This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up discussing what we picked up. This week, Graeme McMillan, Evan Narcisse and Douglas Wolk talk about three all-ages comics: Uncle Scrooge #401, the debut volume of Takio, and Axe Cop: Bad Guy Earth #1.
DOUGLAS: I was talking a couple of days ago with a friend who was rhapsodizing about Don Rosa’s Uncle Scrooge comics, and naming particular, individual stories, all the way back to Rosa’s first one, “Son of the Sun”–that’s the mark of one kind of great cartoonist. I know that my adoration for Rosa’s Scrooge stuff isn’t quite universal, but I think he’s amazing.
The story reprinted in Uncle Scrooge #401, “The Universal Solvent,” was first published back in 1995–its only American appearance split it into three eight-page chunks over three issues of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, and I don’t think I’d actually read it before. As I understand, Rosa’s basically retired from drawing comics now, and I gather that the gag on the first page hints at one of the reasons: “the toughest, most impervious substances known to mankind” include tungsten steel, carbide steel, titanium steel and a Disney contract.
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This isn’t even close to the top rank of the Rosa stories I’ve read, and I still love it–it’s such a weird, intense, obsessive comic book! Most of his Scrooge stories are character-based comedies that have some kind of historical element. (I’ve been reading his “Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck” serial as bedtime stories for my five-year-old, and he and I are enjoying them in what I suspect are totally different ways.) This one, though, is just a single-minded working-out of a conceit that’s basically an engineering problem: what would happen if you found a genuine universal solvent that could eat through absolutely anything except one substance, and then what would happen if some of it got spilled on the ground? (“Mayhem ensues” is the short version.)
The thing that makes this a delight, though, is how beautifully choregraphed it all is. There are throwaway sight gags in nearly every panel, consistently hilarious character acting (Gyro Gearloose’s little light-bulb-headed assistant is pushing at the limits of how expressive a stick figure can be whenever it appears), and a really playful approach to layouts–which is not something you see very often in Disney comics, especially Disney comics that stick as close to the tone of vintage Carl Barks stories as Rosa usually does. I don’t think Rosa’s ever used panels that occupy the entire vertical dimension of a page before; of course, that makes sense here. Just a joy to read.
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GRAEME: Completely agreed. I’m not sure I’ve read that much Rosa before, and this pretty much ensures that I’m going to fix that sooner rather than later. Everything just works so well here, from high concept to the way that the story moves along past that idea before it’s even gotten old, turning into an exploration, then an escape, then a chase, all the way keeping faithful to the original notion that started the whole thing off. And the visual comedy is great–both the “glorp” when the solvent comes into contact with something, and the damage it leaves behind. (The remains of the truck later on in the story are my favorite, but I liked Scrooge’s first rampage from Gyro’s lab to Donald’s house, too.)
There’s something classical (okay, maybe that’s the wrong word, but it’s the one I’m sticking with) about the balance of imagination and execution here, and it reminds me of the Silver Age Superman stories that I’m a complete sucker for: a weird understanding of a fictional world in which anything is possible as long as it follows the rules set by the characters’ personalities, even if everything else goes haywire. I’m surprised that this is as recent as 1995, because it feels older, maybe because of that classicism, but I’ll admit to being weirdly comforted knowing that things this ideal were still being made so recently. This was just spectacular–I loved it.
EVAN: Graeme, this reminded me of Silver Age stuff, too. The weird pseudo-science that kinda sorta sounds plausible, wacky character beats and outsize contraptions and props all make this story seem like something from the Eisenhower administration.
DOUGLAS: That makes sense–according to the Uncle Scrooge timeline that Don Rosa compiled (from the Carl Barks canon), all of Scrooge’s adventures with Donald and the kids happen around that time, i.e. during the years that Barks was writing and drawing Uncle Scrooge stories.
EVAN: One thing I loved about this was how each character seemed to have something to do. Donald is a nervous nellie for most of the story, but at the end he’s the one that winds up creating an escape for them. The nephews and Gyro handle exposition, Scrooge is used for motivation and color, and cameos from other characters show consequence. The whole thing feels super-efficient, and yet that efficiency is invisible because you’re having so much fun reading the thing.
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I also found a bit of a dark edge to this, too. Part of it is what Douglas said about the obsessive subtext to Scrooge’s behavior, but Rosa’s artwork also gives us some dimly-lit and even grim panels, along with ornery character expressions. And the scale of the story kept waxing and waning in a good way, like a roller-coaster ride. First it was about a dangerous invention, then about imperiling the planet, then about saving the town, then about turning a profit. It just chugged along. A really, really fun read.
