The Planetary / JLA crossover gives Planetary the Planetary treatment.  In it, the team is re-cast as an analogue to The Four; they control the world by suppressing alien / emergent phenomena, then re-releasing it as their own.  Opposing them is a faction composed of a naive Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent and Diana Prince.

The Planetary / Batman crossover starts with the Planetary team pursuing a fugitive in their Gotham City.  The fugitive causes ripples in space-time, which allows the team to interact with various incarnations of The Batman.  They are all here – Frank Miller’s Batman, campy TV Batman, standard 70s and 80s Batman -  but tellingly, it is Bob Kane’s original pulpy Bat-Man who compromises with Elijah, thereby satisfying the Planetary theme.

Not a bad collection, over-all, but certainly not a necessary one.

Hypothetically related posts:

1. Planetary, Vol. 1: All Over the World and Other Stories
2. Planetary, Vol. 2: The Fourth Man
3. Planetary, Vol. 3: Leaving the 20th Century

About that cover art.  One of the things that I love about the cover art is that it is never the same.  Each issue, the cover is remixed to give you some indication of the genre within.  Are we going back to the pulps this time?  Steve Ditko’s funky-psychedelic-secret agent-groove pads from the 60s?  Attack of the 50 Foot Woman?  It’s all part of the magic of Planetary, and another thing that makes this series one of my favourites.

Hypothetically related posts:

1. Planetary, Vol. 1: All Over the World and Other Stories
2. Planetary: Crossing Worlds
3. Planetary, Vol. 2: The Fourth Man

And if that were so, An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories, Vol. 1, edited by Ivan Brunetti, would be one of the best values for money around.  This is a BIG BOOK, and it’s pretty reasonably priced.

“But wait,” you might say.  “There are Spanish peanuts, Runner peanuts, Valencia peanuts, Virginia peanuts and Tennessee Red and Tennessee White peanuts. You didn’t take into account the different kinds of peanuts and my preference for one over the other.  Maybe some peanuts are better than others and therefore worth more than others.  Just how good are these peanuts?”

And I would say, “Pretty good.”

Brunetti has done a fabulous job of picking up where Chris Ware left off with McSweeny’s Quarterly Concern #13.  There is a lot of overlap in terms of artists, but there is a lot of different stuff here as well, and I’m pretty sure there is no duplication of content.  The book, like Issue #13, is full of “indie” comics, all of which range from “quite good” to “excellent.”

And so, that makes this book a particularly good book to pick up.  It’s high quantity AND high quality.  You can’t do much better that that.

Hypothetically related posts:

1. Planetary, Vol. 1: All Over the World and Other Stories
2. McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #13
3. Batman: False Faces

Given that McSweeney’s is a literary magazine, you would have to assume that the point of Issue #13 is to introduce graphic fiction to those who are unfamiliar with it.  The book starts with an illustrated introduction by Ware, comedically breezing through “The History of Cartooning”, and then treats us to some early examples of the genre by Toefler, Herriman and Schultz.  And certainly, the book doesn’t abandon its literary roots, interspercing (as it does) the graphic fiction with written articles from Chip Kidd, John Updike and others on how comics influenced their art.

And even though the first few comic excerpts resemble the daily gag strips you see in your local rag, the content is also decidedly literary.  There are no super-powered, muscle-bound, homo-erotic heroes in tights here (not that there’s anything wrong with that).  Black-and-white is the order of the day here, and autobiography of a Bukowskian nature is rampant.  It is, in a word, excellent.

Issue #13 collects many important pieces of work from the origins of North American comic art in the early New York dailies right up to the time it was published in 2004.  And “North American” is right; there is a good representation made by Canadian artists, including pieces by Seth, Chester Brown and former Hamiltonian David Collier.  This was an important book; since its publication, several other anthologies of graphic fiction have made the scene (Ivan Brunetti’s Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories, Vols. 1 & 2, and the Best American Comics series, to name a couple).

If you are interested in comics, but the adolescent power-fantasies of DC and Marvel put you off; if you love indie writing; if you find the potential of this medium intriguing in any way: do yourself a favour and pick up a copy of this book.

Hypothetically related posts:

1. An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories, Vol. 1
2. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
3. Next Meeting of the HGNBC Nov. 5

I always find it interesting to read Tintin stories.  Hergé did a pretty good job of tying contemporary events and concerns into the story arc, and while this can make them seem dated, it is also revealing to the modern reader.  Flight 714 has a couple of great examples of this.

Tintin and friends land in Jakarta on their way to a conference in Sydney.  While hanging out in the airport terminal, waiting for their connecting flight, they meet an old friend, Skut, who is flying the private jet of millionaire Laszlo Carreidas to the same conference.  They raise the interest of Carreidas and he invites them to travel the rest of the way with him.  Unluckily, they end up in the middle of a plot to capture the millionaire and steal his millions from a secret Swiss bank account.  Pretty standard stuff.

