Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #180 by Drew Barth

Doing Something to the Trend

A few months ago I looked at the first issue of Shobo, George Kambadais, and Jim Campbell’s Buckhead. It was one of those series that left some hooks in me after I finished the first issue—with its blending of small town mysteries, African mythos, and a blend of science and magic, I couldn’t help but want to know more. With the series concluding a couple months ago, it did take some of those hooks back to wrap its story, but it couldn’t help but drag out a few more to explore later.

Buckhead is the story of Toba, a recent immigrant from Nigeria to the titular town in the Pacific Northwest. While it may look sleepy and idyllic, there is a strangeness that permeates the town. People seem to shut down around that abandoned house on the edge of town, adults leave their homes in the middle of the night to congregate the school, and trench coatted androids roam. It’s from these oddities that Toba and his friends enter a game in the basement of their school, the Elseverse, and unravel more of the town’s mysteries—namely, why Toba’s dad is in the game they’re playing. From finding out more about the forces that seem to control the town to putting down ancient Yoruba spirits, Toba finally  finds his place in Buckhead while building a group of friends to help him throughout his journey.

But that doesn’t quite feel like the end. Buckhead is doing something I’m seeing more comics do recently and that’s to leave their conclusions open. This is a fairly tight five-issue series, but there are lingering questions and plot points—namely whoever the Eight Lords of Chaos are—that could be picked up on later. The way this story is told gives it a natural break point, but also an open door for a sequel series that can pick right back up where this one ended or give it space enough for a time-skip. This kind of story planning treats a series less like a monolithic entity and more like a grouping of seasons. We can get a complete arc with this volume of Buckhead, but there’s an over-arching plot out in the distance that we can pick right back into if the creators want to continue. It gives some more time and space to develop that larger plot without having to rush through every aspect of a longer story.

While Buckhead isn’t the first to use this kind of comic storytelling—there’s still no word on if the story will continue into new volumes—but it’s one of the ones I’m becoming more drawn to the longer I think about it. Shobo, Kambadais, and Campbell have created a world and a mythology to populate it that I want to know more about. Like the game in the story, I want to explore and marvel at the work that has gone into it. Buckhead can stand on its own, but it’s still leaving those plot hooks in me that can be explored so much more in the future.

Get excited. Get sequels.

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 #179 by Drew Barth

The Deep

Standing at the edge of a beach, you don’t know how deep the water gets. Even taking a boat out doesn’t give you a sense of just far down the water goes and how little light can peer down there. In this way, the ocean takes on a sense of dread—that feeling that what’s out there is beyond what we can understand, much in the same way space feels unfathomable. It is at this intersection of ocean and space horror that we find Ram V, Christian Ward, and Aditya Bidikar’s first issue of Aquaman: Andromeda.

Something has crashed into the ocean. All we have is a team of scientists that shouldn’t be there in an experimental research vessel that shouldn’t exist and governments that will not take responsibility if they’re found out. We also have a kraken. More than that, we also have Arthur Curry—king of Atlantis and Aquaman to the world. But Aquaman has been around a while. Like, a long while. He’s shown up on the shores of Kamchatka Krai for generations to help build ships but has never once looked any different. This is an Aquaman that is becoming as old as the oceans he guards, but when this object fallen from space disturbs a kraken in the most remote area of the sea and goes after a research vessel that shouldn’t exist, he has to become that young Aquaman we’ve all grown up with.

Andromeda is the most atmospheric Aquaman book I’ve read. Ward’s mastery of color and composition allows this story to feel like something is pushing down on it. Even the splash pages feel as though there’s some hidden pressure keeping them stationary. And this ties into that intersection of the sea and space—the unfathomable distance and the deeptime in which they exist. Aquaman himself exists in a similar intersection here as well, between the sea and the surface, but in his costume adorned with reefs and glowing pupils, he has a more alien look than any previous incarnation. V, Ward, and Bidikar are leaning into this idea of the unknown and unfathomable as Aquaman’s appearance becomes stranger and the artifact that came from space does something to the ocean that he can’t quite figure out yet.

The first issue of Aquaman: Andromeda plants the kind of roots that branch out into murkier depths. As though we were nearing the bottom of the sea ourselves, we can’t quite make out what mysterious shadows we’re seeing maneuver over the sand, but we’re curious. Curious and maybe a little afraid. But that fear draws us back into the story. We want to illuminate the unknown; we want to see where space and sea come together despite its dangers. But the sea beckons us forward, even if we’re not meant to be there. There’s mysteries here that we can’t help but want to uncover.

Get excited. Get deep.

