Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #158 by Drew Barth

Meat Me in the Middle

I adore postmodern advertisements where you know that they know that you know they’re just trying to sell you something, but the whole ad is so deep in its own meta-narrative that you forget that you’re being sold a product. The ad can tongue-in-cheek its way to your heart. We seldom see that intersection of advertisements and a full issue of a comic. At least, not until Monkey Meat by Juni Ba.

This first issue of Monkey Meat is the first part of a five-part anthology series by Ba in partnership with the Monkey Meat Multinational. Through the audience’s familiarity with the Monkey Meat Multinational, its line of products, and the mysteries of their headquarters on Monkey Meat Island, we’re drawn into the process behind their newest creation: Lug’s Soul Juice energy drink. We’re given the story of the island’s caretaker, the Lug of energy drink fame, and how he came to be the sole defender of Monkey Meat Multinational’s headquarters from the ravages of the rest of the island. Immediately we feel a connection to Lug—he’s a working-class lad that we can see ourselves in as he is also beholden to a corporation that both relies on and underpays him. But we also want to be like Lug since he’s big and strong and has all of this energy that we feel like we could experience from his new drink.

The entire issue, the story of Lug and his soul being signed away to the Monkey Meat Multinational, is all building up to the introduction of a new energy drink. We don’t even see it happening despite the hints. This anthology breaks down what an ad is and what it can do in the universe in which Monkey Meat exists as a product and company. On the outside, the book satirizes advertising culture and the ways in which we buy into stories. But we buy into the story of Lug either way. That is the skill of Ba on display. We’re so lost in the story, we don’t know that we’re in an ad until the final panel hits.

While this is only the first issue of what will be a five-part anthology, it is already setting up the mind-bending world we’re going to be living in for those five issues.

Get excited. Get meat.

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 #157 by Drew Barth

Results-Driven Workplace

I remember cubicles and commission checks and a constant striving to snag the biggest commission out of everyone, a grinding frustration even as I made enough to populate my desk with Pop figures. Intersecting this feeling with superheroes is where we have one of the most disconcerting superhero stories out in recent years: One-Star Squadron from Mark Russell, Steve Lieber, Dave Stewart, and Dave Sharpe.

The DC Universe is resplendent with hundreds of heroes without even cracking into the Legion of Superheroes. Not everyone can be in the Justice League. Or Justice League International. Or Teen Titans. Sometimes their skill sets are somewhat limited. This is where HEROZ4U comes in: a superhero temp agency that specializes in call center work, security, parties, and whatever else people might need. You still have recognizable heroes like Red Tornado and Power Girl running these offices, but then they’re managing more obscure characters like Minuteman, Heckler, and GI Robot. Everyone has bills to pay.

One-Star Squadron is a comedy series, but it’s one that lures you into a false sense of comedic security before bricking you in the back of the head with sudden humanity. There is the inter-office drama you would expect when enough cubicles are stacked together, but then there’s Gangbuster. Without his memory, Jose Delgado is dumped on the steps of the HEROZ4U office and left to Red Tornado to piece the life of Gangbuster back together. There’s not much there. He was an 80s hero who could fight well and cleaned out some Metropolis gangs, but who is he now but an old man who can’t remember where he lives? That becomes the essential humanity of the series at its beginning: there’s dignity in every single person in the HEROZ4U office, but they’ve been relegated to these odd jobs because there just isn’t a place for them in the Universe anymore.

Russell, Lieber, Stewart, and Sharpe have created a new portion of the DC Universe that still slots right in with all of the other crises or cosmic catastrophes. HEROZ4U feels grounded in reality somehow. It could be the economic anxieties or the feeling of office competition or even the need to just be recognized as someone who matters. One-Star Squadron follows with much of Russell’s previous work in finding that dignity in people in more outrageous situations. The book provides a counterpoint to the more gritty realism some stories lean into to link their work to the real world. But they don’t need that grit; they just need to smile through the tears.

Get excited. Get results.

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 #156 by Drew Barth

Deep, Resigned New Year

This is another new year. Half of my new year release articles have been written while steeped in plague.

This better be the last plague list.

As we drag our nails along the chalkboard of time, let me talk about some new comics coming soon. I’m dividing things up seasonally this time around just to jazz things up since I need something fun to do while COVID variant news gives me ulcers.

