The latest releases from AdHouse books I’ve read are both beautiful examples of books-as-art-objects. They look nice on a bookshelf, a night stand or a coffee table. You’ll look cooler and more attractive while reading them on the train or in a restaurant. Both suggest narratives beyond themselves, as if the books themselves are chronicling or representing something else bigger and more important, but outside the confines of their contents.

One of them is a lot of easily accessible fun, the other one is nigh impenetrable fun…which I suppose isn’t everyone’s idea of fun. In either case, they make for great conversation pieces. So let’s talk about ‘em, huh?

Let’s start with the character whose pretty, pretty face is to the right there.

Like the Quiet Bird-Man in Jamie Tanner’s The Aviary and the title character of Mike Dawson’s Ace-Face: The Mod with the Metal Arms, Afrodisiac’s first AdHouse-published adventure in 2005’s superheroes-by-artists-not-primarily-known-as-superhero-artists showcase, Project: Superior.

That adventure, in which the hero who possesses both an afro and aphrodisiac superpowers over all women to escape and electricity-themed villain’s master plan of employing lesbian hechwomen, is reprinted in AdHouse’s recent book Afrodisiac, along with a great deal of original material.

Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca’s book is rather curious in that it more or less functions as a greatest hits collection culled from a long-running superhero comic book that never actually existed. There are a whole bunch of short stories in a variety of styles, but they’re greatly outnumbered by the suggestions of stories—covers, posters, letters pages, concept art, advertisements and so on.

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I assume few of you are actually reading this on Christmas Day, and I hope you all have better things to do on the holiday—even if it’s just a day off work for you than a holiday you celebrate—than read me talking about comics. But in the off-chance than any of you do check out Blog@ today, I thought I’d leave some content for you. Here then are some short reviews of several recent-ish graphic novels and collections...

365 Samurai and a Few Bowls of Rice (Dark Horse Comics): J. P. Kalonji’s violent tale of an Edo-era swordsman’s bizarre quest, to kill the titular number of samurai in order to avenge his master and discover the meaning of life, is deceptively simple. It’s also blisteringly paced; it’s almost-400 pages flying by with the speed of protagonist Ningen’s steel being unsheathed. That’s because of the rather unique format.

Each page of the small, square, seven-by-five-ish inch book is a splash page, so each page is also its own panel. From the craft perspective, it strikes me as a very interesting way to produce a comic book, but from a reader’s perspective, the results are a lightning-fast pacing that’s perfect for the subject matter. I can’t be positive without going back and counting, but I think we may actually see 365 samurai get killed within these pages—although, to be fair, he does kill over 200 by simply dodging a blow in one of the book’s more clever fight scenes—but when Ningen’s quest is completed, he (and we) learn an appropriately Eastern, zen-like moral.

Kalonji’s character designs are a real treat, a bit of exaggerated, funny cartooning, a bit period-appropriate simplified Japanese abstraction and a bit of samurai movie actor caricature. It’s black and white, with plenty of black ink arcing and splattering about as Ningen cuts his way toward enlightenment. It’s a truly unique work in the genre that should feel fresh to its adherents, and good enough at what it does that even those with no prior affection for or experience with samurai comics should find something to appreciate in it.

Showcase Presents: The Warlord Vol. 1 (DC Comics): Writer/artist Mike Grell’s late-70s/early-80s fantasy series still seems doomed to never be anything more than the second best comic book barbarian adventure series, but it does have its advantages over Marvel’s (and now Dark Horse’s) Conan. There’s the modern day setting (Well, now it’s a few decades in the past, but you know what I mean) and the Hollow Earth element, which makes Skartaris more of an unpredictable, anything-can-happen sort of environment. Rogue CIA agents, robots and alien invaders fit in just as naturally as the dinosaurs and Dungeons & Dragons stuff, and after these first 28 issues (plus the DC First Issue Special), I’m hard-pressed to imagine something that would actually seem out of place in The Warlord’s weird milieu.

Grell’s work is especially well-suited to the Showcase Presents format, as the black and white re-presentation eliminates the period coloring and the ravages of time on the original back issues so that there’s nothing to come between a reader’s eyes and Grell’s impressive designs and line-work. Additionally, the paper stock and low price-point seem more appropriate for this than more high-end, color collection—Grell’s  was pure pulp adventure, so the pulpier the presentation, the better.

I’m sure the storyline grows more epic, complicated and sprawling as it goes on—the first volume lasted 133 issues, after all—but these early adventures are a nice introduction to a pretty fun premise, if a readers need more than 500 pages of nice drawings of scantily clad beautiful people and rampaging monsters and dinosaurs to get them to pick up a book.

The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book (Fantagraphics Books): The two Joe Daly stories collected here are difficult to describe, as the great pleasures of each story are the odd, idiosyncratic details Daly includes, and the way in which he reveals them.

I suppose it’s safe to say that it stars Dave, a freelance artist in Cape Town, South Africa, who has red-hair, a monkey-like face and even more monkey-like feet. Hell, they’re not monkey-like; they are straight up monkey feet, with thumb-toes and everything. He and his best friend Paul, a freeloading hippy-type, find themselves involved in strange mysteries. In the first story, “The Leaking Cello Case,” Daly introduces us to his characters, and Dave and Paul find a dangerous mystery within Dave’s own apartment complex.

