This and this from Dave Sim’s Glamourpuss #2 (2008)

Said it before, will say it again, one of the finest artists out there, even when, as here, deconstructing and copying someone else’s style for his own purpose.

On the one hand:

Variant covers are a stupid, ridiculous, destructive thing, responsible for no end of torment and financial troubles in the comics industry through the years (oh, alright, they may not have been the ONLY reason).

Marvel’s obsession with variant covers is now past even a sickness, we’re into obsessive compulsive behaviour here. The idea of putting variant covers onto comics seemingly at random, regardless of who is on the cover or inside the comic – that’s just sheer, absolute insanity. In the old days, DC used to do these sort of things as gallery comics, most often as I recall with the Vertigo stuff, in particular Gaiman’s Sandman. Marvel meanwhile just went straight for their readerships pubescent crotch with a swimsuit special. Now Marvel just slap them randomly on any comic they can find, regardless of any connection.

On the other:

These are VERY pretty. There are more, of course there are more – see Heidi for those,  But these are my favourites):

(Charles Paul Wilson III, after E.H. Shepard.)

(Steffi Schutzee, in the style of Al Hirschfeld)

(John Tyler Christopher – after Erté, I think, but can’t get the exact piece – anyone help out?)

(Michael Kaluta in the style of Winsor McCay)

Eclipse Comics promotional ad featuring Tales of the Beanworld by Larry Marder,Cynicalman by Matt Feazell, and Floyd Farland by Chris Ware, 1987:

Promotional image for The Jam by Bernie Mireault, 1989.

Promotional ad for Stray Bullets #1 by David Lapham, 1995.

Promotional ad for Baker Street #5 by Guy Davis, 1990.

But it’s certainly not all ads and promo pieces. There’s some lovely rare stuff as well:

Rare art of the day: Cartoon diary jam page by Joe Matt and Bernie Mireault, 1988. Not reprinted in Peepshow collection.

Much more at The Adventures Of Mr. Phil – bookmark it now!

“Trese is a supernatural series starring a female investigator who steps in to protect the streets of Manilla when the police can’t deal with the supernatural weirdness that appears. Produced by Budjette Tan andKajo Baldisimo, this Filipino book does so much right it’s practically scandalous we haven’t heard more about it here in the UK.”

Looking at Budjette’s Trese blog, I spotted these pieces by Kajo, illustrating a couple of slightly unlikely team-ups for Manilla’s finest:

“A year or so ago, I asked Kajo if he was ever going to make a new portfolio to show to DC and Marvel editors. He said he wanted to do a story where Trese teams-up with Batman and Wolverine and all the action will happen in Manila. So, in one of my notebooks is an outline for that very short story, but we got busy with our dayjobs and finishing Book4, and I forgot all about it. Today, Kajo sent me these sketches based on a story he’s never read and yet he drew one of the scenes that was in my head. (But, as usual, Kajo comes up with an even better idea and he dressed up Wolverine in a barong tagalog!)”

By Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo

Visprint

Foul play. Magic spells. Supernatural criminals. When crime takes a turn for the weird, the police call Alexandra Trese.

We covered Volumes 1-3 of Trese back in January 2011. And what I said there goes just as well for Volume 4:

“Trese is a supernatural series starring a female investigator who steps in to protect the streets of Manilla when the police can’t deal with the supernatural weirdness that appears. Produced by Budjette Tan andKajo Baldisimo, this Filipino book does so much right it’s practically scandalous we haven’t heard more about it here in the UK.

Whenever she’s needed, Trese arrives, often called in by Captain Guerrero, the Comissioner Gordon to Trese’s unconventional Batman, a man who seems singularly predisposed to lean on her knowledge and specific skills. Supported by two mysterious and obviously magical creatures of uncertain powers – the always stylish Kambal twins, she’s always there to protect Manilla from supernatural threat.”

