Back to the comics, folks. Honestly, did you
think that first bookcase would be it in terms of Mark’s super-nerdo comic geek
department? Noooo, sir!
Alan Moore. He wrote
Watchmen. He wrote V for
Vendetta. He wrote Miracleman. He
wrote Swamp Thing for a while. And the entire
America’s Best Comics line—until a few years ago, anyway. Sadly, he wrote
only two issues of Big Numbers and I’ve been waiting over a
decade for the conclusion of Lost Girls. I will fight
anyone who tries to claim that Alan Moore is not the greatest contemporary
comic book writer in the universe. Eh, not
really. I’m a lover not a fighter. But Alan Moore’s the shit, for
real.
What can I say about
Sandman? For as much as I love Alan Moore I have to
admit that if it weren’t for Neil Gaiman’s 75-issue masterpiece, comic books
would be hovering somewhere between disco music and monster truck rallies in
the ghetto of popular entertainment. As Brad said in Fast Times
at Ridgemont High: “Learn it. Know it. Live
it.” I have lent Sandman to people with absolutely no
interest in comics and for a couple of them it practically altered their state
of consciousness. Some of them never read a comic book again, but they
still talk about Sandman. It’s that good.
Strangers in Paradise is like a
long-running soap opera that you like because you were there for the beginning
and the characters have become personal friends of yours—in your
mind. It’s got a little of everything: the wounded
flower, the angry lesbian, the mysterious dude, cops, rock stars, organized
crime bosses, sabotaged commercial airliners, etc. Yes, Terry Moore lost
the focused, core thread of SiP years ago, but I still buy it. Or at
least I did until he decided to end it, that is. Usually I get sad when
something I love ends, but I think many would agree that SiP’s time has
come. I look forward to seeing what Terry Moore does next.
Let me tell you a story about the guy at the other
end of the shelf. Everybody talks about what a nice guy he is.
Well, when I was working for a comic book publisher we produced a book that
this guy had a hand in, and I was his point person at our company.
Although there were a few snags in the production of the book it was basically
business as usual. He had his requests and I complied with every single
one of them. The book came out, it looked nice, everybody was
happy. Then we went out to the summer conventions and one day this guy
came up to me while I was standing at our booth and he said, “Hey, Mark, I just
wanted to thank you for all the hard work you put into this book. It turned
out really well, and everybody’s proud of the way it looks. Blah blah
blah.” I thanked him for his kind words and shook his hand, and when he
left the head honcho at our company started laughing. “What’s so funny?”
I asked. Turns out this guy had called my boss at one point and
complained about the job I was doing, and laid it on so thick that my boss
started to wonder if this guy was trying to get me fired. I asked what
this guy’s specific complaints were, and my boss said, “Honestly, it sounded to
me like you just didn’t kiss his ass enough.” Lucky for me, my boss can
smell snooty bullshit from a mile away, and I didn’t get canned. But
still, I felt a little bit betrayed—especially after he had
just walked up to me to thank me for the “great” job I’d done. That seems
pretty two-faced to me. Nice guy, huh?
This is my collection of DC trade paperbacks (which
only stretches halfway across the shelf). I was strictly a Marvel fan as
a kid, so although I’d pick up the occasional DC book, this is about as deep as
I got into the DC universe. I wish I had a better place to put my
leatherbound copy of Frank Miller’s Batman stories. It looks kind of
out-of-place there. Also, despite owning both the individual issues and
the trade paperback version, I have never read Crisis on Infinite
Earths. And I heard that DC just did some big shakeup that
reverted everything sort-of back to the way it was pre-Crisis, so maybe I won’t
ever read it. Kinda makes me wonder why I bothered.
Y: The Last Man is a great
series, as is Thieves & Kings and
Powers. In fact, Powers: Forever
blew my mind. It was one of those stories that you could tell the author
had had in his head since the beginning of the series, and was just waiting for
the right time to spring it on his readers. It was awesome.
