COMICS WORTH READING… AND ALSO SOME OTHER COMICS: In alphabetical order, to maximize randomness!

Cuckoo #12: Subtitle: “One woman’s true stories of living with Multiple Personality Disorder.” Gripping story, rough scratchy intermittently lovely art, memorable images. This issue is a sampler. It begins with the narrator denying that she has multiple personalities, then opening her diary and seeing the riot of differing handwritings and voices. It ends with a ferocious, blackly funny rewriting of that therapy cliche about the hole in the street (you know, where you fall in the hole, then the next day you pretend you don’t see it and fall in again, then you fall in but you get out immediately, then you avoid the hole, then you take a different route home)–in reality, there’re about five hundred ways to end up in that hole, and you’ll find every one of ’em. (“If I crawl over the hole, it’s less far to fall. I do a happy handspring into the hole. There’s a barrier but those rules don’t apply to me. There’s a cute guy/girl in the hole and I jump in.” etc.) The last picture in that sequence is especially harsh.

This is pretty brutal. It includes a harrowing scene of gang rape. I stupidly read it in a public place and almost started crying (which is not something I do). So be forewarned. But this is a really, really good comic. I’ll be looking for more of these.

Finder: Sin Eater Books 1 and 2: I can’t think of enough good things to say about this comic. Science fiction with lively, crisp drawing; excellent design sense; realistically ad-hoc, duct-tape-and-chewing-gum setting; vivid, moving characters. I wanted more more more more more. Themes of justice, guilt, shaky sanity, city vs. wilderness, gender, violence, and family. Man, just awesome stuff. I need to get smarter so I can come up with more things to say to make you read these!

(Minor complaint: Some of the gender stuff seemed unrealistic. Not the stuff involving the actual characters, but some of the peripheral descriptions of how other societies organized gender. I found it interesting, and confirming of my beliefs, that the more in-depth and character-oriented CS McNeil’s explorations of gender got, the more realistic I thought they were.)

Human Target: [the one that isn’t Final Cut–I can’t find a subtitle or issue numbers]: The idea behind this series is swift: A guy is so skilled at impersonation that he rents himself out to people whose lives are in danger. He pretends to be them, then takes out their assailants when they’re attacked. But he’s so good that his identity pretty much dissolves into his clients, so that he has a hard time figuring out where they end and he begins.

Nice setup that plays on my obsession with formation of personal identity. In what may or may not be an ironic twist, the resulting comic is very much WYSIWYG. You get the neat idea, some perfectly serviceable artwork, and that’s about it. Impulse better than execution; ah well.

My Uncle Jeff: Hmmm, what to say. This is a well-drawn, moving pamphlet about two virtually opposite brothers, their ailing and mentally drifting father, and a family reunion at which everyone has to decide what to do about the old man.

I am generally uncomfortable with autobiographical art that airs this much of other people’s dirty laundry. It also did not especially strike me. It’s good, but not, I think, great. I think for people in similar situations it would be more powerful, but I am generally a soft touch for family stories and this did not work for me, even though I really can’t say why (except for the uncomfortable feeling that I was looking over someone’s shoulder as he read someone else’s diary). In general I am much more in favor of fiction than of autobiography–fiction is usually more true, for one thing….

Teen Boat #3: Picked this up for 50 cents at SPX. It’s the perfect Good Humor comic–cheap, sweet, totally lacking in nutritional value but good quick fun. It’s a b&w; comic about a teen who can turn into a boat. The tagline pretty much tells you everything you need to know: “The angst of being a teen–the thrill of being a boat!” (Non-coincidentally reminiscent of Unqualified Offerings’s observations on Spider-Man: “It would totally suck to be that guy. …It would totally rock to be that guy.”) In this issue, Teen Boat gets detention.

I enjoyed this. The art is basic and clean. No reason to write away for it or otherwise seek it out; I just wanted to say, thanks for the ice cream!

Top 10 Book One: Fluffy, breezy story of police station in superhero-packed city. Not my thing (humor too self-referential, soap-opera elements never quite clicking), though it definitely included some funny moments (ad for Vigilante car: “Do yourself justice”; the investigation of the murder of Baldur the Beautiful). Ultimately, too much going on for too little payoff.

Tupelo #s 1 and 2: Another SPX find. The guy who sold me this was very funny: First he pushes a real hard sell on me, really encouraging me to get this great comic (“second issue’s free!”). Then when it looks like I’m actually gonna buy the thing, he gets all remorseful, “Oh, um, you don’t need to feel, uh, pressured or anything, uh…” Heh. I’d been kind of looking for this comic anyway, though, so I reassured him and bought it.

Tupelo is “the world’s greatest junkie superhero,” and the comic is set in the NYC punk scene in what I guess is The Near Future a.k.a. dystopia. The comic suffers from two main problems: a) occasional bad art (odd foreshortening, static fight scenes), and b) too many ideas all jostling around. Junkie superhero = potentially good idea. Grungy NYC guy-with-powers comic = less enticing, but potentially okay. Guy who can transport people to the bizarro symbolic fantasy worlds they supposedly “come from” = lame idea, IMO. The usual anti-media conspiracy theorizing = uberlame. All these things added together = lame outweighs not-lame. Definitely some clever moments, but overall, no.

V for Vendetta: OK, so there’s undoubtedly nothing I can say about this that hasn’t been said already. Famous, wildly influential dark dystopian series about anarcho-revengekiller in Guy Fawkes mask. My superbrief thoughts:

Yeah, it was really, really good.

Murky, old-fashioned-looking art (like reprinted color newspaper comics, I thought) is beautiful, but it was very hard to tell the male characters apart.

The first time I leafed through this in the comic shop I don’t think I was prepared to see Big Ben explode. A little too post-traumatic, these days. This time I knew it was coming so it didn’t freak me out.

Very very English. Good.

But more cliched in its dystopianism than I’d expected. Under what circumstances–even granting a survivable nuclear war–would England in the 1980s actually feature a fascist quasi-Christian state whose slogans include “Strength Through Purity/Purity Through Faith”? (It’s the quasi-Christian-ness, not the fascism, that I find unbelievable, by the way.)

This is something I’m trying to get at in my current short story, actually: History doesn’t repeat itself. We keep expecting the next horror to be blatant even though the ones before it were not. It’s extremely difficult to imagine a realistic dystopia because we’re so tempted to create a caricature. We feel the need to make it obvious to the audience that this is bad even though the real next evil thing is likely to insinuate itself into our lives under unexpected, non-obvious coloring.

Final point: V4V falls into the inevitable trap of anarchist dys/utopian fiction. You want to tell the readers not to follow you–to create a new world, follow their individual dreams, rather than latching on to your messianic proclamations. But that means you can’t tell ’em what to do or how to do it. So you end on the threshold of a new world, but you can never step over the threshold. This makes it much harder for the reader to believe that your vision of the future is realistic, that it could ever happen. We start to suspect that you’re not showing us the future because you have nothing to show.

Alan Moore shouldn’t feel bad about this–Thus Spake Zarathustra falls prey to the same dilemma (are dilemma carnivorous?)–but it is what happens to writers who say, “If you would follow me, then follow yourselves.” Hello, I didn’t write the book! Why would I pay twenty bucks for a comic book I wrote?

Let this be a warning to you.

Anyway, it’s really, really good. Vivid, vicious, visceral.