(Meet Alexandra Trese, supernatural protector of Manilla, from Cadena De Amor in Trese Volume 4 by Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo)

Here in Volume 4, we’re on familiar ground, taking four short stories from the casebook of Alexandra Trese, each one delivering some interesting aspect of Trese’s world, providing a sharp jolt of the supernaturtural adventures that I’d enjoyed so much in the first three volumes. Again it’s something very familiar to anyone who’s grown up with the Ellis’ and Delanos of US comic books, and Trese and her world have that very familiar Vertigo feel. Seriously, any fans of Hellblazer should absolutely pick this one up.

(Spinning a very eastern twist on the familiar supernatural horror – Trese introduces us to some very Singapore specific monsters. From Wanted: Bedspacer in Trese Volume 4 by Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo)

But just as before, the unique setting, and the inclusion of so much native Singapore and Eastern folklore puts it into new, interesting, and unfamiliar territory. It has an exotic and original atmosphere about it, that gives it that extra edge.

Perhaps the only thing missing this time around in this volume was uncovering some more of Trese’s history, her family lineage that was slowly revealed previously. Here we’re back to a simple case file structure, a mystery to solve and move on to the next. But there’s still a lot of great storytelling packed into the four stories here, backed up with Kajo’s stark and frankly rather beautiful artwork.

Standout story is Fight Of The Year, which closes the volume in some style, telling a tale of the country’s greatest boxer taking part in the annual fight for his soul. But we soon discover this interesting spin on the sell your soul tale has a far more significant part to play in the supernatural life of Manilla

(The final tale in Trese Volume 4, Fight Of The Year is the best, really showing off Trese’s position of responsibility, as she acts as a guide to the supernatural realms of Manilla)

And it was with this story that it clicked for me. It was mentioned in the introduction, but I never read those until finishing the books, for fear of spoilers. All the comparisons to Hellblazer and Vertigo were supplanted in this story with a familiar feel – this has the glorious scale and import of Ellis and Cassaday’s Planetary, with Trese functioning as the spiritual and supernatural protector of Manilla, delivering her world safe and sound, no matter what it takes, whilst we get to investigate alongside, all the weird and wonderful her mystical existence has to offer.

Trese Volumes 1-4 really should be on your reading list. Budjette and Kajo are taking very familiar genre stories and spinning them off in interesting and original ways, creating something with a unique sense of place, and doing so with great style. Very highly recommended.

By Karrie Fransman

Square Peg

The House That Groaned is the debut graphic novel from Karrie Fransman, and she’s certainly not frightened of really going for it. No thin little volume is this, no lightweight simplistic story. No, this is heavyweight, thick, literary stuff. Deliberately so perhaps, and definitely appealing to that literary set.

Before we start, a reminder that we’ve already had the pleasure of listening to Fransman have a schizophrenic conversation with herself in a director’s commentary article on the blog. And I’d certainly recommend reading that, marvelling at some of the behind the scenes stuff, and then visiting the frankly brilliantly done website for the book.

Now, on the book itself……

The beautifully designed double cover – a cut out house with its windows full of the characters you’ll find inside, reminiscent of a doll’s house of old, really catches the eye, a better piece of book design I don’t think you’ll see all year.

So welcome to 141 Rottin Park Road, an old, decrepit house, full of fairly rotton and decrepit people. The residents are all damaged in so many ways, ways we explore throughout the book, journeying through the house’s rooms, throught the inhabitants lives, their foibles and obsessions, their pasts and what little futures they all have.

(Barbara meets Janet, holding herself together, just barely, but aren’t they all? Aren’t we all? From Karrie Fransman’s The House That Groaned)

It’s Barbara that ties the book and the residents together, a make-up artist (only temporarily of course – she’s got plans) just moved into the building, our eyes on the various goings-on around her.

She’ll meet and greet everyone in the house in turn; Janet, the dietician whose weight loss only came about through need and remains through obsession and despair. Matt who works with the beautiful people, but only through the photographs he obsessively retouches for others, and he just can’t bring himself to take off his gloves. Brian is the immediately disgusting one, a “diseaseophile” whose desires bring a procession of ill, broken, disfigured women into the house and maybe, one day, into his bed. And then there’s old Mrs Durbach, a nonentity who genuinely blends into the background of her flat, and is glad to do so.