In the second, “John Wesley Harding,” the two begin the story hunting for a runaway capybara, and things just get progressively weirder, in a bizarre spiral of unlikely coincidences and seemingly random but interconnected plot points that the story gets funnier every couple of pages. I’ve never read anything like it—and now I want nothing more than to read more of it.

Sublife Vol. 2 (Fantagraphics): This is a John Pham’s gorgeously designed one-man anthology book, including about a half-dozen stories of various genres, formats, sensibilities and even art styles, each impeccably laid out on longer-than-it-is-high, 8.5-by-7-inch rectangular pages. Some of them seem to begin in-progress but, having never read the first volume, I’m not sure if that is the case, or simply Pham’s approach to those stories.

There’s a short, funny story spread across a stack of four comic strips on the inside front cover that you’ll have to turn the book sideways to read (this is a book that will require a lot of turning). There’s a 13-page story set in space (that’s the one the cover reflects) that really needs to be seen to be believed—it features some of the most innovative and interesting use of a comic’s page that I can recall encountering this year. There’s a four-page slice of life story told in sketchier, slightly more abstracted designs. There’s a weird, two-page, many-tiny-paneled story about St. Ambrose (the actual saint, a school named after the saint, and some of the people who went there). There’s a 27-page, cryptic, post-apocalyptic action-adventure story, with softer lines. And there’s another short, funny one-page story on the inside front cover.

They’re all pretty great on their own, and taken all together, they make up a downright remarkable book.

Wolverine: Weapon X Vol. 1: Admantium Men (Marvel Comics): This recent trade paperback collects the first few issues of Marvel’s fourth ongoing Wolverine title, and while there’s never a lack of Wolverine comics available for purchase, writer Jason Aaron and artist Ron Garney have managed to separate their Wolverine from the pack. It’s hardly essential reading or groundbreaking comic book-ing, but it is accessible and fun superhero entertainment, and if one wants to read a comic book about Wolverine, this trade seems like as good a place to start as any, and a lot better a place to start than most.

Despite the familiar sub-title, Aaron moves forward rather than looking back, and takes a stab at relevance by having one of Marvel’s evil corporations buy the plans for making Weapon X-es to use in their security firm. He takes an even bigger stab at over the top action that makes the recent Wolvie film seem restrained. These new Weapon X-es have laser claws and guns that shoot bullets that give you cancer, and Wolverine’s plans for taking on the bad guys involve such subtleties and crashing his motorcycle headfirst into a limo and cutting people with his claws as he flies through the windshield and out the back window and bringing an attack helicopter to a claw fight.

For his part, Garney does the work of his career, seemingly having made such progress in his work since the last time I encountered it at any great length that I hardly recognized it as his work.

There’s an even better story following the initial arc, although it’s more poorly communicated through the art (Adam Kubert illustrates it, and his layouts are choppy and hard to read, with overly showy, over-designed captions calling to much attention to themselves).

Aaron goes a bit meta, showing a few weeks in the life of Wolverine, who had two Marvel Universe ongoings, is a member of various X-teams and the New Avengers, and can be relied on to show up in a few random one-shots and make around a dozen guest-appearances every month. It’s funny to see what a few days in the poor guy’s life are like but, in the second half, Aaron finds an in-story reason for Wolverine’s business, and ties it into recent events in the hero’s fictional life in a way that make it almost seem to matter. It’d be a stretch to call it poignant, but it is clever as hell.

Yotsuba&! Vol. 7 (Yen Press): Still great.

Almost as a rule, I’m leery of comics projects like The Devil’s Handshake (Archaia).

It’s “based on characters and stories created by Ryan Schifrin,” who gets a very Hollywood “story by” credit and shares the writing credit with veteran comics writer Larry Hama.

Schifrin is himself a filmmaker, his major credit being writing and directing 2006 Bigfoot movie Abominable, and IMDb.com has a handful of other credits to his name.

If I don’t actually read a comic book with similar credits that’s a similar half-comics industry, half-film industry production every day, I certainly read about one every day, and they tend to not be very good comics. Whether it’s actually the case or not, they often read like rejected screenplays and pitches being reformulated as comic books, and, obviously, that’s hardly the best way to go about making great comics.

Why am I bothering to mention all this here? I’m not just kvetching for kvetching’s sake. (At least, not this time!). No, I just wanted to point out that I personally have all this baggage concerning film and TV industry people dabbling in comics, and I still found Devil’s Handshake a heck of a lot of fun. If you don’t share my particular biases and prejudices, than chances are you’ll love it.

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It was Joe McCulloch who really sold me on the idea of DC’s First Wave series. In his regular preview of the week’s releases, he wrote of Batman/Doc Savage Special #1:

[W]riter/mastermind Brian Azzarello seems to have a pretty great concept brewing: a matured, shared universe of pulp magazine fixtures, upset by the arrival of the gun-toting early Batman cast as the young hotshot in town, thus neatly linking the early notion of the superhero to the costumed magazine characters that certainly provided some of the concept’s lineage.

