Graffic Traffic
by Ryk McIntyre
Top Cow Comics has recently emerged from the shadows of other Image creators who’ve fallen (Rob Lifield), gone a tad boring (Todd McFarlane – hey! Good Luck with that baseball!!), or just sold out (as Jim Lee takes the money and wishes DC all the best with his characters and books) to become a serious player in comic land with such huge hits as The Tenth, Witchblade, and The Darkness. And now they’ve brought the man responsible for TV’s Babylon 5 into the 2-D fold with J. Michael Straczynski’s Rising Stars (art by Keu Cha and Jason Gorder). All that’s available as of this writing is the Preview issue (done in rough pencils) or the #0 issue that came bagged in the Wizard magazine special on Top Cow Comics, but it’s enough, the appetite is whetted. Based on the premise that a world that’s never had super-beings suddenly does, this proposed 24-issue mini-series will no doubt feature Straczynski’s famous recipe of plots and sub-plots, action, good characters, and their development through time and experience. Look for it in early summer.
How is it that some people can do great super-hero comics and some people are Marvel Comics? Checking in their reaction to DC’s success with the Kingdom Comes series, I find Earth X (Jim Krueger & Alex Ross-concept and script/John Paul Leon & Bill Reinhold-art) almost totally incomprehensible. It’s not the storyline (thick though it is…), but probably the rough-and-too-dark artwork where you’re not sure who exactly you’re looking at, and it seems like you should be. Anyway, it’s an alternate-universe where everybody has powers, all the old heroes are tired, dead, or not involved yet. Still, the Alex Ross covers are nice to look at.
Better that you should check out Warren Ellis’ work for Wildstorm with the beautiful and excellent series, The Authority and Planetary. The first is the successor to Warren’s run on StormWatch Vols. 1 & 2, featuring the members of StormWatch Black (a covert unit), plus a few reoccurring characters from those books (two, in fact, are regenerativly reoccurring) and a pan-dimensional space-carrier that navigates “the upper dimensions” at the same time it orbits Earth. Gotta love what description theory has brought to comics. Anyway, this is a great butt-kickin’, city-smashing, heroes a-heroing and villains with butts (who will get them kicked, you see…). Oh, never mind. Just read it and enjoy the clear linework of Paul Neary and Wildstorm FX’s color magic. This is a Superhero comic and with summer just a comin’ in, a great beach book (if you’re like me and hide under an umbrella or tent the rare times you go to the beach – or anywhere if you can help it – when the sun is out). And just to show how many stories this man can generate, there is Planetary, a book about four people with great power who use it, and the vast resources of a Shadow Agency devoted to Truth, Knowledge, and Cataloguing “the mysteries of the Twentieth Century.” From their preview (which was printed as a flip-book with Gen 13 #33), we’ve seen the creation and slow death of a hulking man-monster, what happened to a group of 1940’s adventurers, and why Japan has so many legends about giant creatures. This book does it with style, mystery, and with its cards held knowingly to its chest. More impressively, it does it every month with stories contained whole in the issue they appear. I can’t move on without mentioning the art by John Cassaday. Tasting like all the right elements of Jackson Guice, Frank Quietly, and Gregg Darrow, it’s clean, precise, and his facial expressions are worth two thousand words, easy.
To say that Alan Moore comes up with the odd spin on comics is like saying he sort of has a beard. His latest weave features a “hero team” from Victorian literature, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (America’s Best Comics/art by the dangerous Kevin O’Neill) including Captain Nemo and his ship The Nautilus, Hawley “The Invisible Man” Griffin, adventurer Allan Quartermain, Miss Mina Murray, and Dr. Henry Jeckyl (oh, and his… other half…). The sprawl, dirt, filth, splendor, and glory that was England’s vision of itself back then is rendered in pernicious, lurid, thrilling detail by Kevin (banned by the Comics Code Authority) O’Neill down to each grubby, dangerous detail. Just how each character is brought into the narrative is entertaining enough, just think what it’ll be like when they head for the Moon! Other books from Alan’s ABC group are Tom Strong (out as of this writing), a Doc Savage-esque hero, Jack B. Quick (with surreal art by Kevin Nowlan), and the myths-inspired Promethea. Other titles to be added as soon as Alan thinks of a good Western story, or Romance Thriller, no doubt.
This next book has reached the mid-twenties (25, if you include the three-issue mini-series that came first), but I’ll be damned if I can tell what is going on with Strangers In Paradise (Abstract Studios/Terry Moore does it all). After the last major storyline, I have the idea things are proceeding ahead but, like almost everybody else, I just wish Terry would get Katchoo and Francine together already, alright? Not much of a review, I know. This book is an investment of heart and soul on the part of the creator, but in the six weeks between issues, I get kinda sidetracked by the end of the world…
…which brings us to the latest volume of The Invisibles where Grant Morrison explores Hyper-Sciences, Illuminati-plots, Fourth-Dimensional beings, and a great Post-Mod fashion sense. Timed to finish alongside the End of The Millennium (if you agree that it’s 12/31/99 and not 12/31/00) this #12 down to #1 series has a transformed and restyled Invisibles trying to stop a tentacle-headed thing, that is related to Britain’s Royal Family apparently, from taking it all over. Y’know… IT ALL. That is, unless the printing presses get taken down by the Y2K thing….