And opposite her is Marion, the opposite of so many of the residents in the house; decadant, hedonistic, fetishistic, the extravagant to Mrs Durbach’s invisible, the gluttonous to Janet’s calorie counting obsessive, the dedicated pleasure seeker to Matt’s touch averse nature.

(Brian retreats to his work, safe, alone, sealed off from the world)

And all of the strange, isolated characters will come together in one way or another, brought together quite slowly at first by a house that is crumbling, leaking, dripping, breaking, hissing, creaking and groaning towards entropy seemingly in sympathy with those inside.

Along the way we’ll look back, observing those moments that set each one on their path, ending up lost, isolated, alone, damaged in a rotten house on Rottin Road.

(You could almost imagine it’s the house talking about itself in that sequence above, and if that’s the case, it’s speaking for itself and everyone inside.)

The House That Groaned is all about looking at how past events, often disturbing and long buried in our psyches, can twist characters, setting them on paths to a disturbed, dark future, full of contemporary lifestyle commentary, where everyone seems to be dealing (badly) with isolation, body image and obsessions, that affect everything they do, define who they are, and ultimately will lead somewhere dark and disastrous.

(PoorBrian, trapped in his desires, incapable of escaping a house of damaged people)

You want a strange image that came to mind during this? Imagine Rising Damp done now, with a Lynchian sense of body shock. That pretty much covers just how dark and disturbed the territory The House That Groaned covers in its pages.

Fransman’s style is nicely (not perhaps the right word, given the people she’s dealing with) cartoonish, simplistic yet expressive. And the book reads exceptionally well, Fransman’s storytelling is really solid and good. Her characters are exaggerated stereotypes, her situation veers towards the surreal.

My big problem comes not from the execution but the characters surrounding the concept. The assortment of freaks are simply too stereotyped, which wouldn’t be a problem as a starting point, but none of them really move that far away from the starting point to make them truly interesting and engaging. The one original character is Brian, with his diseasophile’s sexual attraction to the ill and diseased, but even he really doesn’t develop past something reminiscent of Fight Club’s obsession with the emotional crutch of various dependency groups.

So that lack of originality, the inability for the characters to really develop much beyond the starting stereotypes and the lack of engagement with the characters because of it puts me distinctly at odds with many far more famous names. Nicholas Roeg is a vocal fan of the book – and although I freely admit it’s hugely impressive for a debut graphic novel, I’m certainly not convinced, as Roeg is, that it “breaks all the rules of storytelling accumulated over the past thousands of years”. It’s good yes, but it’s not that good Nic.

So all in all it’s a damn fine book; hugely, spectacularly impressive for a debut. But the flaws in it make it more a technical and storytelling success than a really great, engaging, intriguing, fascinating thng. The real disappointment in many ways is that everything is in place to make this truly, utterly wonderful. It fails and it falters slightly, but still rather great.

By Sam Vanallemeersch

Nobrow Press

I’m just not the right person to appreciate this.

I’m a comics guy, and my art tastes veer strongly to the sort of art that looks great but does so in service to a story.

So basically Big Mother, as an A3 collection of artwork by Belgian artist Vanallemeersch just leaves me cold. Attractive in its way, but in no way worthy of this treatment.

Vanallemeersch operates under his own name and two aliases; the visually tight and controlled Kolchoz and the mania of Solchoz – and here in Big Mother it’s all definitely Solchoz – panaramas, pencil works, lots of colours – flat and washes.

So yes, it’s huge, yes it’s colourful, and yes the artwork is a littlemore comics-ish – but effectively it’s just the same thing as those Drawn & Quarterly petit livres I slated a while back for being a waste of time (see this one - Nogoodniks).

I didn’t like those much at all. This I like a little more, but honestly? Give me comics.