That does sound like a pretty great idea for a series, huh? Something in the tradition of past DC epics hinging on the change of publishing eras. Think The Golden Age, The New Frontier or Kingdom Come, applied to the dawning of superhero comics as the adventure pulps began to fade. And if someone could do a kick-ass version of such a series, it would almost have to be Brian Azzarello, who has more great crime comics on his resume than just about anyone, and showed a great aptitude for metafictional fun in his Dr. 13 story.

Unfortunately, McCulloch wasn’t speaking for Azzarello or DC Comics, and this first book of the First Wave series/event isn’t anywhere near as clever. Instead it’s a 38-page, $4.99 comic book in which the two leads have a misunderstanding, get in a fight, realize their conflict is premised on a mistake, and decide to team up (Or as Graeme McMillian succintly put it in his Savage Critics review,  it’s “a standard Marvel Team-Up plot without much flair”). It even lacks what little punch that old superhero team-up formula has left, as it’s stretched out past the 22-page mark, but never actually gets around to the teaming-up. That’s something that will presumably happen at a later date, most likely sometime next spring, based on the back matter.

That back matter consists of eight pages of sketch art and character designs by Rags Morales, with a few paragraphs about a variety of characters playing a part in the First Wave to come by Azzarello. The characters are a pretty eclectic mix, so eclectic that it’s hard to find a pattern. There are a few standard DCU characters—new versions of Batman, Black Canary and the Blackhawks. There’s Will Eisner’s Spirit character, who also seems to be a distinctly new take (His Ebony White, for example, is a “brash girl.” Not even Frank Miller thought of doing that!). There’s Justice Inc, an old pulp franchise which became a DC comic briefly in the ’70s. Also from the pulps is Doc Savage, who also did time as a DC Comics-published character. And then there’s Rima, the mysterious jungle girl character from William  Henry Hudson’s 1904 romance Green Mansions, who also did time in the ’70s as a DC character, albeit in a jungle adventure mode.

Is there a logic to the character’s chosen? It’s difficult to say. It seems like they are among the less fantastic characters DC own or has the right to publish comics featuring—none are as hard to imagine existing in the real world as, say, Superman or Space Ghost—but there’s still a sense of the random about them, like they were chosen out of a hat and handed as an assignement to Azzarello, along with the instructions to “Try and make something out of all these guys, huh? We’ll let you know if we can get The Shadow or decide to throw in The Sandman or Crimson Avenger.”

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I had read all 44 pages of FVZA: Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency #1 (Radical Comics) before I began to understand why the comic book existed at all and why it felt like a very solid premise from which a story was being reverse engineered, rather than a story that needed to be told.

That realization didn’t come from the comic book itself sadly, but from an interview with writer David Hine, printed after this first third of the story ends—he was apparently brought in to turn the website fvza.org into a comic book. (This also explains the wonky credits. David Hine and Roy Allan Martinez are the only creators with their names on the cover; on the title page the former is credited as “writer” and the latter as “illustrator,” but there are also two people given a “conceived by” credit and two more people given a “painted by” credit).

The premise is an alternate history of the United States, in which both vampires and zombies are real, and have posed existential threats to the nation since at least the time of the Civil War. Eventually, a federal organization was formed to protect the country from these two supernatural menaces. At present, they’ve both been seemingly stamped out, and the agency is in decline, the way that perhaps the Department of Homeland Security would be if the threat of terrorism were somehow almost completely erased.

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There’s no faulting The Anchor #1 (Boom Studios) for a lack of scope. It opens in Hell itself, where the mysterious title character is single-handedly responsible for beating back the hordes of hell with his big, pink fists.

It then jumps to downtown Reykjavik, Iceland, where a giant ice monster is on a rampage. The title character, referred to as God’s anchor to hell by a member of the demon horde and Clem by a volunteer worker who notices he’s wearing a symbol of Saint Clement, is there too, fighting the monster.

“My soul is in hell,” he explains. “It wrestles with demons there…the wounds my soul suffers are borne by my earthly body.”

Writer Phil Hester doesn’t delve much deeper into who The Anchor is, how he came to be, or why his memory seems so addled and he sometimes talks in psalms without even realizing they’re psalms (Actually, the fact that the ice monster hits him with a truck might explain those last two, come to think of it).

And while all that is usually welcome in a first issue (especially see this is a $3.99 comic), that all that info isn’t present certainly isn’t because Hester’s dragging his feet or anything. He does establish plenty of intriguing clues and suggestions, introduces and half-introduces some characters, sketches out a concept and, most importantly, establishes an appealing tone that teeters between supernatural melodrama and comedy.

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 The secret in the title of A Family Secret (Farrar Straus Giroux) isn’t the sort that is being deliberately kept from others as much as it simply goes un-talked about for years.

And who could blame Helena Van Dort, an elderly Dutch woman who lived through World War II and the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, for not talking about the war years all the time? It makes for a pretty unpleasant topic.

Comics artist Eric Heuvel’s crystal-clear storytelling, beautiful draftsmanship and open, inviting and expressive design makes for a pleasant reading experience, however, as unpleasant as the subject matter might be.