The Chronicles of Conan collects
the old Marvel issues illustrated by Barry Windsor-Smith, back when he went by
the far less pretentious moniker “Barry Smith.” ’Cause that’s, y’know,
his name. Anyway, the art is beautiful, but I’m kind
of disappointed that Dark Horse recolored the pages, because the new colors
tend to wash out Barry’s incredible lineart. Before Marvel lost the
license to these books they put out an Essential Conan book
that collected the first 25 issues in black and white, and as far as I’m
concerned that’s the way it should be (even though that’s not how it originally
appeared).
At the end of this shelf is Scott McCloud’s
Understanding Comics, the book that is to comics what Harold
Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence is to poetry. As lap
had mentioned previously, this book should be on “the fire bookcase,” and I vow
that someday it will return to its rightful spot.
Some good stuff, and some crap.
The good stuff: the Archie Americana
Series. Archie was my personal hero from the ages of 6 to
11. I will always have fond memories of Archie and his gang, and I’m not
ashamed to admit that for a long time (i.e., from second grade to fourth grade)
I wished I could live in Archie’s world. It’s true.
Zot! (by the guy who wrote Understanding
Comics) is also good. Nexus is pretty good,
The Maxx was good for a few issues, Beanworld
is shockingly good, The Maximortal is great, 100
Bullets is pretty good, and the Classic Star Wars
books are good mostly because of Al Williamson’s art.
The crap: Gen 13.
Oh, Mark. What were you thinking when you spent that $15? (Although
I must admit that Adam Warren’s Grunge: The Movie is a
guilty pleasure in the best possible way.) Then there’s
Forge. There is a reason why this happened. But Forge
was by no means that reason. This one time? At ComicCon
International? This guy who pumped way too much moolah into a fledgling
comic book company came up to the booth I was working at and said, “Hi, I’m
[insert name here]. Is Bob [one of our more popular artists] here?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “He’s walking around the hall at the moment, but he
should be back for his signing soon.” “Okay,” [insert name here]
said. Then, after a pause, he smirked at me and said, “Don’t worry, I’m
not going to steal him away from you or anything. Ha ha.” Umm,
okay. Thanks for the heads-up, dickweed.... Cut to [insert name
here]’s spectacular public flame-out three years later and me contentedly
grinning from ear to ear. Anyway, Forge is part of the
crap but certainly not singlehandedly responsible for the death of a
company. That type of implosion takes a special kind of skill.
Hm. Apparently, this diary entry is all about
me airing my dirty laundry from my days in comics. Sorry. I swear
that’s my last bad story for the day.
Some of my all-time favorites are on this
shelf. Armageddonquest is absolutely the best comic
book ever to tackle issues of metaphysics, religion (mostly of the Jewish,
Christian, and Muslim variety), spirituality, and all that goes with it.
It’s thought-provoking, hilarious, disgusting, sexy, absurd, and
terrifying. I strongly urge you to seek it out if you have an interest in
a story concerning religion that’s written and drawn by someone without a
religious agenda of any kind. To help explain what I mean, let me just
say that in this story the antichrist is the hero.
Scary Godmother and
Akiko are two of the better all-ages titles available for
kids who don’t want to spend all their time reading endless variations of the
latest Japanese Manga.
Poison Elves started off strong
and promised to be one of the best dark fantasy titles out there. It is
to elves what Pulp Fiction was to gangsters in the mid-’90s
(which is to say really dark and really funny). Sadly, the author’s
mounting health problems have led to a halt in the story, but with any luck
Drew will be back up to speed in another year or two.
Although I am supremely reluctant to bestow
“genius” status upon Matt Wagner, I will say that he created a pretty cool
playground for other writers and artists with the Grendel
universe. Grendel Tales: Devils and Deaths was written
by Darko Macan and illustrated by Edvin Biuković, two guys who lived through
the Croatian War of Independence in the early ’90s and used their experiences
to craft a story of war, sacrifice, and loss that still touches me today when I
read it. Although he didn’t go on to illustrate much that I would’ve
otherwise taken an interest in, Edvin Biuković nonetheless became one of my
favorite artists because of his skill in conveying scenes of true emotional
power. He died of a brain tumor in December 1999. He was 30 years
old.
Mike Allred’s Madman was a book
that I loved when it first came out, but with each subsequent manifestation it
became incrementally less weird and, as a result, slightly less fun.
Madman’s still a great character, though, and Allred’s art is
retro-awesome.
