a wide space and seeing how Williams III, Blackman, Stewart, and Klein can continually reinvent how our eyes will follow along with such a different kind of page format. While this is only the first issue, it’s going to be interesting to see if this sense of exploration can continue as long as the series does.

Get excited. Get wide.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331 & 485) 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 #138 by Drew Barth

A Chainsaw Heart

It’s been a while since I last talked about manga, so let’s change that. In the early days of this blog/article/scream into the void I talked about Shonen Jump’s digital reader app and all of the content available there. It was around this time that I first spotted a series in its first couple chapters that seemed like it could be interesting: Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Chainsaw Man. But, after reading those first couple chapters, I failed to keep up. This wasn’t any kind of mark against the manga’s quality, I was just busy with a new job. As the series ended back in January, I was able to catch back up.

Chainsaw Man is one of the most shonen series I’ve read since browsing through the first volume of Naruto in middle school. It’s the story of Denji, a sixteen year old, and his pet devil dog, Pochita. Denji needs to earn money to pay off his dead dad’s debt to the yakuza and the only way he can get cash quick is by killing the devils that have been popping up all over Japan. On a hunt, though, his heart is ripped out by a devil and Poochita jumps in to takes it place—thus creating a human-devil hybrid that has yet to be seen since devils started popping up. The titular Chainsaw Man proceeds to rip and tear his way through every devil put in front of him in the most bloody and violent way possible.

This violence is a mask. Fujimoto has crafted a shonen manga where the blood leaking from every page greases the gears of working class oppression. After becoming the Chainsaw Man, Denji is brought in to work for a governmental agency, the Public Safety Division, that hunts devils. For three meals a day and a place to sleep, he’ll jump into any suicidal situation as long as his boss, Makima, tells him to do so. When we’re not being treated to fights, we’re given the stories of what Denji and the other members of Public Safety deal with—insecurity of money and life, the ways in which their jobs grind them down into devil fodder, how many of them simply don’t have a future. But they have to accept it. For many of them, there is no other life outside of Public Safety except for homelessness and destitution. It is a job that leads them all along until they can’t go back to normal life.

What starts out as a particularly violent series about a kid trying to kill devils becomes a critique on the conditions of the working class in Japan. Fujimoto knows shonen well enough that he can draw in a reader with his splash pages of blood, but keeps them coming back for the ways in which his characters become more and more relatable as we see what their jobs do to them. We want to see a hero here win, not because we want to see a devil defeated, but because maybe this one will let them get what they want out of life.

Get excited. Get chained.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331 & 485) 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 #136 by Drew Barth

Pointing Fingers

Do you use finger guns to point things out with a little extra flair or do you point them at one another over Zoom meetings in a bout of cowboy euphoria? Either way, they’re functionally useless—an aesthetic choice more tedious the more frequently we do it. But what if an innocuous point could do something? That’s what Justin Richards, Sabs Cooper, Val Halvorson, Rebecca Nalty, and Taylor Esposito have created with Finger Guns—the kind of series that lets us know exactly what would happen if the world could be changed by pointing a finger gun at someone.

Finger Guns, as a story, is about Sadie and Wes. Each of them have different degrees of difficulty with their home lives—violent and isolated, respectively—and both have the ability to change someone’s emotion simply by pointing a finger gun at them. How did they get these abilities? Don’t worry about it. Look instead at the fact that some high school kids can point their fingers and make someone either calm or enraged at a whim. And while that does seem a volatile mix of chaos, Sadie and Wes don’t use their abilities to wreak any kind of havoc. Sadie uses her ability to calm her frequently enraged father and Wes only experiments on himself or with Sadie so they can see what their finger guns can really do.

At its core, though, Finger Guns is a series about blame: who gives it, who takes it, and the consequences of those choices. The image of the pointed finger throughout the story is no aesthetic coincidence. Sadie and Wes can point their fingers—at other people or themselves—as much as they want to, but they learn throughout the series that pointing doesn’t solve everything. Or, really, anything at all. When Sadie’s father begins to become immune to the finger gun’s calming effect, she begins to point in every which way she can. She blames the people at her school, Wes, and herself. And even when her finger is severed by her father’s rage, she still points her ailing finger gun on herself as though she has nothing to offer the world except misery.

Finger Guns is the kind of series you need to sit with for a moment after finishing the last page. It’s another story from Vault Comics that ends, but keeps itself open for another volume to come out in the future. But as it stands, Richards, Cooper, Halvorson, Nalty, and Esposito have crafted a comic with a straight-forward image tying the whole concept together and have explored it to some of its furthest extremes. And even still, they’ve left it open enough to return and give these characters a kind of closure that just pointing fingers can’t fully give.

Get excited. Get pointing.

Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.

Drew Barth (Episode 331 & 485) 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.