A Family Secret is Heuvel’s graphic novel about Helena’s war-time experience, written from a scenario credited to Heuvel, Ruud van der Rol, Menno Metselaar of the Anne Frank House and Hans Groeneweg of the Resistance Museum of Friesland. That sounds like a lot of experts to have in the room, and it shows in the book’s educational focus.

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As a comics critic, I’m not terribly fond of the anthology format. They’re extremely difficult to write reviews of, and I’m hardly ever satisfied with the reviews that result any time I do try to tackle one.

That’s due mostly to the very nature of anthologies (Well, that and the fact that I’m not as good a writer as I’d like sometimes, but I prefer to blame the format). Even those with strong, unifying themes will involve different creators on each story, and inevitably some creators will be better than other or, in the rare case where they’re all excellent, they will all be excellent in very different ways.

So every time I sit down to write a review for an anthology, I generally end up walking away from my laptop disappointed with the results—they always seem to be some variation of “This is an anthology consisting of stories tied together by this particular theme. Some of these stories were good, and some of them were not.”

As a comics reader, however, I’ve found that anthologies can be a lot of fun, introducing you to new creators and/or characters in rapid succession after a relatively low-risk investment of time and money.

Among my favorite to read are the sorts of holiday specials that mainstream publishers occasionally put out, for these very reasons. And for the Halloween ones, the grab-bag nature of anthologies seems particularly apropos, as reading them can parallel the experience of trick-or-treating. One stop you might get a little box of Dots or a York peppermint patty, the next you might get a Tootsie roll or one of those hard, brown blobs that come wrapped in plain black or orange wrappers and smell vaguely of peanuts.

Yesterday’s new comics day brought two such Halloween-prompted anthologies—DC/Vertigo’s House of Mystery Halloween Annual #1 and Image Comics’ The Perhapanauts Halloween Spooktacular #1—so I thought I’d try trick or treating in those two particular neighborhoods. Both books were also promoted as good jumping-on points for the various serials, and since I have yet to read a single issue of either House of Mystery or The Perhapanauts, I thought I might be well-positioned to serve as a test case for how effective they were at meeting those goals.

So grab your metaphorical costume and metaphorical treat bag and join me after the jump for some metaphorical trick or treating. (The “jump,” by the way, is also metaphorical).

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Matt Kindt’s 2007 Super Spy, a book that devoted each of its many chapters to the life of a different World War II spy in occasionally crisscrossing stories, featured a very complex narrative, made more complex by Kindt’s relentless, almost delirious shifts in layout and style.

His latest work, 3 Story: The Secret History of the Giant Man (Dark Horse Comics), is similar to Super Spy in a lot of ways. It’s impeccably well designed, so that every aspect of the book as an object—covers, title pages, etc.—serves the story. Kindt shifts from standard comics panel-grids to incorporate information in the form of other media, like a newspaper articles and pages from books about his characters. His artwork remains bold and showy. His characters still seem assembled from brushstrokes, like calligraphy people that suggest greater detail and radiate a third dimension.

But where 3 Story differs from Super Spy, it differs for the better. The story is more straightforward, but also a little more serious and sophisticated, Kindt’s use willingness to push the limits of the form in different directions here never coming between the reader and the story as it sometimes did in Super Spy (At times Super Spy seemed like a book that was first and foremost about the way in which it was being told).

The title refers both to the structure of the book, which consists of three stories distinct but continuing stories, and the one-time height of its main character Craig Pressgang, the Giant Man of the title. Each story is told from the point of view of a woman important in Craig’s life—his mother, his wife and his daughter—with his wife’s section making up the bulk of the book, and his mother and daughters’ stories serving as a prologue and epilogue.

Craig reaches the height of nine-feet-tall by the time he starts college, and keeps growing the rest of his life. It’s a fairly normal life too, including college, a girlfriend who becomes his wife, work, family and attendant difficulties with each, although the normalcy of Craig’s real problems are slightly obscured by the fantastical nature of his condition.

None of us are giant people, but most of us face some or all of the emotional problems Craig does, his gigantism functioning simultaneously as an in-plot conflict and a metaphor. In other words, everyone grows apart from their loved ones at some point, but when Craig does so, it’s in large part because he himself is literally growing constantly.

That the emotional content works so well is a credit to Kindt’s ability to write, draw and, most importantly, write with drawings, although the fact that he focuses on a single fantastic element to write as naturally as possible around certainly doesn’t hurt. Other than Craig’s mysterious growth, every element of the story is considered and presented as realistically as possible. Rather than the sort of wish-fulfillment attendant in growing superheroes, like Marvel’s Giant Man, Craig’s growth brings with it as many problems as it does benefits—his nerve reactions are super-slow so he hurts himself easily, he suffers from leg problems, and, in a world without Pym particles, all of his clothes need to be custom-made, until he grows so large the only clothing that will fit him are bolts of cloth stitched together and, finally, he’s too big for clothing at all.

His increasing alienation is manifested physically, as he gets so big that he can communicate with his tiny family, and Kindt keeps the character remote even from the audience, as we aren’t show or told what’s going on inside his head directly, but instead see him from within the heads of the women in his life.

It’s a pretty powerful work from a cartoonist whose skill, like his protagonist’s size, seems to be continuously increasing.