Winter

First this year is Kamen Rider: The Classic Manga Collection by Shotaro Ishinomori that, finally, brings together the entire Kamen Rider manga series. Based on the original tokusatsu series of the same name, this is the first publication of the entire manga in English as a nice release for the series’ fiftieth anniversary. This week also sees the first issue of Juni Ba’s Monkey Meat, a new anthology of stories from Monkey Meat Island and the people subjugated by the hell of living under the Monkey Meat Company.

This season will also see the publication of a few new graphic novels from First Second and Dark Horse: Pinball by Jon Chad and Crema by Johnnie Christmas, Dante Luiz, Ryan Ferrier, and Atla Hrafney, respectively. Both of these graphic novels deal with the relatively mundane in extraordinary ways—Pinball goes into the real world history of one of the oldest arcade games while the other is a continent-spanning adventure involving ghosts and coffee.

Also, at the end of the month, we see the return of Saga by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. The last time we saw a new issue of Saga was July 2018, so about six months before this article even started. It’ll be interesting to see how much has changed in that nearly four year hiatus.

Rounding the season out, we see the release of a new series by the team of Si Spurrier and Matías Bergara with Matheus Lopes, Step by Bloody Step. This entirely silent comic centers around a young girl and a giant suit of armor as they walk to Earth, regardless of if they want to stop or not.

Spring

The Spring season this year has a slew of graphic novels that look like they’re going to be all kinds of enjoyable, starting with Hound by Paul Bolger, Barry Devlin, and Dee Cunniffe in March. This book centers on the mythological demigod of Irish folklore, Cú Chulainn and the violence that would come to permeate his life.

Later in the month we have the start of Nick Dragotta and Caleb Goellner’s slice of sci-fi strangeness, Ghost Cage. A new limited series, this follows the scientist whose power plant controls all energy on Earth and the creation of his who has to go back into the plant itself for mysterious reasons. This is Dragotta’s first major series since the conclusion of his and Jonathan Hickman’s East of West two years ago.

April sees the release of Anna Haifisch’s Schappi—a collection of short graphic stories in which animals take on the anxieties and problems of people. From lizards to dancing ostriches to weasels, Haifisch looks at the world through the lens of these animals and what they can tell us about our own lives.

Summer

Summer looks like it’s going to be graphic novel season with a wide variety of work coming from all over the globe. One of the first we have is Summer Fires by Giulia Sagramola and translated by Brahm Revel, a story of two sisters and their coming of age while growing up in a small Italian town that borders a series of hillside fires.

By contrast, we also have the story of a young teenager growing up in the south side of Chicago and the different degrees of hell that comes with that in How to Make a Monster by Casanova Frankenstein and Glenn Pearce. As a memoir, it looks like it’s going to be an unflinching depiction of growing up segregated and terrified in the 80s.

June also has Cold Bodies by Magdalene Visaggio and Andrea Mutti, a graphic novella that deals with a different branch of the post-YA stories that we’ve been seeing in comics for the past couple years: post-slasher. We follow the survivor of one such slasher incident in their small town in Wisconsin and how the approaching anniversary of the massacre is causing them to see the killer everywhere they go.

Summer is also looking to be the season of Drawn & Quarterly printing older manga for an English audience for the first time with the collection Offshore Lightning by Nazuna Saito and translated by Alexa Frank, and Talk to My Back by Yamada Murasaki and translated by Ryan Holmberg. The former is a collection of works spanning the 90s and mid-10s that looks at the lives of middle-aged men and the children of dying parents. The latter critiques the Japanese middle-class in the 80s and how a family deals with living in these times.

To round out summer, we’re also seeing the first English translation of Linier’s newspaper strip with Macanudo: Welcome to Elsewhere. The strip itself follows more classic comics like Mutts, Peanuts, and Krazy Kat in terms of its ruminations on the nature of the world told through monsters, robots, and whatever else Linier creates.

The year does at least look good for comics. We’ll just have to see if the rest of the world will want to keep with how its going or find some way to improve.

Get excited. Get new.

