GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: FAIREST vol.1 WIDE AWAKE (2012)

Previously published on Amazon as a 5* review.

This Fables spin-off is not only the best of Fables spin-offs, it's actually better than Fables itself. The idea behind it is to tell background stories of the women of the Fables universe with tales of varying lengths. In this first volume we have a 6-parter and single issue story.

Wide Awake, the main story is an origin (the real one) of Sleeping Beauty aka Briar Rose and it's ingeniously done. Set after the fall of the Adversary in the main continuity, Ali Baba the self-acclaimed Prince of Thieves, frees an effrit, not a djinn as he hoped, who can only offer him knowledge rather than three wishes. The effrit, a highly intelligent and sophisticated imp, for reasons of his own encourages Ali to steal Sleeping Beauty's slumbering body from goblins who've captured her only to find that there are two sleeping women, both of whom he awakens. Unluckily for Ali, one of them is the Snow Queen, former right-hand woman for the Adversary, who has a penchant for listening to stories and she finds that of SB's most interesting.

What we have have here is, written by Fables mastermind Bill Willingham who is at the very top of his form, a delightful story itself, packed with wit, invention, action, and romance which expands on the background to the Fables stories. 

The art by Phil Jiminez is to die for. He's emerged from his George Perez lookalike phase as a sophisticated artist in his own right. His men are handsome, his women gorgeous, his monsters and villains hideous. And I must add a note of appreciation for the rich and subtle colouring of Andrew Dalhouse which does so much to enhance the art. It's a disgrace his name isn't on the cover.

 

Set in the 1940's, the single-issue story is sepia coloured noir written by Matthew Sturges and illustrated by Shawn McManus. In it, a heavy-smoking Beast playing a hard-boiled private eye is hunting the Lamia, a serial-killing Fable, who has arrived in Lost Angeles. It's neat, nicely done and has a killer twist I wouldn't dream of spoiling.

If the creators of this title can maintain the standard set here, then us lucky readers are in for a feast of delights in the near future.

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: ROOTS OF THE SWAMP THING (DC COMICS CLASSIC LIBRARY)

This had been out for nearly a year before I even realised it existed and even then I couldn't get it from Amazon and had to pay more for a copy on Ebay. But it was worth it. This is the collection of one of the two comics which got me back into reading comics again almost exactly forty years ago -the other being Roy Thomas & Barry Smith's Conan (which I also have in hardback). That's 1972 for the numerically challenged. The book contains all 13 issues of Swamp Thing that were written by Lein Wein, the 10 illustrated by Bernie Wrightson, 3 drawn by Nestor Redondo and the precursor to the series, an 8 page story from House of Secrets which created a big stir. All in a nice solid hardback with decent paper.

The very first words on the opening page of Swamp Thing:1 are: Beginning --a NEW kind of graphic excitement-- The SAGA  of the SWAMP THING! And for once, rather than being outrageous hyperbole, this was the simple, plain unadorned truth.

Well, more or less.

Muck monsters weren't anything new -back in the 40's there was The Heap- they'd just never been fashionable before. The Heap was also brought back later that decade when Eclipse Comics revived, and to great success (trans. I loved it) Airboy and his friends.

But what made Swamp Thing the great success was the art by Bernie Wrightson who came over as a cross between EC artists Berni Krigstein and Wally Wood with his eye for the grotesque, his distinctive style and very fine lines. The script by Wein was good for the period but not noticeably outstanding. His plots were better as we got: a brilliant young scientist trapped in a grotesque body which could form words only with the greatest difficulty who comes into conflict with diabolist Arcane (who later played a major villain in Alan Moore's revival) and his Un-men (who got their own Vertigo series), a Frankenstein's monster-like creature, a wolfman, witches, robots with a twist, a Lovecraftian monster, an alien, and Batman. The actual stories were better than the dialogue and suited the maturing young Wrightson to a T.

Back then, no-one had seen art like this in mainstream comics before. It was grotesque, it was scary, it was beautiful. It was, by the standards of the time, breathtaking and a world away from the clean bright conventional superheroes. Swamp Thing inhabited the places they never even thought to go.

It was the best comic of its day and forty years later it still stands up. This is a collection that no comic lover should be without.

Post script.

Nestor Redondo, who replaced Wrightson, was by no means a weak substitute but a very talented Philippino comics artist. If he lacked Wrightson's eye for the grotesque, he made up for it with an attractive, clean and detailed style. He died in 1995.

Bernie Wrightson, however, is still with us and still active. He's currently working on stories about a revived Frankenstein's creature with writer Steve Niles and I'm impatient for the trade paperback edition..

BOOKS: BOOKS WAITING TO BE READ

And these are only the most recent titles.

 

(NB: this is a book created to accompany a 2004 exhibition of Tezuka's work at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia. Quite scarce, I picked it up for a reasonable price on Ebay because no-one else put in a bid.)

(A long time fan of this series, I only just found out that this and some others I'd missed were available.)

(Following his recent death,the insults by cretins commenting in some of the tabloids because he never gave up on Marxism were just appalling and made me want to seek out his books.)

(The only book on sport that I have ever bought or will buy.)

And if I was to include all the books sitting on my shelves waiting to be read, this list would more than double in length.

BOOK REVIEW: SPACEHAWK by BASIL WOLVERTON (Fantagraphics Books, 2012)

Writer/artist Basil Wolverton is one of comics cult legends. He produced some weird and wonderful science fiction stories in the early 40's; in the 50's he became a legend for his physical and surreal grotesqueries which appeared in Mad Magazine; and later in his life, following his fundamentalist evangelical faith, he focused on Biblical and apocalyptic images.

Spacehawk is one of his earliest works and this is a complete and chronological collection of the (usually) 10 page stories which appeared in Target Comics. The first  nine stories are set in the future where our hero zips and zaps around the solar system defeating evil (often with extreme brutality and usually with lethal force) which he senses mentally. His powers are vague but do include super-intelligence, able to transfer a humanoid brain into a dinosauroid creature or knock up a robot fish in half an hour. He's very strong but not quite invulnerable, and has various mental powers. He's also at least over 800 years old.

This was his only cover appearance.

The creatures, aliens, and humanoids in these stories were strange and often quite wonderful, such as the bad guys whose neck and head bear a strong resemblance to a penis but obviously no-one noticed at the time. Please let me know if I'm seeing something that isn't there.

And then, very abruptly, Spacehawk was suddenly contemporary with his readers, the smell of war was in the air with World War 2 already well under way in Europe. Now he fought thinly disguised, and then not thinly at all, the Axis powers which allowed Wolverton to caricature Germans, Italians and Japanese, something he did with great gusto. But you'll have to take my word for it as the image below was the only one I could find. After 20 stories in this vein, Spacehawk was cancelled, never to be revived.

Fantagraphics have done a great job in the presentation. The book is large size, larger than the original comics, on good quality paper (which has a nice smell to it), and there's an informative introduction by Wolverton's son who also followed in his father's footsteps.

Even better from my point of view, I originally ordered this title when it was £13.99, used an Amazon voucher to knock a tenner of it, and when it was finally published clocked in at £18.99. Sweet.