Graffic Traffic – Column

Graffic Traffic

And the Beat Goes On…

by Ryk McIntyre

It’s winter, and the President denies having oral affairs, while Monica appears in public with a pearl necklace. No wonder Ken Starr is ready to openly wear his Gestapo uniform, if only he could learn to stop bending his knees when he marches. None of which has anything to do with comics (apparently, only the movie Wag the Dog lucked out in the “Relevant Art” lottery…) So, shall we get on with discussing comics? Let’s shall!

With issue #56, Supreme (Awesome/Alan Moore – words/Spouse & Gordon – pictures) continues on its mission to tie together all the loose, ambient, contradictory threads that have made up the many decades of Superman stories. This time it riffs off the whole “there’s a ‘Negative Zone’ where you can imprison criminals, and what would happen if they all escaped?” (I think you’d call it Superman II – The Movie, but enough about me.) Y’know… it is good, most anything Alan writes has natural high-quality to it, but… uh… so? Is this a way of getting back at DC Comics for screwing him so many times by writing a better Superman than they can with four or five books? Okay, on that level it legitimizes itself. Still, with all the money Alan makes from this company, you’d hope, I hope, that we’d see a few Lost Girls issues, or even (dare I say its Holy Name?) Big Numbers. There. I said its name. Now it’ll never come out.

I’m going to review the next book before I’ve even read it, it’s that sure a bet. Joe Sacco has written stellar work before, not only in the anthology Yahoo (Fantagraphics), but definitely in the series Palestine, where he spent months in the camps, in Palestinian-controlled territory, and in Israel as well. It humanized the Palestinian people in ways our news media will not show you… ever. It places the Israeli Gov’t’s oppressive policies in a tarnished light. So, knowing only his dedication to ground-level research, I can guarantee that Joe Sacco’s Soba-Stories from Bosnia will only resolutely tread on that same dangerous, legitimate path, showing a slice of Bosnian culture and life not even reachable through Joe Kubert’s excellent Far From Sarajevo. Hell, I hear even U2’s Bono makes a brief appearance.

This is not a comic, of course, but still I want to use the massive weight of this column and throw it behind the bandwagon of Trey Parker and Maft Stone’s South Park, enjoyed weekly on Cable TV’s Comedy Central, and, undoubtedly one of Ani DiFranco’s 32 flavors. You see, I liked the first season of Ren & Stimpy a lot, I never found anything about Beavis & Butthead even vaguely amusing… go figure. But there is something about South Park that is mined directly from the same motherload of wild, raw talent, profane sense of humor, street-smarts all armed with an Edward-Albee-on-crystal meth misanthropic world view that blessed this planet with the Insane Clown Posse. When I was watching the Christmas Special, and Kyle did his plaintive solo song, I was fiercely praying that either Parker or Stone were Jewish, or they were in for a P.C. shit-storm. And this praying thing is hard to do with any dignity when you’re laughing your genitals off.

It would be unprecedented for me to do two reviews in the same column for books I haven’t even read, it might even be irresponsible. So that said, it gives me awesome pleasure to predict that you and I will love New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln (Homage Comics/ Scott McCloud – everything). I mean look: this is from the same brain that humanized a super-hero in Zot, and then set the standard for what made up the bones, the soul, and the infrastructure of comics, as well as its awesome potential with Understanding Comics. So I can recommend this one completely blind. Trust me here.

Considering just how many consecutive columns I’ve found SuperHero-Team books a bore chore, it’s something when I find three books recently to be amongst my faves. Sure it makes sense to like JLA (DC/Grant Morrison – words, Porter & Dell – pictures), it is, after all, a chart-topper right now, one of DC’s prime sellers. With issue #16, we get the final team, the full 14, as well as the introduction of a major adversary, Prometheus (first featured in the New Year’s Evil one-shot of the same name), who seems to have some promise. Kind of like when the Avengers would fight against Thanos or Gravitron. And since we brought the Avengers up, you’ve got to check issues #1 and 2 (on shelves right now) if you ever loved this group in its glory days. The teaming up of Kurt (Marvels, Astro City) Busiek, and veteran Avengers artist George Perez mesh perfectly, recreating what was always great about this book: a big group of your favorite heroes going up against a menace of staggering proportions in a multi-part story of great deeds. And Kurt can also rock it on a smaller, individual character-driven scale in Marvel’s other great team-book, ThunderBolts (Kurt – words, visualized by Mark Bagley & Scott Hana), where the group (recently exposed as ex-criminals, betrayed by and fighting against their own leader, winning, but unable to capture him and his accomplice […they’ll be baaa-aack!], and then when they decide to surrender and let themselves be judged for their former actions, hoping their recent actions might mitigate, a mysterious beam transports them away) finds themselves stranded on an extra-dimensional plane of warring insectoids. Don’t you hate when that happens? Anyway, characterization reveals more and more about these people. Sometimes their powers and weapons don’t matter, what they think and do, does. And that, my friends, makes a great comic book.