GRAEME: I’m going to be the person who doesn’t like Takio while you two love it, aren’t I? I can just tell. But it just seemed very underwhelming, unoriginal and in-jokey to me. The leads are named after writer Brian Michael Bendis’ daughter, artist Mike Oeming’s girlfriend and Matt Fraction’s wife? Was it just me that that leapt out at? And tonally, it’s all over the place. (It also weirdly reminded me of Superman: Earth One, in that it felt more like “And now that we’ve got the origin out of the way, wait for what comes next” than a complete chunk of story in its own right. Again, that’s just me, isn’t it?) I’m not sure what I’d expected when I picked this up, but it wasn’t this.
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It’s not just that Bendis’ script seemed really familiar, what with its shadowy conspiracies and reluctant teen heroes, not to mention The Bendis Dialogue (on the one hand, it was nice that he’s not writing down to an all-ages audience, on the other, OH MY GOD it would be nice if every character in everything he wrote didn’t sound like every other character in everything he wrote, wouldn’t it?) and the utterly unsurprising twist that Taki’s best friend turns out to be her worst enemy for reasons that don’t entirely make sense, but hey, just go with it, it’ll make for cheap emotional drama. And it’s also not just that Oeming’s art mixes an awkward sub-Jim Mahfood cartoony look (I’ve not read Powers for awhile, is this what his art looks like there, too? Or is he trying to channel Mahfood to be “down with the kids”?) with some surprisingly shoddy storytelling (What actually happens in the silent scene flashback to when Taki and Olivia get their powers? What is that “tap tap”?), either. There just seems something kind of tone-deaf about this for me, as if both Bendis and Oeming really wanted to do a kids book, announced it, and then thought “Well, we don’t really know what that actually means, so we’ll do a kind of retrofit Ultimate Spider-Man story with our friends and family” instead.
That said, I really liked the color, and thought the format was really nice. But this is the point where I can look like the bad guy when you both tell me that it was great.
DOUGLAS: I agree that the format’s lovely: a 96-page color hardcover for $10 is a really nice price point, and the format is exactly the kind of thing that librarians who deal with this stuff love to stock. (It’s even got a volume number on the spine! Smart.) How long has it been since the last time Marvel published an original graphic novel, anyway? Quite a few years, I think, but this was definitely the right way to go for a story like this. I just wish it were a better one.
You’re right, Graeme–there’s some very weak storytelling going on here in places, surprisingly for a team as experienced with each other as Bendis and Oeming. (And in a kids’ comic, it’s important to maybe spell things out a little bit more, rather than being super-subtle.) Bendis mentioned in a couple of interviews that his daughter suggested the key twist in the story, and I’m not even clear what that twist is. This kind of eccentric, hurry-up-and-wait pacing can work well in a project like Powers, but in an all-ages book like Takio, it’s the creators’ responsibility to hit the ground running from page one.
Actually, inspired by that thought, I’m comparing the opening pages of the other two comics we’re looking at this week. Uncle Scrooge‘s first page establishes Scrooge and Gyro and his assistant as characters, spells out the story’s MacGuffin, and throws in half a dozen gags, all in the space of six panels; Axe Cop sets up the general tone of the story and jumps straight into hardcore absurdity. Takio has a little bit of dialogue to establish the relationship between the sisters, but it’s basically just beginning to yawn and stretch–we don’t even know what the story’s going to be about, really, for a fairly significant stretch.
I’m happy to see Oeming stretching out stylistically here, but there are a lot of places where the new style he’s using doesn’t seem to have had a lot of its kinks worked out yet. In general, actually, this seems like a first draft of something potentially promising: I like the snap of the dialogue (although it really does need to be more character-specific and less standard-issue Bendis), I like the relationship of the sisters, I like the overall look of the thing. But there is no room in all-ages comics for a ramp-up or a first draft, or for a plot this relaxed. This badly needed a firmer editorial hand–in both its superstructure and its details, I suspect that tightening it up would’ve done it a world of good.
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EVAN: I don’t have a ton to add to what you guys said here. I agree on the Bendis Dialogue issue, and the more problematic wrinkle here is that it breaks the premise of the book. The kids don’t sound like kids; they sound like mini-Powers/Avengers/Ultimate Spidey characters. The uniformity of Bendis Dialogue is tolerable when characters are all adults, because there’s a sense of “this is what I’m showing up for,” that post-modern Sorkin-style chatter. But that stuff is an adult affectation, and it messes things up as far as making the kids feel believeable.
I wanted this to be a modern-day Power Pack. In that book’s initial run, the kids dealt with challenge and trauma with a broad spectrum of emotional responses. One kid felt like a baby, one was rowdy, with the brainiac and the dreamer rounding things out. Takio’s main characters all feel cut from the same cloth, and it makes me wonder how much a young reader would relate if you put this in front of a kid whose personality is different from those in the book.