And that’s my problem with it – as illustration, it’s alright, but nothing I can’t see all the time at numerous websites (including our own) every week. As a package it’s impressive through its size – but is that merely painting it with the brush of artistic pretension? Or to justify the price of £18 for 23 pages of content + cover?

So if you do have £18 burning a hole in your pocket – try The Wrong Place – beautiful, colourful art and a great comic story. Or the new Joost Swarte book – beautiful illustration, AND a master of comic art.

By Bram Stoker, adapted by Jason Cobley and Staz Johnson

Classical Comics

It’s been a while since I looked at Classical Comics, way back in 2009 with the adaptations of Romeo & Juliet and The Tempest. Of which I ended with:

“They may come across as worthy reads to this reviewer but to children in their teens, turned off by the complex, exaggerated, theatrical language of Shakespeare I can see these full colour, well illustrated graphic novels being a very attractive alternative and a wonderfully exciting breath of fresh air.”

And that’s been proven to me several times this past year, as the Shakespeare graphic novels found their way into the school library to be eagerly read and enjoyed by several of the great readers in Year 6. Noticeably though, the children gravitate towards the Quick Text versions – sufficiently fast paced and succinct to give them a good read without bogging them down.

But what I have here is the original version of Stoker’s classic. A classic I first read as a young teen, and loved for the originality of his idea, and the creeping, oncoming horror that works its way into your head far slower and effectively than any of the Dracula movies I’d seen by that stage. Reading it here sent me back to that first experience, of a novel that chilled, that thrilled, that genuinely scared me so much I couldn’t tear myself away.

And reading it all over again, in this abridged form that utilises Stoker’s original words, I had a real sense of all the excitement of that first reading.

Or at least it did after a little perseverance. Because that first section of the book, maybe 30 odd pages, is really heavy going – as though Stoker’s words were doing battle with the adaptation itself and I found myself reading the words with scant attention to the artwork at times. There’s simply too much here, too much on the page, too much to properly construct a symbiosis of words and pictures.

BUT BUT BUT - crucially, it’s only the first section. Once that’s over and done with it’s as if a lightness descends on this darkest of tales, with Cobley relaxing and settling into a far more confident flow.

And once that happens Johnson’s artwork becomes far more integral to the adaptation, and everything settles down to a much more enjoyable read. There’s a far better sense of flow, of integration of words and pictures and we’re presented with many pages of lovely layouts, although there is a feeling that Johnson’s art, with a strong US comics style, is eminently more suited to the action sequences than the slow, creeping horror of what is actually a rather slow moving tale.

Here are just a couple of highlights, where Johnson really makes those ages work – such as this montage where writer and artist combine beautifully to summarise Dracula’s journey to Whitby, as the doomed ship he sailed on comes to port:

Or this piece, with Renfield detailing his meeting with his master:

So yes, once over that initial trouble, this had most of what I was after with an adaptation of Dracula. It certainly manages to get across everything I remember so vividly from the novel, and that is always a sure sign of the success of an adaptation of a work I’d previously read and enjoyed.

Overall, without having seen the Quick Text version, I do have a sneaking suspicion that I’d have had far fewer problems with this in that format, and sense the words and pictures would fit far more comfortably throughout. As it is, this original version is a flawed yet fulfilling adaptation of a book you really should read at some point in your lives.

By Graham Pearce

Pier-C Comics

I’ve looked at Pearce’s Mike Battle before (here and here) and although I had reservations, I’d enjoyed it, especially the later issues where he’s beginning to find an artistic style. But with Last Admin Hero he’s reprinting issues 8-10 of Sgt. Mike Battle, and some of the problems are back, along with a new problem of trying to switch his storytelling to a multi-issue storyline. More on that in a moment.