Related: For more info on the book, including a seven-page preview, visit the publisher’s website here. For more on Kindt, check out the artist’s website here (And make sure you visit the portfolio and blog section, if you’re curious as to what a Kindt image of, say, The Thing fighting MODOK might look like).

Ball Peen Hammer writer Adam Rapp must have one hell of a busy-looking business card at this point. He’s a playwright, filmmaker, young adult novelist and adult novelist, adding graphic novelist to his resume with this, his debut work in the medium. He’s working with artist George O’Connor, a picture book artist now on his second graphic novel (His first, Journey into Mohawk Country, was also published by First Second).

Their book, named for the tool used in a procedure best not spoiled here, betrays Rapp’s background in theater, as it’s an extremely talky one, mostly occurring in  two pretty claustrophobic settings. A cast of six or seven and minimal set design is all it would take to move this from the page to the stage, which points to a problem with the work: It’s a comic that doesn’t have to be a comic, and while that doesn’t make it a bad comic, I think it keeps it from ever being a truly great one.

I said it was talky, but it’s not at all poorly assembled. All that conversation is well-divided into different panels, so that the whole endeavor retains the form of a comic book and the experience remains one of reading a comic book—there are no walls of text, or panels overwhelmed by dialogue bubbles. It doesn’t read like a novel or screenplay or play being stuffed into a graphic novel for cynical reasons. Given how much of the story is told through the conversations—there’s no text prologue or narration to serve as shortcuts—it’s really quite remarkably assembled.

O’Connor’s lines are thin, and many when they’re needed—on brick walls, cross-hatched gloom, rotting diseased bodies, exterior long shots, a few rain storms—but his character designs are smooth, expressive, open and highly variant. The cast is a small one, but it looks great, and if you’re familiar with O’Connor’s children’s books, you may be surprised to see how he’s adapted his style to this form and this particular work.
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The second release from Drawn and Quarterly’s John Stanley Library collection features a much better known property than Melvin Monster—Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip heroine Nancy. As was the case with the Melvin book, Nancy Vol. 1 is a gorgeously designed and packaged book, something collection-ophiles can look at and handle with admiration.

Seth uses Nancy’s emoticon-simple face to great effect on the cover, title page and the pages between the five issues of Dell’s Nancy comic collected within,  making for a fine example of a book-as-art-object in and of itself, regardless of the contents.

But what contents! These late 1950’s issues were written and laid out by Stanley and drawn by Dan Gormley, and I was somewhat surprised by how similar they read to Stanley’s Little Lulu comics, of which I’m much more familiar (and also a great admirer).

Nancy and Sluggo fall neatly into the friend/enemy/paramour relationship of Lulu and Tubby (Is “boyfrenemy” a word? Can we make it one?), with fat jokes about Tubby swapped out for jokes about Sluggo’s poverty. Both little leading ladies are similarly precocious, smart, imaginative and basically good but capable of being quite annoying to adults. Each girl also deals regularly with a comically wealthy snob, a kinda creepy-looking best friend (Oona out-creeps Annie easily, of course), a bratty baby-sittee and neighborhood bully or bullies.

Both features also traded in amusing character-based humor and corny situational comedy often funny today for its precise lack of humor, and both work best when showing the intersection of the adult world and the children’s world.

As with Lulu, one of the many pleasures I took from the Nancy book was that weird nostalgia for a time I’ve only ever experienced in other old comics (Peanuts and Dennis the Menace and the like), for a childhood that doesn’t even remotely reflect what my own experience of growing up 30 years after Nancy and Sluggo’s adventures collected here was like. (Oh, and as with Lulu, there are plenty of reaction shots of adult passersby on the streets; those always crack me up).

Where Stanley’s Nancy differs most strongly from his Lulu (aside from the great differences between the way they’re being packaged these days) is the often quite strange clash in character design. The super-simplified Nancy and Sluggo seem to belong to a completely different strip than the gorgeous and almost representational wasp-waisted, delicate featured Aunt Fritzi, and all three of them seem to belong to another world than that of Oona, Spike, Rollo and most of the other kids and adults that pass through the strip.

The tension in the designs—intentional or not—only heightens the differences between the distinct sets of characters and the way they perceive their world, underlining the conflicts at the center of some of the best bits.

Not to over think it or anything. One could also just say it’s great cartooning applied to somewhat amusing mid-twentieth century kids comedy in a gorgeous package and leave it at that.

What comes to mind when you think of Jeff Parker comics? A talking gorilla with a machine gun? Harrison Oogar, The Caveman of Wall Street? The entire roster of the Avengers, transformed into a team of M.O.D.O.K.s?

Well Parker’s latest comics work, five-part Image miniseries Underground, doesn’t have any of those things in it, nor is it much of anything like the vast majority of the Parker-written comics you’ve probably read.

That’s not a bad thing.

While his ability to make me laugh is one of the things I admire most about Parker’s writing, there’s nothing wrong with range, and it’s nice to see Parker taking the opportunity to demonstrate his own. Underground has very little humor in it, aside from an early scene in which park ranger Wesley Fischer stares at herself in the bathroom mirror and tries to figure out the best way to say good morning to the sleeping co-worker in her bed, who is now more than a co-worker.

