The Comic Book Club: “Adele Blanc-Sec” and “Amazing Spider-Man”

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This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up discussing what we picked up. This week, Douglas Wolk and Graeme McMillan talk about The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec, vol. 1, and Amazing Spider-Man #648.

DOUGLAS: First off: a round of applause to Kim Thompson for his translation of The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec. The French title of the first volume translates literally as “Adele and the Beast,” and that was the title of the previous American version (20 years or so ago)–but “Pterror over Paris” is way funnier, and in line with the overheated, not entirely serious style of this book. And Adele’s Scrooge-ish “OH, SO?” on the last page made me crack up.

I haven’t seen the movie yet (have you?), and I hadn’t actually read any of the AB-S material before, but this is really charming stuff.

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GRAEME: I’m not sure I even knew there was a movie. I can’t really imagine one, this seems like such a comic book comic.

DOUGLAS: It is, and it’s super-fun. I love the basic premise: George Sand-ish badass adventure-seeking woman in 1911 Paris, surrounded by supernatural and/or nearly inconceivable events and evil or just incompetent secondary characters, achieving victory because of sheer sang-froid. Even the panel-dominating chunks of expository dialogue are funny, just because Tardi’s not taking them particularly seriously–the very Gallic style of fully capitalizing characters’ names makes them even funnier. (“Like JOSEPH and ALBERT, I was expecting RIPOL, once set free, and yourself to lead me to the loot and thus to PAZUZU secreted in one of the two bags. But I arrived too late at the Jardin des Plantes, albeit in time to save you from CAPONI’s tender mercies.”)

My only quibble, and it’s a pretty minor one, is that I’m not sure how well the elegant hardcover format suits this material. It feels very pulpy and light, as beautifully drawn as it is (Tardi’s Parisian landscapes are totally on the mark); somehow, I feel like the comedy might be a little more immediate if it were in a format that I as an American reader associate with stories that are sort of in this vein but take themselves much more seriously. The fact that Adele has exactly one facial expression 90% of the time, Dick Tracy-style, makes me wonder if there’s some similar tradition in Francophone comics–Kim Thompson mentions in an interview about translating Tardi that “Adele, with its playful Euro adventure tropes, is in some ways less accessible to American readers than, say, [It Was the War of the] Trenches.” Which is at least slightly true for me.

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(And that, in turn, makes me wonder if Kim Thompson manages to keep up with all the translations and editing he does because he secretly has an identical twin named Kim Thomson.) (I’m sure that joke has been made before. Repeatedly.)

GRAEME: I’m really torn on Adele. It’s one of those books that I both completely love, but also find surprisingly hard to enjoy, if that makes sense. I’m entirely won over by the concept and the art, but there’s a strange stiltedness to the writing that continually stopped me dead when I was reading the book – It’s not the translation, exactly (I think there’s a very fun, subtle humor at play in Thompson’s dialogue, and especially his captions, here), but the odd, expositionary-and-coincidence-heavy nature of the writing. It’s not an easy book to read – and made less easy by the scale of the pages and the coloring, I think; I agree with you on the format feeling off, Douglas – but it’s a rewarding one, and despite all my torn and turmoiled thoughts, I find myself looking forward to the next volume. I just hope that it’s something that’ll feel more coherent.

GRAEME: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #648 or, perhaps, “Dan Slott tries to stuff in a lot of revamp into 30-odd pages of story”: On the one hand, this feels very much like a continuation of what Slott and the other writers were doing during the “Brand New Day” era – The characters all have the same voices as they have done for the last three years, and there’s still the oddly endearing desperate attempt to mix retro and hip that marked BND for me – but on the other, wow, this is a packed issue of setting up the new status quo really clumsily. Why Slott didn’t try and leave some of this for future issues, I don’t know, but there’s SO much change here – and so much of it comes from out of nowhere, which strikes me as particularly weird considering Slott should’ve been able to work foreshadowing for things like JJJ buying back the Daily Bugle or Michelle leaving the city into earlier issues, considering he was part of the BND braintrust – that none of it feels particularly meaningful or “real.” Instead of feeling like a natural progression from what’s gone before, this reads like more than a few abrupt twists and turns as Slott goes out of his way to set up the world as he sees it, even if it comes out of nowhere (or, more likely, continuity from decades ago – Seriously, John Jameson and the 1990s Green Goblin both reappear in the same issue?). There’s an odd fan fiction-ish quality to the main story, sadly.

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(To add insult to injury, it’s Humberto Ramos illustrating – He’s not a bad artist, but he’s one that I can never really get my head around; his pages are so cluttered and his figures so stylized, that there’s something ugly about his work to me. Sorry, Ramos fans.)

Best part of the issue for me was Paul Tobin and Clayton Henry’s Spider-Girl short. Fun, snappy and nice to look at, it felt like a nice change of pace and a “See, this is how you do easily accessible superhero comics” after what had gone before.

DOUGLAS: Graeme, as much as I enjoyed how packed this issue was, I’m totally with you on the clumsiness of a lot of what Slott was doing here. This issue is obviously a “let’s set up the premise for a new open-ended run” story, which is fine, and it does have one very good idea: Peter Parker’s a science whiz, so maybe he could use that big brain of his to get himself a job that pays well and stop struggling for money all the damn time! Fair enough, although I’m not sold on the idea that he can do Amadeus Cho-level calculations in his head in the middle of severe physical stress: he invented web-fluid as a teenager, but that doesn’t mean he’s every kind of insta-thinking savant.

The part I object to is that Slott rushes to roll back so many things “Brand New Day” set up. JJJ and Marla are reconciled; Peter and Felicia are calling it off (well, maybe not, considering she’s showing up next issue); the paper is the Daily Bugle again; Michele’s out of the series again, having served her purpose for Brand New Day; Betty Brant and Flash Thompson are back together (actually that one’s way before BND…); Mac Gargan’s going to be Venom again; the Hobgoblin’s back… I kind of hate the moments when superhero franchises reveal the inevitable truth that they tend toward stasis. And that Daylight Saving Time (not “Savings”! Leave off the extra S for “saving”!) gag would’ve worked a lot better, I suspect, if this issue had come out a week ago.

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Detail I really liked, though: the idea that Green Goblin tattoos are becoming a white-supremacist meme, which looks like it’ll be explored more in the Osborn mini. Note that last issue Michele’s brother Vin showed up wearing one, and referred to Norman as his “higher power” for his 12-step program… (Although what’s a guy whose last name is Gonzales doing with a white-supremacist tattoo? Maybe it has some other significance.) I also appreciated the gag of “Andru Air Force Base,” as in (I imagine) early-’70s Amazing artist Ross Andru.

I don’t have as much of a problem with Humberto Ramos’ artwork as you do, Graeme, but I do think I’d probably like it a lot better if he were the only regular artist on this series, or at least closer to some kind of default look for this series. (His work makes a lot of sense next to, say, Chris Bachalo’s.) My favorite thing he’s ever done was Impulse, just because the kind of stylized, twisted characters he draws worked well for its sitcom tone. Amazing is on the light side as far as the tone of superhero series goes, but it’s not quite a comedy. On the other hand, it appears from the letter column that he’s one of three rotating artists for “Big Time,” and that one of the others is the mighty Marcos Martin. I’m particularly happy about that.

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