Daily Breakdowns 027 - Masterpiece Comics

A couple things before today's reviews:

1) The FTC has a new law that bloggers must disclose whenever they write about products they receive for free that they hang onto. I don't think this disclosure has to appear in the copy I write for the tonnage of crap I end up selling on eBay. The estimable Johanna Draper-Carlson, apparently an FTC disclosure pioneer, has more info here, although I have to admit I'm more interested in how the female lawyer in the advertisement on the left is providing her own form of disclosure with the profiled sweater meat (to use the legalese). Way to go, Lisa!

2) Thanks, Mr. Postman, for bending Astonishing X-Men Vol. 2 so it fit in my 3" x 6" mail slot, rather than just putting it in the larger package compartment or on my doorstep! Way to take "hardcover" as a challenge to make a book look like a taco.

Black Salt #1
Written by Chad Boudreau from a screenplay by Owen Ratliffe and Aries Carmona
Art by J. C. Grande
Published by Blackline Comics. $.99 USD

I have to be honest. Even if this wasn't a bad comic -- and it is -- I would have had some bias towards it due to the fact its existence as a comic is almost an afterthought, or just one piece in a multimedia assault. Ratti Entertainment, which I guess derives its unfortunate name from screenwriter Ratliffe, includes a text piece at the back of this issue that explains that the Black Salt film is in "the final stage of development," whatever that means. It looks like it could happen, but then again, there are thousands of films in development, so until that happens, or the cartoon (there's an anime-esque piece of art for that), or the videogame, or action figures, all we have to go on is the first issue of this comic.

What's here is a small group of operatives who go up against some goggled ninja types to stop them from dropping vials of a powerful virus that would kill everyone in the city, and from what I gathered from the dialogue, it would just keep going from there until it ran out of people to infect. What kind of plan for world domination is that? Because the outrageously stereotypical Fu Manchu type villain was dumb enough to put his own son on the mission, the leader of our team of good martial arts practitioners shoves a sword through his chest and kills him, thereby setting the stage for revenge and making things personal, as the Fu Manchu type is going to end up killing the hero's wife and daughter. Hey, blame the text piece for spoiling the plot. Don't worry about the dead family--Boudreau doesn't bother to create any characters here, just people in uniforms shouting military cliches, so I doubt the wife and kid will make an impression prior to their exit. Grande is sub-'90s Image style, just guys with gritted teeth or gaping jaws, and no dynamism at all to the action sequences, which is pretty much the whole issue.

You know, I was reading an old interview today with John Byrne, and he was saying that even with early work, bad art falls into one of two categories. The A category is art that's bad but has something to it, some understanding, some hint that the artist knows what they want to get to but haven't quite mastered the skills to get there yet. The B category is when there's nothing, not a hint of promise. I don't want to tear any of these guys' dreams down, but I'm just not seeing it. There just isn't one original element or hint of a personal style or sensibility. It's just a means to an end. If the screenplay is good, maybe there will be a movie. But I can tell you there is nothing about the comic that would cause this to happen.

Masterpiece Comics
By R. Sikoryak
Published by Drawn and Quarterly. $19.99 USD

R. Sikoryak has been doing bits and pieces of this book over the years in various anthologies. In fact, a lot of what I know about his work has ended up here. So I knew he is comics' greatest mimic, able to create excellent facsimiles of the styles of EC's horror comics, Charles Schulz and others. And that would be a neat enough trick, but in this book one gets the feeling that he had the idea first and learned to ape other cartoonists afterwards, to best realize the concept. The concept of the book is to take stories from classic literature and depict them in the style of iconic comic strips, all of which end up being between the '40s and '60s. If that isn't enough, Sikoryak also takes pains to match the literary work's themes to the comic's themes, so the impish Pearl from Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter becomes "Little Pearl," in the style of John Stanley's Little Lulu. The story of The Garden of Eden becomes "Blond Eve," with Dagwood and Blondie finding out about temptation and shame while God, in the form of Dagwood's boss, Mr. Dithers, harangues and beats Dagwood, finally kicking him out from the Garden (sorry if I spoiled it).

The quality of the art and the execution of the ideas are what makes the book a success, but it was successful in a way I hadn't expected. That is, it's not all that funny beyond the concepts. Making Garfield into Mephisto and his owner Jon into Faustus is great, but even acknowledging what an ambitious undertaking this is, couldn't we have some funny gags, too? Is that wrong? Merging Macbeth with Mary Worth to come up with "Mac Worth," with busybody Mary giving helpful advice to her blood-drenched, guilt-ridden husband is brilliant, as is recasting Wuthering Heights in the style of Tales from the Crypt, but the end result is that we have some shorter, jazzier versions of Classics Illustrated, clever retellings but still extremely faithful.

There are two faux letter columns, and Sikoryak uses them as a substitute for an Introduction, explaining the similarities between the classics and the comics with which they're matched .It's helpful, and yet I'm still left wondering exactly what he wanted to accomplish beyond the surface elements, beautiful and clever though they are. I find myself extremely impressed by the craft of it and it's a great accomplishment as an intellectual exercise, and yet I'm a little confused and disappointed at the same time. Sure, it's useful to me that I don't feel like I have to read Crime and Punishment now that I've seen the plot encapsulated in a Detective Comics pastiche, it's not like I gained a new understanding of the literature I already knew, or the original comics, by seeing it in these mash-ups. Fascinating and worth examining, but falling a little short for me.

Christopher Allen