Short Take: Holy Terror, Frank Miller

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Frank Miller’s 2011 graphic novel Holy Terror was originally planned as a Batman vs. Al-Qaeda story. It’s not hard to see why DC Comics sought to distance themselves and their most popular franchise from the project. The story glories in its hatemongering bigotry against Islamic people. It’s utterly repugnant. In the published edition, Batman has been replaced with an obvious stand-in figure called The Fixer. One night, following a chase-fight-and-sex series of hijinks with a character clearly intended as Catwoman, The Fixer is caught on the periphery of a series of terrorist bombings in Gotham--ahem--Empire City. After the attack, The Fixer says “Let’s get us some killing done,” and he and the Catwoman character go on the attack against action-adventure costumed-character imaginings of Al-Qaeda operatives. There’s plenty of killing, as well as a sequence where The Fixer happily tortures a terrorist by breaking his back. The story--its hatefulness aside--is awesomely stupid, and it never escapes from superhero-adventure clichés. The climax has The Fixer defeat the terrorist cell after breaking into their lavish, super-duper, top-secret headquarters underneath the city. Miller’s art is the only point of interest; it combines the splashy, José Munoz-derived style of his Sin City stories with the architecture-fixated imagery of Elektra Lives Again. The kinetic quality of his better superhero comics is present as well. There’s also an odd rendering effect. Miller gratuitously covers the otherwise finished art with strokes, smears, and drips of white paint. The pages look as if they've been spattered with bird droppings. But the more one thinks about it, the more appropriate the technique and effect seem. Shouldn’t excrement look like it’s been rendered with excrement?

Comics Review: Hark! A Vagrant, Kate Beaton

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant, a wryly witty take on literature, history, and whatever else interests the cartoonist, has now been gathered in a welcome first book collection.

Webcomics, for the most part, are just the latest iteration of newspaper strips: short-form comics that present a scenario or gag in a handful of panels. Indeed, many current newspaper strips have, in practice, become webcomics. I wouldn’t be surprised if Doonesbury, to pick one example, enjoys more readers from its perch on slate.com than it does in the daily papers. Additionally, people I know are far more inclined to follow the current newspaper strips on the syndicate websites. But that said, the rise of Internet publication has opened the door to a new breed of strips. Just as the alternative-weekly comics of the 1980s marked a shift in the form--the better-educated readerships of those publications allowed for edgier and more literate content--the Web has given a platform to work that wouldn’t have been seen otherwise. There’s now a place for strips that editors would have judged too esoteric for their papers’ readerships. And it was only a matter of time before some of those strips enjoyed breakout success. One is Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant, which has parlayed its online popularity into a commercially and critically successful book collection. (For Beaton's latest strips, click here.)

Hark! A Vagrant doesn’t feature continuing characters or storylines. It’s a showcase for absurdist and satirical jokes that take off from literature, history, and other sources. Beaton's favorite approach is to reimagine this material in terms of contemporary attitudes and behavior. In the collection’s opening strip, the Brontë sisters are shown scoping out men. Charlotte and Emily ooh and aah over the sort of creepy brooding-intensity types they feature in their novels. But Anne, whose work treated such men far more harshly, is shown reacting in disgust. Her sisters respond, “No wonder nobody buys your books.” In another, John Adams bids goodbye to his cantankerous ways and decides to kick back and hang loose. The other Founders realize how much they miss the old Adams, who they used to mock behind his back. The tables are turned. Now they’re the tight-assed ones, with Benjamin Franklin ruefully telling Adams, “I was cool until you started scoring more chicks than me.” There are a number of strips that get laughs at the inherent narcissism of medieval courtly love, and Robinson Crusoe through the eyes of Friday, and many other things. My favorites are those in which Beaton uses the covers of Nancy Drew novels and other books as a starting point for reimagining the stories’ content. She has a sharp, distinctive sense of humor. The collection is a breezy, enjoyable read.

My one caveat about Hark! A Vagrant is that it’s in danger of being overpraised. A reviewer like Time’s Lev Grossman is setting readers up for disappointment when he describes the collection with superlatives like “the wittiest book of the year.” (Click here.) The strip is a modest, fun diversion, and that’s what it should be approached as. It doesn’t have the wit, imagination, or depth of the greatest newspaper strips; people shouldn’t be led to expect that. What it does give us is clever and occasionally incisive jokes about things like King Lear, Lewis and Clark, and hipsters throughout history. I say it’s about time. Newspaper and syndicate editors have stood in the way of this sort of material for too long.

Comics Review: Liar's Kiss, Eric Skillman & Jhomar Soriano

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Compelling eye-candy artwork is the saving grace of this graphic novel’s rather tired rehash of detective-story clichés.

Liar’s Kiss, written by Eric Skillman and illustrated by Jhomar Soriano, is a moderately enjoyable subway read. It holds one’s attention without demanding much in the way of concentration. But the fun of it is almost entirely due to Soriano’s artwork.

Skillman’s story--a murder mystery set in contemporary New York--feels more like an exercise than anything written from urgency. The story elements and characters seem assembled from a checklist. The private-eye protagonist is an unkempt, hard-drinking, trenchcoat-and-fedora smartmouth in the Philip Marlowe mold. His client and love interest is the beautiful wife of the murder victim, a wealthy scumbag whom any number of people had reason to want dead. There’s also the loyal secretary, and the cops who are none-too-happy about the detective sticking his nose into their investigation, as well as the inevitable twists and turns that pull the rug out from under one’s assumptions about who is guilty. It’s all very familiar territory.

Jhomar Soriano’s jazzy noir visuals are the main point of interest. They’re elegantly composed and drawn, and the arbitrary, energetic use of black in the brushstrokes, shadows, and silhouettes is quite seductive to the eye. The art is nothing profound--it’s as if Soriano took José Muñoz’s work and wrung out all the expressionistic intensity--but the skill and assurance give it a sleek liveliness that carry one along.

Liar’s Kiss reminds me a good deal of the second-tier efforts in European comics from the 1970s. It’s a glib, hackneyed piece of category fiction, with more misses than hits storywise, but the art makes a terrific case for slickness as an end in itself.