It’s certainly a change of pace for his action series starring the very all-American, all-over-the -top, all-action hero Mike Battle, here relegated to a supporting role, with the male lead going to the weedy bloke working as a temp in the admin department of some secret US military organisation. Or as Pearce puts it:

“The ridiculous scenario that entered my head was what if terrorists took-over the building, I was the only person to stop them and all I had was the contents of the stationary cupboard”

And that’s it really. Die Hard with the office admin temp in the Bruce Willis role, set against the backdrop of the Sgt. Mike Battle universe in the S.H.I.E.L.D. era of Jimmy Bond-esque superspies. Here’s his first scene:

John Trojan is just a lowly office temp, thrust into the limelight here when he just happens to be on a toilet break as the agents of A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. storm the building he works in, the brilliantly designed Section D – a straight up yours to the UN building opposite. They’re intending to sell out the good ol’ U. S. of A. and flog its secret-est secrets to the highest bidder.

Panic ensues, or rather it would, if the folks in charge weren’t trying to figure out something much more important:

In some ways that A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. gag is the very essence of this comic. Enjoy that and you’ll find a lot to enjoy.

The simple concept works really well at the start, with the turn it all on its head idea of the last guy in the building being genuinely a bit useless. There’s clever gag after clever gag, all playing on our familiarity with the stuff Pearce is pastiching. Again, another war-room funny:

I have to admit though, I think Pearce’s work is more suited to shorter tales, where he gets to keep things fresh and light and clever and succinct, within the confines of a single issue. Stretched out over the three issues here, the simple concept feels just that – stretched, and just that little bit thin. By the end, it’s a little overdone, a little tired. I was lagging by the end, I really was, and the joy of the original gags had gone.

Art wise, quite naturally, it’s between the really rough first issues and the more nuanced, stylish stuff that came after it. There are faults, of course there are, but you can easily overlook them, enjoy the nice art when it pops up and generally get swept up in the adventure. Flawed but fun.

And Pearce certainly knows how to fill the book with some genuinely interesting and worthwhile extras – an alternate ending courtesy of Pearce’s wife, a brilliantly done tongue firmly in cheek trailer, loads of concept art and behind the scenes stuff (did you all catch the Akira reference in the cover by the way?).

Last Admin Hero is available from Graham Pearce at the Sgt Mike Battle website. And if John Trojan’s adventures have set your heart racing, Pearce promises Last Admin Hero II is coming soon(ish).

INJ Culbard already has a busy 2012, with the new Deadwardians series at Vertigo, a story in SelfMadeHero’s Lovecraft Anthology II, a new collaboration with Ian Edginton – Princess Of Mars, and a new Lovecraft full length graphic novel The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward all in the next couple of months.

But that’s certainly not the end of his comic output. SelfMadeHero have announced that the Deadbeats series, written by Chris Lackey and Chad Fifer, and featured here back in 2011, is getting a release as a full graphic novel  in the autumn:

“We are delighted to announce a forthcoming title in our original fiction series: Deadbeats written by Chris Lackey and Chad Fifer and illustrated by I.N.J. Culbard.

This autumn, Lackey, Fifer and Culbard will be transporting you to 1920s Chicago and a world of jazz, jalopies and tentacles in this creepy adventure like no other. Wait a minute, ‘tentacles’? That’s right – Deadbeats pays homage to the American master of  “weird fiction”, H. P. Lovecraft. If you know anything about the authors, you’ll see that a Lovecraftian obsession runs deep within them.

Chris and Chad are dulcet toned denizens of the interwebs (ahem! and California and Yorkshire) who host the extraordinarily popular, HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast. Both are massive fans of Lovecraftian stories, movies and comics and this is reflected in the podcast, where they discuss a specific H.P. Lovecraft story each week – “what it’s about, how it reads, why it may have been written and what other works of art it has influenced”.

I.N.J Culbard is known to many as the award-winning graphic novelist who adapted Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness into critically acclaimed graphic novel. If you already know Culbard’s work then you’ll no doubt be looking forward to his adaptation ofThe Case of Charles Dexter Ward, out from SelfMadeHero in May.”

And if you want a sneak peak, the preview at the HP Podcraft site is still there for your viewing pleasure.