The Marvel shelf (including DC’s Kingdom
Come, for absolutely no discernable reason whatsoever). Both
runs of Frank Miller’s Daredevil are here, and those issues
remain some of my favorite superhero comics. Elektra:
Assassin was less successful in my mind (though I love Bill
Sienkiewicz’s artwork)—and the graphic novel Daredevil: In Love and
War, by the same creators, is absolutely beautiful.
Kevin Smith’s Daredevil, on the
other hand, pissed me off beyond all belief, because he had the unimaginative
gall to pull one of the oldest tricks in the book: killing off a major
character as a way of overcoming a lack of good dramatic writing by instead
creating a shocking event. Argh—screw you, Kevin Smith! You haven’t
created anything of artistic merit since Clerks!
Ahem. Sorry. Brian Michael Bendis’s
Daredevil run—or what I read of it, anyway—wasn’t too bad,
but I ran out of steam before he did. See, the problem for me, at this
point, is that I feel as if I’ve truly outgrown the superhero genre. Not
because it’s juvenile—in fact, I feel as if it’s almost the opposite at this
point. Ever since Alan Moore and Frank Miller had their way over at DC in
the ’80s, the superhero genre never fully recovered from the “grim and gritty”
mode it fell into. I miss the days of Ann Nocenti’s quiet, thoughtful,
liberal-bent storytelling (Daredevil issues 236-291).
The Marvel Universe is just too complicated for me to get into anymore.
Though, with that said, I’ll admit that I’ve been
enjoying J. Michael Straczynski’s run on The Amazing
Spider-Man. How can you not like Spider-Man?
Walter Simonson. I love that guy. His
run on Thor was great, as was his run on
X-Factor, one of my early favorite Marvel titles and my
“gateway drug” to the much larger X-books universe, which I eventually started exploring—to
my eternal dismay. Still, Walter Simonson’s awesome.
Peter David’s Incredible Hulk
was great, too. Once upon a time Peter David used to be truly
funny. Now he seems to be only “ha ha” funny, which is to say I can
recognize when he’s made a joke, but it doesn’t make me truly laugh.
G.I. Joe is special to me
because it’s the first non-Archie comic book I started
reading regularly (as I mentioned here). Why Marvel stopped
reprinting the old ’80s series in trade paperback form with issue #50 I’ll
never know. Oh well, I still have the original issues....
I love the Silver Surfer. What a whiney bitch
he was back then! But oh so Cosmic! He rides a surfboard. In
space, okay? That’s freaking awesome.
As I mentioned before, Barry Smith’s linework in
Conan was incredible, and this Essential book really shows
it off because it prints the first 25 issues without any color.
Beautiful!
I’m also a big fan of Dr. Strange and his
alliterative exclamations ("By the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth!" "By
the Mystic Moons of Munnopor!"). And his giant collar. He also
boasts one of the ass-kickingest comic book villains of all time:
Dormammu. Good stuff.
Howard the Duck, finally, is another classic
character. Just pretend the movie doesn’t exist. I know that’s what
Steve Gerber does....
P.S. By the way, I hate the red
and white Marvel spine logos. I think they look tacky, garish, and
completely unartistic. Honestly, it’s one of the few things Bill Jemas
instituted that I think Marvel should abandon. Immediately.
A bunch of newspaper strip collections, including
my all-time favorite, Bloom County; my second all-time
favorite, Calvin and Hobbes; my fourth favorite,
Doonsbury (particularly the book that collects Duke’s most
infamous adventures—Action Figure!); and my sixth favorite,
Li’l Abner. My third favorite is The Far
Side, and some day I will own the gigantic slipcase edition that
contains every Far Side cartoon Gary Larson ever
created. More on my fifth favorite when we arrive at bookcase number
12. (Notice the stack of Garfield books in the upper
left-hand corner. You may not believe me, but that first one, “Garfield
at Large,” is a collection of the early Garfield strips, and
they’re actually pretty funny. This was, of course, back when Jim Davis
did his own work rather than hiring subcontractors to do everything for
him—including signing his name.) On the far right-hand side you’ll see
two ACME Novelty Library collections by Chris Ware.
You should read those if you haven’t already.
Aaaaand scene.
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