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 #155 by Drew Barth

Exploration

How often can we link the exploration of the ancient with contemporary modes of entertainment? It’s on this field that we find a new series, Buckhead by Shobo, George Kambadais, and Jim Campbell. Placed at the intersection of archaeology, video games, African mythology, and conspiracies, Buckhead takes a small town and builds up a story being trapped in unexpected ways.

Toba Adekunle’s dad disappeared on an archaeological trip—zapped into an artifact in a hidden temple and hasn’t been seen since. Toba’s mom, a fellow archaeologist, moved them from Nigeria to the small town of Buckhead in Washington state. Toba is, of course, the new kid at his school and is already tired of the smallness of his new town. But while the town itself is small in population, it’s city-sized in its mysteries. Everyone Toba has met has a small tattoo just below the base of their neck. His new friend can’t see the large abandoned building on their walk to school. At night, people simply stand and stare at nothing while in their homes. The janitor’s closet in his new school has a massive computer with a game based on African myths—and also a character that looks a lot like his disappeared dad.

Between the town of Buckhead and the strange video game Toba found in his school, the theme of being trapped runs through this story. Even the cover has a slow incursion of chains coming for our main characters. But Shobo, Kambadias, and Campbell are subtle through this first issue. It’s like stepping into a trap that you’re too deep in to before you notice the door closing behind you. And the trap itself goes beyond the physical. Toba is coming from Nigeria to a small town in another country where all but three other people mispronounce. But he’s still much too young to go off on his own, so he has to stay in a place that doesn’t know or understand him. It’s also a place that he doesn’t know or understand either—the mystery of it locking him in place while he tries to figure out why people suddenly freeze or why his dad is in a video game.

What’s most arresting about Buckhead’s first issue is its last page. Like any good first issue, we’re given the kind of cliffhanger that makes us want to flip through the past few pages to see if there were any hints that look obvious in hindsight. We want more now. We want to see these mysteries unfurl. We want to see if Toba really is trapped in his current circumstance or if the situation of the last page will open this world up more than we had thought possible.

Get excited. Get exploring.

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 #154 by Drew Barth

Wondrous History

I have, in the past, talked at length about how DC’s Black Label has been a refreshing take on many of their characters—akin to early 90s Vertigo-before-it-was-called-Vertigo comics. Works like Wonder Woman: Dead Earth by Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer or The Other History of the DC Universe by John Ridley, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Alex Dos Diaz, Andrea Cucchi, and Jose Villarrubia have shown just what these more expansive works can do with their pages. Wonder Woman: Historia by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Phil Jimenez, Hi-Fi, Arif Prianto, Romulo Fajardo Jr., and Clayton Cowles, however, isn’t just taking advantage of this larger format. They’ve instead opted to treat each spread as a canvas to showcase what comic art can really accomplish.

Wonder Woman: Historia is a modified history of what we know about The Amazons. We know Themyscira. We know Hippolyta. We don’t know the actual origins of either of them. Where did this island come from? How did it become the haven that it is in canon? Where did Hippolyta even begin? To answer any of those, we’re given an origin story. The goddesses Hestia, Artemis, Demeter, Hecate, Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera have seen the atrocities committed by men against women and have demanded an end to men. The gods of Olympus, as per usual, scoff at the idea and essentially shoo the goddesses away. The goddesses meet again, sans Hera, to create something new. From this meeting, the  Amazon Tribes arise. And from here as well, he meet Hippolyta, but not as the leader of the Amazons just yet.

Wonder Woman: Historia is a conversation between DeConnick and Jimenez on the nature of comics themselves. What can you do with these pages? The Black Label allows for the story to expand with the page size, so why not fill every single inch of this visual medium with something that engrosses the reader so completely that they emerge from the other side with spots in their eyes? As a creative team, DeConnick, Jimenez, Hi-Fi, Prianto, Fajardo Jr., and Cowles are working with this space in much the same way that teams were during their runs on Wednesday Comics years ago, but there is a lushness in these pages that I’ve yet to see in many other comics. And it isn’t art for the sake of it—if this is a history of one of the oldest societies in DC canon, it should be given the reverence of an illuminated manuscript.

