This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up discussing what we picked up. This week, Graeme McMillan, Douglas Wolk and Evan Narcisse talk about Strange Tales II #3, Big Questions #15, and more!
DOUGLAS: Well, now we see why Marvel was playing it close to the chest with the lineup for Strange Tales II #3. It’s bittersweet but also sort of delightful that the final story was written by the late Harvey Pekar, one of the last people I’d ever have expected to write a Marvel superhero comic. (And, incidentally, I really hope this issue’s indicia doesn’t mean that Pekar-as-a-character belongs to Marvel now.) It’s also exactly the kind of conversation I’d have expected Pekar to have with the Thing.
EVAN: The Pekar thing made me choke up a little bit because, y’know, with Harvey being gone in real life, he’s also sort of gone from comics.
(More on Techland: The Comic Book Club: Batman & Robin #16 and Strange Tales II #2)
DOUGLAS: One of the things I love about this incarnation of Strange Tales is seeing how deeply rooted the Marvel characters are in certain cartoonists’ DNA. James Stokoe’s Galactus? Holy crap: the first page of Stokoe’s story looks like something he’s been waiting 20 years to have the opportunity to draw. Ditto for Dean Haspiel’s Woodgod story. Because it’s about Woodgod. (And is it me or is that story’s final caption much more like something that would appear at the end of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book or an Infocom text game than your typical comic? I kind of love that too.)
EVAN: I’m not going to lie: at first, a lot of this issue felt like leftovers to me. Strangers in Paradise is a personal favorite of mine, but Terry Moore’s effort on Thor languished in the shadow of that awesomely weird Tony Millionaire story in Strange Tales II #2. The lurid U.S. Agent drew me in, though, and I remembered why I show up for this book.
DOUGLAS: Yeah, that Benjamin Marra U.S. Agent story is something that could’ve appeared panel-for-panel in some angry young underground comic book 35 years ago, which I guess shows that Marvel is catching up in some ways. Or something.
EVAN: Like you say above, Douglas, it’s always great to see the childhood obsessions of the creators work themselves out in this kind of off-brand work. (It’s doubly off-brand, too, being a divergence for Marvel and the alt/indie creators.) So, while Alex Robinson might’ve done research for those little details in his Mr. Fantastic story, I’m guessing he didn’t need to. And Robinson’s contribution here fits in with the wistful vibe of his other work, too. This could’ve been outtakes from Too Cool to be Forgotten, if not for Victor Von Doom’s presence.
Also: Kate Beaton’s storytelling is world-class in that “Avengers at the Fair” story, but the third panel of the first page? You can wait entire lifetimes and not get a panel that good. You can just hear the dialogue: “C’mon, Odinson, it’ll be fun!” “Oh, okay…”
DOUGLAS: Also, it’s a little weird to see Tim Hamilton in the context of “bizarre art-comics people doing superhero comics” twenty-plus years after The Trouble with Girls, but I’m not going to complain about new Tim Hamilton comics.
EVAN: I loved The Trouble with Girls. (And I remember pining away for it on Twitter, only to have you tell me that they’re out in TPBs, Douglas.) But Hamilton’s work really blew me away here, because his Machine Man story really danced the line between ironic satire and genuine poignancy. It’s like he took all these cliches about robot-wanting-to-be-human and a corny reversal, yet found some real gold there. I honestly couldn’t tell if the whole story was meant for a smirk or a sigh and I liked that a lot about it.
DOUGLAS: Plus I know I singled out Ivan Brunetti’s cover last month when it appeared as a “coming attractions” page, but let me just note again how great it is. The little wobbly Don Heck line on the side of Iron Man’s helmet! The Hulk’s one-brushstroke arms! The Green Goblin “squashing” Spider-Man! MODOK jumping rope, with mechanical assistance!
GRAEME: Best thing about the Brunetti cover for me? The Thing’s look of determination on his exercise bike. It’s Clobbering Bodyfat Time.
(More on Techland: A Brief History of “Strange Tales”)
This issue felt like a collection of leftovers for me; I loved the Kate Beaton and James Stokoe pieces – You’re right, Douglas, that first page is amazing – and liked the Toby Cypress, Eduardo Medeiros and Michael DeForge pieces, but both everything else left me cold. Yes, even the Pekar piece, which makes me a heartless bastard, I know. As a series, Strange Tales II has been all over the place – I feel like there was enough material here for a killer two-issue series (or oversized oneshot), but each issue individually had bits that I either didn’t get, or didn’t really enjoy for some reason. I’m glad Marvel’s doing these series, but I guess I’d rather this kind of experimentation wasn’t shoved into one series, outside of the main Marvel Universe line.
Yes, that’s right: I want Kate Beaton to take over from Brian Michael Bendis on the Avengers books. You heard me.