The mode is more straightforward action drama, and Parker has a perfect collaborator for work in the genre—Whiteout artist Steve Lieber, who’s no doubt having a pretty exciting month in general.

Wesley, the aforementioned park ranger, is also an expert caver, and wants to keep Stillwater Cave off-limits to amateur cavers and tourists, who could damage the delicate system. That places her at odds with much of the rest of the small, economically depressed Kentucky town, the residents of which think opening up the cave could prove an economic boon. Leading the charge is local businessman and entrepreneur Winston Barefoot, who may have something to do with guys going ahead with the dynamiting of the cave on their own.

A great deal of this first issue is spent on introducing the characters and conflict before ultimately complicating it, leaving us with an underground cliffhanger promising more action in the unusual, underground setting in future installments.

If the comic seems like a bit of a departure for Parker, whose writing has dealt with some of the more off-beat corners of Marvel’s superhero universe and a colorful magician character fighting demons for DC/WildStorm, Lieber is well within his comfort zone of drawing real people in real places doing realistic things.

Lieber’s a strong designer, storyteller and actor, and makes every page beautiful (if you stop and really look at it), unassuming (if you don’t) and, most admirably, perfectly natural. He’s one of those rare artists who manages to make great art look effortless, so that his panels and pages simply look as they should, making it easy for the reader to be drawn in.

In that respect, it mirrors the issue as a whole—it’s really quite inviting.

The last thing the world needs is another telling of Superman’s origin story, particularly in comic book form. Mark Waid, Leinil Francis Yu and company just did a perfectly good job of retelling it for the 21st century in Superman: Birthright, a twelve-part series that started just six years ago, and even more recently Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and company  reminded readers they knew the story like the back of their hand already, so why not just fast forward right through it, in the first four panels of their All-Star Superman?

Of course, DC’s been fiddling with their continuity, and one of the changes of their 2005-2007 Infinite Crisis/52 continuity reboot that many of the things that were done away with in the previous continuity reboot were gradually restored, which left a lot of questions in the minds of those of us who worry about things like when Superman first put on his suit or first met the Legion of Super-Heroes.

So here comes Superman: Secret Origin #1, the first in a six-issue series by the “Superman and The Legion of Super-Heroes” team of Geoff Johns, Gary Frank and Jon Sibal to put our anxious minds at ease.

Johns rather wisely skips over the destruction of Krypton, the rocket ship, the Kent discovery and so on, opening with young Clark Kent already a teenager at Smallville High. He, his parents and his confidant Lana Lang all know he’s a lot stronger and tougher than he should be, but Clark doesn’t know why. When his heat vision shows up, Ma and Pa reveal the rocket ship hidden in the barn, and Clark begins to learn about his origin, which has been kept a secret from him all this time (See? Secret Origin. That works perfectly).

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Batman: Gotham Underground (DC Comics) I passed on this when it was originally serialized, as I wasn’t reading Countdown, and it was a tie-in to a Countdown tie-in (Salvation Run), but I’ve found I’m much less picky about the comics I read when I borrow their trade collections from a library as opposed to paying for them out-of-pocket 22 pages at a time over the course of several months. The work of writer Frank Tieri and pencil artist Jim Calafiore, the book is an ambitious attempt at what seems like a pretty good idea for a comic.

Despite the title, the main character is actually The Penguin, and the book deals with his attempt to fend off rival criminal empires encroaching on Gotham City. Tieri seems to be trying to give at least one scene to every single villain and vigilante in Gotham City, and manages to pretty successfully work almost all of them in, sometimes successfully (the unavailable Joker, for example, via flashback) sometimes less so (Vigilante IX, or whatever version they’re up to now, enters and exits via left field).

The main problem with the book (beyond Calafiore’s art, which brings a jagged, edgy weirdness to the proceedings, but little else of value) is that the trade collection isolates the story from whatever else DC had on the shelves at the time, but the story doesn’t quite stand on its own once isolated. Plot lines from other books are picked up on and left to finish elsewhere, with no indication within the story itself that this is so. The result is that certain swathes of the narrative seem to come out of nowhere and then be forgotten.

And even if you are a reader of the DC Universe in general, and are thus aware of things like Countdown and Salvation Run, there’s still something unsatisfying about the book. It is, after all, the story of the struggle for criminal control of Gotham City. So was War Games (2005), Face The Face (2006) and Battle For the Cowl (collection due in November). It’s hard to care much about the consequences of these stories when their results are so short-lived, and/or contradicted by the other Batman books.

Beasts of Burden #1 (Dark Horse Comics) Well this is awkward. I was pretty disappointed in this book, which comes from my own incredibly high expectations for it (I don’t think I’ve ever read a bad comic by either Evan Dorkin, who wrote this issue, or Jill Thompson, who provides the painted art) and the simple fact that I was completely unprepared to read this story. The cast of characters, all house pets that can talk to one another and apparently have some experience facing supernatural threats, was surprisingly large, and this issue is constructed not so much to introduce them as it is to tell readers about what’s currently happening in their lives—it’s assumed that you already know them and what their various deals are.