I can’t overstate the experience of sitting down and reading Wonder Woman: Historia as a piece of comic art. The vastness of the page and the sheer beauty of the art brings to mind walking through a guided tour of an ancient art museum. There is a continual feeling of the historic on every page—that what you’re reading is important, as though it were chiseled in stone as the last vestige of something ancient. Right now, there’s really nothing else like it in comics.

Get excited. Get historic.

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 #150 by Drew Barth

Last Short

Once again, we return to ShortBox—one of the best curators of the comics medium. Over the past few years, Zainab Akhtar has provided the world with a box of comics, candy, and wonderfully illustrated prints from a wide-range of creators—all of whom are putting their best efforts forward through every volume they create. This most recent box, the thirteenth so far, is easily one of the strongest.

It is also going to be the last.

The variety of comics within ranges from silent fantasies to recipe comics to deeply personal ruminations on our connections to the people around us. There is, as always, something in here for every kind of comic reader. A particular highlight in this box was Xulia Vicente’s I See a Knight and its story of Olivia and the headless knight, Sierra, she sees following her. While the knight is a kind omen, Olivia and Sierra soon create a friendship between them that lasts for years. Until it doesn’t. I See a Knight chokes me up. It isn’t the only comic to get me choked up in a ShortBox. And we do have Bun’s Comfort Food Corner by Chu Nap as a nice little comedown as well.

But as good as this ShortBox is, there’s still that realization that this is the last one. And the awful thing about it is that it’s ending for reasons almost entirely out of Akhtar’s control. Rising costs compounded by Brexit have made it difficult to keep the box at its original costs, even more so with international shipping climbing near the cost of the box itself. We have a box of unabashed human expression being delivered, in my case, across an ocean. Akhtar has said that she will continue publishing individual comics, as ShortBox has done in the past, but I will miss these boxes of comics.

All good comics end.The transcendent delivery of Shortbox too comes to an end. As sad as I want to feel about it, I can open up some of the many books I’ve been getting over these past few years and savor what I was able to get.

Get excited. Get short.

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 #149 by Drew Barth

Noir-vember

What’s in a grave? Usually a body. Usually a body that matches the grave listed above it. But if that was always the case, we wouldn’t have dozens of conspiracies about who could be in which grave. And that kind of conspiracy is where we get a series like Regarding the Matter of Oswald’s Body by Christopher Cantwell, Luca Casalanguida, and Giada Marchisio. We’ve seen every kind of conspiracy regarding the assassination of JFK—from government involvement to his head just doing that—and so many of them also center around his assassin: Lee Harvey Oswald.

The story begins in 1981, but it actually starts in 1963, but then we’re given a couple different framing devices for this story. The main crux of this first issue, however, is the assemblage of a group of disparate individuals from around Texas by an unnamed man in a trench coat. Each of these individuals has a particular skill—from not being noticed to forgery to hot wiring cars—that makes them perfect for an assignment. This assignment is, of course, the spirit of conspiracies for decades to come: find an individual who looks similar enough to Lee Harvey Oswald. For what purpose? From what the moments in the 80s we see at the beginning show, it’s to replace the real Oswald’s body. But why though?

What Cantwell, Casalanguida, and Marchisio do to make this an even more fascinating look at the idea of conspiracy theories is how they chose to frame it. Text pages from non-existent books aren’t new to comics—an Alan Moore comic without those would feel empty—but the way these pages are presented along with the further framing of the story in the 80s creates this interesting contrast of what we’re supposed to pay attention to in the story. Tangentially related to the story at hand, coming into this first issue with no idea about its general plot, these text pages would feel like they belonged to a completely different book. But once the understanding hits at the first page of comic, the reader gets drawn back into the plain text about doppelgangers and the dangers of meeting them. This kind of text in a comic can feel like a risk, but the creators here not only make it interesting, but slip in some foreshadowing for how the rest of the story will likely play out.

Seeing how this story is framed already makes me hopeful for future issues. The slow unfurling of information with a cast of disparate actors in a grand narrative is always the kind of cork-board conspiracy that I can get behind. It’s also the kind of thing that makes me wonder how much this framing text will act as foreshadowing and how much could spoil the rest of the series. We can already put our trust in Cantwell, Casalanguida, and Marchisio for this issue, so we can trust to see what kind of labyrinth they can lead us down next.

Get excited. Get conspiratorial.

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.