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 #178 by Drew Barth

The Rumiko World

I remember watching the first episode of Rumiko Takahashi’s Inuyasha when I was eleven years old and being smitten with the world she had created. The blending of myth and history layered just below the modern world made my imagination spark. But I got older and the reruns of the series got tiresome as I waited for the new ones to finally make it to Adult Swim. Waiting to see where the story progressed was my first exposure to the work of Rumiko Takahashi—a woman who’s manga is so revered that it’s still odd that so many people my age had only discovered her work through those Inuyasha reruns years ago. But just last year, the first volume of her most recent series, Mao, released and it is a showcase of everything great about Takahashi’s work.

Mao is a the story of Nanoka, an orphaned junior high student living with her grandparents who miraculously survived a sinkhole accident that claimed the life of her parents. When a group of her classmates start talking about ghostly voices at a shopping center close to the site of the accident, Nanoka walks through the gate of the shops and finds herself in 1923 where strange demons roam. An exorcist, the titular Mao, defeats one of these demons after it is nearly burned alive by Nanoka’s blood. Mao’s blood does the same to these demons and the two begin investigating their potential link and the curse they carry that may have killed Nanoka’s parents.

From the first page, there is a cleanliness to Takahashi’s lines and action. The panel to panel composition feels almost intuitive to read, but is the kind of thing only the most experienced mangaka can accomplish this consistently. Even the page turn reveals are given the incredible weight throughout this first volume as the story beats have an almost mathematical precision. As exposition is given its space to breathe, we come into action-focused moments that burst with movement even in the splash pages. The incredible precision of the lines and storytelling make some pages almost feel like they’re being animated before the reader’s eyes. But this is one of Takahashi’s strengths—creating motion where there’s only the static image. It’s one of the ways that great mangaka like her can make these comics feel almost like magic when reading them.

I’m never going to be the only one to sing Takahashi’s praises—it’s why she is one of the few women to receive the Grand Prix de la ville d’Angoulême—but Mao is the kind of series that deserves as much praise as you can give it. As comics, it is that perfect synthesis between narrative and visuals with neither aspect detracting from the other. There is a balance in Takahashi’s storytelling that has remained consistent in her work for years and Mao continues that tradition.

Get excited. Get exorcised.

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 #177 by Drew Barth

Tied Together

 wrote last week about the Jurassic League and the ways in which those designs and characters reminded me of toy tie-ins from the 90s. And that just led me to the Harley Quinn: The Animated Series: The Eat, Bang! Kill Tour and how that tie-in series reminded me of the animated Batman series from the 90s as well. What Tee Franklin, Max Sarin, Erich Owen, Marissa Louise, and Taylor Esposito made starts as bridge between the second and third season of the Harley Quinn animated series, but we’re also given one of the most in-depth character studies of Poison Ivy and her relationships in comics.

From its first page, The Eat, Bang! Kill Tour is season two-and-a-half of the Harley Quinn animated series. We’re starting right at the car chase between Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy and Commissioner Gordon and the entire Gotham City Police Department the second season ended on and immediately into the fallout from Poison Ivy and Kite-Man’s botched wedding. Even if this is a Harley Quinn series, this is a story about Poison Ivy and everything that has been mentally following her throughout the animated series. We see the doubts, regrets, and ultimate acceptance of herself all the while her and Harley drive from Gotham to Blüdhaven to Detroit and annoy any hero or villain in their vicinity. And while Gordon tries to drag them back to Gothamn.

What makes The Eat, Bang! Kill Tour work, though, is the efforts from Franklin, Sarin, Owen, Louise, and Esposito. The whole series feels less like a tie-in for a cartoon than a love letter for every single character we see. But no more so than for Poison Ivy. While this is Harley’s series, this is Ivy’s story. As we’re going directly from the animated series, we get a bit of Ivy’s internal struggles with her insecurities and the doubts about whether or not she’s made the right choice in staying with Harley, but that becomes the main through-line of this comic. Her growth from the continual doubt or the ways in which she lashes out as a result of those doubts only lets that eventual moment of self acceptance shine all the brighter. And that all of this is her pushing herself to do them with Harley, that this isn’t a journey to take alone, really helps to make that point of self-acceptance stick.

If The Eat, Bang! Kill Tour does anything, it makes me want that third season of Harley Quinn to come even sooner. But as a comic that ties into the series, this one does something many don’t and that’s it helps to really expand the world and the characters of the series. It isn’t simply another episode or something that slots in-between adventures, it’s a continuation, and the rest of the animated series will pick up from that point. And I do really hope that all of the character work we saw in this comic series will follow into its animated counterparts.

Get excited. Get tied.

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 #176 by Drew Barth

With Jurassic Chomping Action!