What is interesting here in post-9/11 land is the complete naivite of the hijacking plot.  One of the co-conspirators, the co-pilot, was picked up when they landed in Tehran (Tehran, for Chrissake!) and the regular co-pilot became sick.  Everyone on board has a gun, no one has a political cause, etc.  What is interesting is that, to me at least, this doesn’t seem like Hergé being simplistic, but rather the world in which this plot existed.  Rightly or wrongly, (probably wrongly), it seems that hijacking an airplane in 1968 really was as easy as walking on board with a gun and saying, “We’re taking this plane to Pulau-Pulau Bompa!”

The other thing I found interesting, from a sociological point of view, was the inclusion of a major plot point right out of the pages of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods.  In 1968, Chariots of the Gods proposed that Earth was visited multiple times in the past by aliens, and depictions of these events can be found in the archaeological record.  It is interesting that Hergé was able to grab a hold of this meme and get it into Flight 714 so quickly, given that it was also published in 1968.  Clearly, the Chariots phenomenon was a big enough deal at the time to warrant such an inclusion.

Flight 714 is a fun read, worth picking up, even if you don’t enjoy analysing it as much as I do.

Hypothetically related posts:

1. The Adventures of Tintin, Reporter For “Le Petit Vintième,” In The Land of the Soviets
2. Tintin in Tibet
3. The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country

Currently, the HGNBC is small but growing.  We meet on the first Thursday of the month at someone’s house where we drink a few drinks, argue about the book at hand and pick one for the next month.  If you are interested in joining, please email me (Marc) at graphicnovelbookclub@gmail.com

Hypothetically related posts:

1. Next Meeting of the HGNBC Nov. 5
2. Batman: False Faces
3. Transmetropolitan: Back on the Street

The only real complaint I have is that this volume is short, hence the script thrown in at the end to pad it out.  But, on the other hand, there are still eight more volumes in the collection, so that isn’t that great of a problem.

Hypothetically related posts:

1. The Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes
2. The Sandman, Vol. 2: The Doll’s House
3. Batman: False Faces

From there, we go straight for pure plot.  Oh sure, the structure of the series is the same, it is still a great commentary on the genre of comics and its origins, but now Planetary begins to explore itself.  We get back story on The Four, on the Planetary organization, on Elijah, and the Fourth Man.  Thrown into the mix are 50s monster movies, a rocket crash landing in a house, and some suspiciously familiar characters.

It’s hard not to give anything away, so I’ll stop here.  Simply put, if you like Planetary, you’ll be happy no know that the quality of the tales continues.

Hypothetically related posts:

1. Planetary, Vol. 3: Leaving the 20th Century
2. Planetary: Crossing Worlds
3. Planetary, Vol. 1: All Over the World and Other Stories

In The Shadow Of No Towers is Art Spiegelman’s response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.  Spiegelman and his family live in Manhattan, and so the attacks were very close, and very personal (in fact, his daughter was attending high school at the foot of the towers when they were hit).  In the aftermath, Spigelman decided to exorcise the demons of paranoia and fear through his art, and this led him, paradoxically though completely logically, back to his love of comics.  As he says about his “near-death realization:”

“I made a vow that morning to return to making comix full-time despite the fact that comix can be so damn labor intensive that one has to assume that one will live forever to make them.”

Spiegelman was given space in the German paper Die Ziet to do whatever he wanted, with no editorial control over him.  What he did was to create a large-format editorial comic covering his response to the 9/11 attacks.  It starts out as a fairly personal account, his version of Maus as he says, but morphs pretty quickly into commentary on the Bush administration’s co-opting of the attacks to justify the invasion of Iraq.  He invokes the cartoons of New York Past to tell his tale, and the effect is quite stunning and, well, effective.  And this is just the first half of the book.

The last part is support material, but this really sells the piece, in my opinion.  Reprinted are a handful of the old comics, a Gasoline Alley, a Little Nemo, a Bringing Up Father, and so on.  They play out all the fears of the day, which are the fears of today.  They remind us that we have been through this wringer before, and that comics have always been political, even when they are the mainstream.  You just have to keep your mind open to what they are saying.

Hypothetically related posts:

1. In The Shadow Of No Towers: A First Impression
2. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
3. McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #13

I really liked this book.  I have been reading comics since I was a kid (so, for 30+ years), yet there was lots for me to learn.  The book is very accessible, in terms of both is visuals and its prose.  Having said that, this is a pretty academic book.  If you don’t like getting all philosophical about things, you might not like this book too much.  And, while it didn’t bother me at all, one of the more illustration-focused people in our club remarked that the inclusion of many pieces of illustrative samples made the book seem visually cluttered and hard to read.  So you might want to take that into account too.

Hypothetically related posts:

1. In The Shadow Of No Towers: A First Impression
2. McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #13
3. The Boys: The Name of the Game