It’s not an unfair assumption, given that the characters have appeared in several stories in Dark Horse’s various Book Of… horror anthologies over the years, but I expected a more entry-level story from a #1 issue in a new miniseries. If you didn’t read the Book Of… books, Dark Horse is making it easy to do so, by putting them all online here, but I wanted to evaluate the book as it stands on its own.

And it doesn’t stand on its own all that well. Sure, Thompson’s art is gorgeous—the character designs are all extremely strong, to the point where the various animals all look like representational versions of real animals, but can still emote in a way real pets can’t quite manage. A few of them have strong, likable personalities, and there’s a neat conflict involving an imaginatively conceived monster that gets around by pulling a Charles Forte strange fall maneuver. But joining the story in progress like this felt a little like picking up a random X-Men comic. I didn’t know who was who or what was what, and was compelled to go to the Internet to find out.

I realize this doesn’t exactly sound terribly positive, but I don’t mean to warn readers away. Instead, I just want to warn you that if you haven’t read the Book of… books, to start here, and then pick up Beasts of Burden #1. It’ll make all the difference in the world. I didn’t think much of this issue, but I have a hard time blaming anyone but myself, which doesn’t happen very often. (For another opinion, check out my colleague Sarah’s review here).

The Color of Water, The Color of Heaven (First Second) The second and third volumes of Kim Dong Hwa “Color of Earth” trilogy follow young Ehwa into adolescence, into her first serious relationship and ultimately into marriage. While the first volume concentrated mainly on Ehwa’s gradual discovery about her body, the bodies of others and the world of love and relationships from the outsider’s perspective of a child, in the second and third book she begins to experience the same grown-up emotions from the inside for herself.

In Water, which I guess you could call the puberty volume, she meets a wrestler/farmhand from a nearby village named Duksam and falls in love, experiencing longing and frustration. In Heaven, she becomes an adult, experiencing marriage and sex. All of the characters continue to speak to one another almost constantly in poetic nature metaphors, which makes for a formal, literate read, but, looked at from a different angle, can also be pretty funny.

In Water, for example, everything in nature seems to be suggesting sex, like, constantly. Similarly, the wedding night consummation scene in Heaven, told in visual metaphors, is rather elegant in context, but also sort of hilarious, particularly read out of context.

Taken all together, Kim Dong Hwa’s epic is surprisingly emotionally effective. By the end, I found myself feeling proud of Ehwa and sad for her mother, who was about to lose her closest friend and confidant after so many years. That comes from watching Ehwa grow-up over the course of hundreds of pages, I suppose. The cast is tiny (there can’t be more than a dozen characters total) and the setting small almost to the point of being claustrophobic (most of the action set at Ehwa and her mother’s small house), but because the subject matter is that of the two principal characters’ lives, and so much attention is devoted to it (about 900 pages total), that it’s a grand, sweeping epic of the small, intimate elements of two women’s lives.

Johnny Boo Book 3: Happy Apples (Top Shelf Productions) Now on its third book, James Kochalka’s series about a little ghost and his even more little ghost friend has reached the point where I ask myself, “Is there any point of still reviewing this, other than to point out when a new one arrives?”  After all, if you’ve read the first two books, Best Little Ghost in the World and Twinkle Power, you should know what to expect by now:  An all-ages comic featuring Kochalka’s ultra-cute art, coloring so bright it’s electric and gags aimed at both kids (in their silliness) and adults (in their absurdity). In this volume,  Johnny learns what kind of food makes your muscles big and strong (hint: it’s in the title) and what kind of food makes your muscles floopy and funny.  I can’t recommend this series highly enough to Kochalka fans and comics fan parents who happen to have little kids.

I’m facing a bit of a dilemma.

Usually new comic book day falls on Wednesday, right? And usually I put together a linkblogging post late Tuesday night and set the Blog@Newsarama  robot to post it for me early the next morning, so I can devote my entire Wednesday to the acquisition and reading of new comic books.

But new comic book day has arrived a day late this week, on Thursday, instead of Wednesday, due to the Labor Day. (Thanks for improving working conditions, getting people with full-time jobs a Monday off at the end of summer and completely ruining my week, American Labor Movement!).

Normally on Thursday mornings and afternoons I spend my time working on a post for Blog@, but I can’t go get and read comics and come up with a Blog@ post at the same time, and I need to do both as soon as possible, because the new comic book reading is something of an addiction at this point, and the latter is something I should probably do before you call go home from work and thus stop checking Blog@ for comics-related content.

So here’s the solution I came up with: I’ll liveblog my reading of this week’s books. Will that be entertaining? Informing? Mildly interesting? I don’t know, but it will definitely be a blog post.

So I just got back from my local comic shop with this week’s purchases (By the way, any fellow Columbusites in the reading audience, Sean McKeever is signing at the Laughing Ogre today in support of Nomad, so go visit him and buy his book. I suggest you bring copies of Ted McKeever books with you and ask him to sign those, just to see what happens), and it’s a relatively light week for me.