Comics are, above all, a medium for telling stories. And sometimes the best kinds of stories are catharsis—we need to feel a release from what we’ve become accustomed to. Jurassic League is one such kind of catharsis. Taking familiar characters that are confined to some kind of canon and allowing creators like Juan Gedeon, Daniel Warren Johnson, Mike Spicer, and Ferran Delgado to transform them into something akin to a mid-90s action figure line gives a reader that deep-soul chuckle that we need while slipping into the comfort of dinosaur superheroes.

Jurassic League is kind of what it promises on the tin: the Justice League with a jurassic bend to it. The Bat Walker patrols the outskirts of Growltham City for the Jokerzard; Wonderdon begins her journey from the island of Trimyscira; the alien Supersaur helps the human citizens of Metraaaghpolis build their burgeoning community. It’s a distilled version of each familiar character, but one that cuts to the heart of their stories: the brooding vigilante, the protector from a mythical land, the alien raised by a kindly couple. But there is already an undercurrent of something larger happening as Jokerzard, Blackmantasaurus, Giganta, and Brontozarro are performing their own duties of not simply tormenting people, but collecting them for some unknown purpose. As a first issue, it’s establishing those essential threads and rules of the world that we’ll follow along and unfold over the next five issues.

The bright boldness of Jurassic League already shows its promise as not just a strange multiversal spin-off, but as this cathartic comic. Many superhero stories are hampered by canon, and re-launches and reboots only seem to complicate those issues further. Gedeon, Johnson, Spicer, and Delgado have instead distilled these familiar origins into something eccentric yet accessible.  Its weirdness is comforting. It is the most fun I would ever have playing with action figures as a child in the 90s. And yet it isn’t trying to rely on nostalgia for that comfort. As a series so far, Jurassic League is wholly unique but enough sinew of the familiar remains. What is left allows us to revel. We can get lost in this new interpretation and sink into the kinetic art style that lets us just sit with the loud weirdness of the story for those few moments. It’s like wrapping yourself in a neon green and yellow Jurassic Park comforter on a cold night.

These odd Elseworld series are necessary in these long-running comic universes. The stories can’t always be tertiary colors and high drama. There needs to be a release to make that drama really work. And as superhero comics are the kind of medium that thrives on these stories occurring simultaneously while reading every week, this spot of primary colored absurdity gives readers a chance to unclench their jaws and enjoy comics. And as things in the world are only getting more strenuous, it’s nice to have that romping moment of comfort.

Get excited. Get prehistoric.

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 #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.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #172 by Drew Barth

What Streets Say

I don’t know if there is anyone as influential to comics as a medium as Will Eisner. His Contract with God trilogy would become one of the shining examples of what graphic novels could do and how a self-contained story could work in mainstream Western comics. The initial story, A Contract with God, is still considered a touchstone of the medium, but what of the other two parts? A Life Force is a towering work that continues many of the themes of A Contract with God, but it is Dropsie Avenue—published nearly twenty years after Contract—that really shows Eisner at his best.

Dropsie Avenue centers on the fictional neighborhood in New York, the titular Dropsie Avenue, and how it has changed throughout the century of its existence. While much of the Contract with God stories are shorter stories about a specific building or people’s lives, Dropsie is more of a history of the neighborhood those stories take place in. Told chronologically, we start with the first Dutch farmers that settled in the South Bronx in single family homes and continue into the British, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Puerto Rican immigrants that would call the neighborhood home until their tenement buildings eventually crumbled. A microcosm of city life from the late 19^th to mid 20^th centuries, Eisner shows the ways in which homes and the people in them shift with the times, culminating in the construction of a suburban neighborhood in the 1990s that would start the whole process over again.

Eisner’s skill as a graphic artists is why they name the medium’s biggest award after him. Dropsie Avenue reminds us of his skills. From a glance of the included pages, we know this is an Eisner comic. From the blending of panels to the lettering, there is a continual distinction in his lines that is unmistakable. But it is these panels—the blending of story into the next—that helps give his stories an energy and a continuity that has always remained unique to his type of storytelling. As this is a history of a single neighborhood, his blending of panels helps to contribute to the more liquid nature of how a neighborhood develops. It isn’t all at once as much as it is the push and pull of its people.

Dropsie Avenue, and much of the Contract with God Trilogy, is a testament to Will Eisner’s skill  and consistency as an illustrator. Told over nearly twenty years, his style remained as impactful and distinct from the first Contract with God story to the final pages of Dropsie. And Dropsie Avenue itself shows Eisner’s continual fascination with the neighborhoods he grew up in and shows just how comics as a medium can intertwine with history, even if it’s fictitious.

Get excited. Get neighborly.

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.