GRAEME: It’s potentially bad comic blog talk karma to say that, as much fun as Axe Cop: Bad Guy Earth #1 may be, I don’t really believe that it’s written by a six-year-old kid. And yet, I don’t – that, or Malachai Nicolle is the smartest six-year-old out there. I mean, sure, there’s a lot that works with six year old logic, and that’s what is really, really enjoyable about this strip, and this issue in particular (the randomness and surreality of being able to drink a guy’s brain, or later, the chickens’ brains turning into bad guys and jumping out of the chickens’ heads, say, or the illogical logic of Axe Cop having a partner called Dinosaur Soldier), but there’s also this weird, knowingness to the writing as well. Maybe Malachai comes up with a basic story and his 30 year old brother Ethan reworks it and expands it as needed? That would make sense, I guess, unless Malachai also manages to write exactly the right length of story each time, and it’d also explain the schizophrenic feel to some of this issue, which occasionally feels like someone trying to keep up with some of the more inspired segments elsewhere.
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All of which sounds like complaining, but it’s not, not really; this is still a fun, inventive comic with a particular energy that propels it quickly towards its cliffhanger ending, and everyone involved seems to have had as much fun making it as I did reading it. It’s just that somehow this felt a little more forced than it used to, and I found myself wondering what would happen if the mind that came up with this concept in the first place could do something new with entirely different characters and an unlimited page count. Maybe I’m just too old for the joke, or something?
DOUGLAS: I gather from Ethan Nicolle’s notes that he basically plays with his little brother, collects ideas that Malachai comes up with, and then works them all into a story, or something like a story. And yeah, it’s absolutely true that Axe Cop can’t go on forever; six-year-olds aren’t six for long, and part of the delight of the initial stories was their total novelty.
That said, yes, this is a very good time, Ethan’s artwork is inspired absurdity with just the faintest patina of dignity holding it together, and I’m not going to complain about anything that includes the line “That looks like the machine we stole from those bad guys using the ‘Free Poison Soda’ secret attack!” I love how every panel connects narratively to the ones before and after it, but not necessarily much beyond that. It really does feel like Ethan doing justice to his brother’s hyper-inventive play. Pieces of it are very funny, too: “Real cops don’t have dinosaurs!” I’m glad it exists, and I bet fifteen years from now I’ll get to blow somebody’s mind a little bit with it.
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EVAN: Man, just call me a wet blanket, then, because something about this didn’t click for me.
I think what’s happening with Axe Cop is that a flight of fancy is being played for laughs, what with the meta-premise of this springing from a six-year-old’s mind. But the problem is that it’s not funny enough to be flat-out absurd, but not well-crafted enough to be appealingly innocent.
It feels harsh to be passing judgment on an elementary school kid’s creativity but, to my mind, the fault lies with the adults in the equation. Part of me very clearly hears young Malachai blurting out the story in breathless fashion, giggling at his own crazy ideas and pausing to answer questions that explain where things come from. Kids’ minds are fascinating with how they create, destroy and re-forge rules for play and understanding the world. However, what Bad Guy Earth doesn’t do is capture and translate that manic energy of reckless imagination. It might be moving from oral to printed matter that trips things up. Whatever it is, the “and then, and then, and then” rhythm of this issue gets tiresome by the end. It’s like the jokes–which aren’t jokes, at all–come too fast and the reader starts to feel kind of lost and then stops caring. A six-year-old has a rapt audience when this bit of storytelling happens with friends or family. But draw it up and put in a comic, and the thing has to operate on a different level.
There’s a ton of funny, interesting ideas in this comic, but I think they’re presented all wrong. The approach is super-flat, and you can’t tell if you’re supposed to laugh at the meta-text or the text itself. I mean, it’s a six-year-old providing the raw material, but professional adults who are shaping it. I feel like someone should have decompressed it, so that the weirdness and unexpectedness of the ideas have room to breathe. Or go the opposite way and speed everything up that we don’t have a chance to see where insertions and interpretations are made. Bad Guy Earth #1 winds up falling in this weird place between grown-up and kiddie. If Malachai were telling me this same exact story while sitting on a couch before his bedtime, I’d be really entertained. But the comic doesn’t–and maybe can’t–duplicate that energy. It was funny, but then stopped being funny.
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I keep on coming back to this comic and trying to figure out why it rubbed me the wrong way. I mean, I see all the things that you guys do: it’s funny, it’s cute and well-drawn, and it’s freaking crazy. But, still, it feels like there’s some kind of filter mucking it up for me. Sigh.