I’ve been adjusting my weekly comics-buying budget down gradually over the last few years, and it currently stands at $25 (down from an all-time high of $45 in 2005). The arrival of the long-awaited sixth volume of Kiyohiko Azuma’s Yotsuba&!, which costs $10.99, bumped a trio of $3.99 DC books and a $2.99 Marvel book off my shopping list (Booster Gold, Adventure Comics, Doom Patrol and Marvel Adventures Super Heroes, for those keeping score; I’ll probably pick up some of those if one of the next few weeks are lighter). So this week’s haul consists of Yotsuba&!, Blackest Night: Batman #2, Wednesday Comics #10, Incredible Hercules #134, and Secret Six #13.

I’ve got them all in a little stack on the end table next to my special comics-reading chair, I’ve got a large black coffee from Honey Dip Donuts on Kenny Road in Columbus, and I’ve got my lap top open. So, let’s do this experiment!

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As a comics critic, I hate Chris Onstad’s Achewood. As a comics reader, I love it—it’s by far my favorite web comic, and one of my favorite comic strips or comics of any kind…hell, maybe one of my favorite pieces of current fiction of any medium.

The reason part of me hates it and part of me loves it is the same. It’s such a unique strip, there’s nothing really even remotely like it, which, obviously, can make it really hard to explain to others, or talk about at all.

There are a lot of conceptual hurdles that can make entry into the world of Achewood kind of hard, hurdles I struggled with the first few times I tried reading it, until someone eventually advised to just pick a story arc from the archives and start reading—within a dozen or so strips, you should start to not only get it, but dig it. And Onstad is so accomplished at world building that the longer the strip goes on, the more you read of it, the more you get to know the surprisingly dynamic and versatile characters, the better it gets.

Those hurdles? Who are all these crazy anthropomorphic animals, and what species are they exactly? Are they anthropomorphic animals living in an animal-scaled world, or a human-scaled world? Why don’t squirrels have pupils? How is it that four such divergent characters as Mr. Cornelius Bear, Lyle, Teodor and Phillipe are roommates?

Achewood Vol. 2: Worst Song, Played on Ugliest Guitar (Dark Horse Comics) is the book that the Caleb who once struggled with such things could have used to answer such questions.

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I’m just going to go ahead and say it: I think X-Men: Misfits Vol. 1 (Del Rey Manga) is the single best X-Men story I’ve experienced since Grant Morrison brought his run on New X-Men to a close.

Writers Raina Telgemeier and Dave Roman and artist Anzu have a lot of definite advantages over the creators toiling away in Marvel Comics’ X-Men mines, of course—they’re not beholden to decades worth of continuity or the designs and characterizations of other creators, and they don’t have to line-up what they’re doing with what, say, the people over in the Avengers office are up to that month.

In this manga-style “remix” of the X-Men (to use the back of the book’s own word for this particular sort of reimagining), the creators are free to take whatever core concepts they think work best, and rebuild the X-Men franchise from the ground up as they see fit. They do an incredible job, and it was downright uncanny how they managed to make the X-Men into something that seemed completely new while still retaining much of their essential je ne X quoi.

Telgemeir and Roman retain the deep adolescent appeal of the mutants as stand-ins for kids who feel awkward, persecuted or alone (but, it turns out, are actually much more special than anyone else), and, if anything,  broaden the appeal beyond the normal metaphors and make it feel a little more universal.

They also retain basic elements that worked well from throughout the various eras of the comics: Xavier and Magneto’s differing views on on how humans and mutants relate, school-as-superhero team, Kitty Pryde as point-of-view character, and so on.

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It’s fitting that 28 Days Later has finally been made into a comic book. You can trace the current zombie boom straight back to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 2002 film, and while zombies have been increasingly popular in several media since, they’ve been particularly ubiquitous on the comics shelves, and show no signs of going away any time soon. After all, one of the best-selling super-comics at the moment is a zombie story grafted onto DC’s Green Lantern franchise.

So there’s a nice bit of symmetry to the very existence of Boom Studios’s 28 Days Later. It might be an even nicer bit of symmetry if it proved to be the ultimate zombie story, closing out our decade’s fascination with the living, shambling (and sometimes sprinting) dead and bringing a temporary end to the zombie craze.

I don’t see that happening though.

Not only is there no evidence that zombies are on the wane, but this comic doesn’t seemed poised to be the one that says everything there’s left to say about zombies for the time being. It’s not a bad comic, but it certainly doesn’t offer a revolutionary new take. Of course, given that it’s premised as a bridge between the original film and the 2007 sequel, it’s entire reason for being is to simply to keep the Later story going.

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The first issue of this new miniseries from Archaia read a great deal like the work of someone new to the comics medium. Which is a little shocking, considering it’s written by longtime comics artist and writer Phil Hester (who also provides one of the several covers) and illustrated by Frazer Irving, an artist who also has plenty of great comics work on his resume.

Hester gives way too much information about unimportant things on several pages (including two splash pages featuring static images of the protagonist with columns of text narration that seem more appropriate for a work of prose), and too little information about more important matters.

Presumably in an attempt to keep a little mystery about the protagonist and premise, Hester lets the entire first issue slip by without giving readers much more than hints of what may come in future issues, or even answering pretty obvious questions that arise in the course of the story. Not only do the creators tell when they should show, sometimes they’re a little too coy about even telling.

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