DOUGLAS: I wouldn’t mind at all if the Mystery Solving Teens joined the New Avengers.
DOUGLAS: Oh God what a fantastic series Big Questions has been. I’m not sure if “fifteen issues about the aftermath of a plane crash, from the point of view of deadpan anthropomorphized animals who live around the crash site” was a concept anyone but Anders Nilsen would ever have attempted, but he’s really bloomed over the course of it.
In general, Nilsen’s not much like any other cartoonist I can think of; between this, Dogs and Water, and the unbelievably emotionally raw Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, he’s triangulated a territory that involves staring straight at a particular patch of mortality from a lot of different angles. Big Questions #15 is maybe the most beautifully drawn of the whole series, which is saying something–it’s a clever touch that the little birds who form most of the cast are totally indistinguishable from one another (except for haunted, echo-y Charlotte and Leroy), but the pointillist landscapes and cross-hatched cave scene and closing mandalas, and the body language of the two human characters are all incredibly distinctive. (I think almost any square inch of Nilsen’s artwork, even if it didn’t have any characters in it, would be instantly identifiable as his work.)
(More on Techland: The Comic Book Club: “Brightest Day” and “Bring the Thunder”)
Also, he’s funny–profoundly funny, really. One of the key sequences in this issue involves a swirling mass of dots that take three pages to cohere into a pair of pants, and another is a pair of geese quibbling about the best way to raise somebody from the dead to lead him toward the afterlife. I loved seeing where Betty and Curtis are building their nest. And I think it’s brilliant of Nilsen to “answer” the biggest question of all–what happens after you die?–by raising a zillion more questions and frame them as if they’re answers.
EVAN: I’ve only ever read about three issues of Big Questions, including this one. Never understood what was going on in any of them, in a strictly linear narrative sense, but the beauty of this book is that you don’t need to. It’s already bound together by a hallucinatory dream logic at its core, so stuff like causality and passage of time barely even matter. (And, just for comparison’s sake, Dogs and Water was self-contained and wasn’t exactly an exercise in point-A-to-point-B storytelling.)
Still, there’s an emotional journey coming to an end in this issue and it happens in beautiful fashion. Man, it’d be just so easy to go to trite for a portrayal of the afterlife, especially when you’ve already got all the birds and nature symbols waiting to be folded in the service of something corny. Dead Pilot could’ve got his wings or changed into a winged creature or something like that. Instead, we get a haunting, original vision. What might it be like, to stop flying, stop flapping, pull off those boots, take a good, long stretch and sleep. Beautiful.
(More on Techland: The Comic Book Club: Strange Tales II #1 and Knight & Squire #1)
Equally beautiful is the raw naivete of Feral Boy. That last scene is so touching, when the birds bring him their food. It’s a great metaphor for how good grows in the world. One act of altruism changes person’s path from angry self-involvement to paying it forward. In everything from his linework to his layout style–love those “invisible” panels!–Nilsen comes to his symbolism so idiosyncratically. That makes it even more amazing when there’s something universal when a reader pulls back the lens to take it all in.
GRAEME: Sadly, my store didn’t have Big Questions, so I can’t say anything about it (other than, based on what you two have said, I now want to read it). I did pick up Next Men #1, and – Douglas, did you read it? It’s a weird mix of old school superhero comics – John Byrne may be coming up with the best art he has in years, but the writing felt like it should’ve had characters naming themselves in bold letters every second panel – recycled sci-fi novel ideas and a dated attempt at “mature” comics (calling sex “dancing,” and then making a point of pointing out how much “dancing” took place? Come on). It’s also a really, really oddly paced book – It’s pretty much an issue-length expositionary flashback to recap all of the last series, which doesn’t really give new readers like me any real reason to come back next issue. I’d be really curious to see what the sales figures are like for the first and second issues, because I wonder (a) if that many newcomers picked up the first issue, and if so (b) how many will come back for the second, given this first taste.
DOUGLAS: I did read it! Yes, “a weird mix” is exactly what it is. I never read the original Next Men series, and I’m curious about how much this issue was a recap of the older stuff and how much it was “everything you know is a lie!” On the one hand, I’m always happy to see comics where interesting cartoonists are pursuing their personal obsessions full speed ahead (which is why I love Gerald Jablonski’s Cryptic Wit and Dave Sim’s glamourpuss and so on), and this is obviously essence-of-Byrne in some ways; on the other, I can’t help but wish that Byrne would go much deeper into whatever he’s skirting around here. Yes, all that euphemistic stuff got to me: he could either repress the crazy sex stuff so far that it bubbled up in interesting disguised ways, or express it outright, but this is irritatingly nudgy-winky. Even so, I’d be up for reading this as a trade: I don’t know that I need to immediately know what happens next, but I am interested in finding out where it’s eventually going.