Daily Breakdowns 048 - Act-I-Vate

The Act-I-Vate Primer
By Various
Published by IDW Publishing. $24.99 USD

A truth and a confession: It's good to be in a club, and reviewing anthologies kind of sucks. Let's talk about the club thing first. In our lives, almost everyone goes through different times when we're part of some kind of club, team or posse. It's reassuring and empowering and a lot of fun, strength in numbers and making up your little rules and signs and lingo. I envy these Act-I-Vate folks that, although this Trouble With Comics thing is its own kind of fun club. Putting together a website and figuring out how it's going to look and what you're going to put on it--we're not all that different, but these men and women are making comics and we men and woman are (just) writing about them.

The problem I have with reviewing, or really, reading, anthologies, is the variety. It's the spice of life and all, but for the most part, they're the equivalent of that cheap buffet you go to for lunch or dinner one day with some buddies. There's a helluva lot of different kinds of food--a lot of which you like, in theory--but it's a lot for a group of cooks to do well with, and so after that first plate where you try a whole bunch of it, you go back for only a few of the successful items on your second plate. That dumpling thing filled with a sweet brown paste in a banana leaf? One bite and out. Tiny octopi in a Tabasco-based sauce? You can now say you tried it. Once.

I'm not saying the work here is like spicy octopi or sweet brown paste, but on the other hand, the buffet I was writing about above was one I went to for lunch six months ago, and I was able to remember it instantly, while I can't tell you much about the stories inside this book I just read without opening it again. Actually, let's try that. I'll just look at the names of the creators and stories from the back cover and see what I remember.

Nick Bertozzi's "Persimmon Cup" is beautifully drawn, and I'll follow Bertozzi just about anywhere, but I couldn't penetrate this one. Pedro Camargo's "Glam"? No. Mike Cavallaro's "Loviathan" was kind of interesting, an underwater science fiction/fantasy thing that had a good setup and great coloring. Molly Crabapple's and John Leavitt's "Backstage"? Mannered, dull. Mike Dawson's "Jack & Max"? I think this was drawn as an homage to the famous children's book, Goodnight, Moon but while it looked a lot like it, there didn't seem to be much of a reason to do it other than to disguise that there wasn't much of a story there. Jim Dougan's and Hyeondo Park's "Sam & Lilah" was, I think, a kind of low-key science fiction thriller. Not very memorable. Ulises Farnias' "Motro" looked a lot like Sammy Harkham's style, a sort of mythical spirit quest thing that doesn't really come off. Nice looking, though. Michel Fiffe's "Zegas" is one of the more memorable pieces, very Art Deco and elegant, a little precious but certainly memorable. Maurice Fontenot's "Ghost Pimp" was labored. I don't remember Simon Fraser's "Lilly Mackenzie" at all. Jennifer Hayden's "Underwire" seemed to want to be kind of Lynda Barry but damned if the panel-to-panel transitions were really awkward most of the time. I knew there was a story in there but it didn't come out right. Tim Hamilton's "The Floating Elephant" was almost there. Really nice period art but the ending needed work. I think some people get so fascinated by stories set around the beginning of the 20th Century but very few of them have actually succeeded in comics. Dean Haspiel's "Billy Dogma"...well, Haspiel's always memorable. I can't say this was the best Dogma outing, but his brio is appealing. Joe Infurnari's "Ultra-lad!" illustrates a certain rule about comics anthologies in that, where you least suspect it, i.e. indie comics, someone's always got to do their version of superheroes. The production on this one was nice, as he did a great job making it look like an old, beat-up, four-color comicbook. But the production works against it a bit in that it's kind of hard to read, and it's not the most gripping story to begin with, being basically a narration of a selfish, immature man failing to evolve over the course of decades. Roger Langridge--maybe the hottest name among the collective--gives us one of his "Mugwhump the Great" silent clown comics, and you know, although Langridge is undoubtedly talented and I like his Muppet Show stuff, he kind of blew it here. The line weight is so uniform that the art is really off-puttingly flat. I literally had to squint and work to read what was intended to be a series of effortless gags. It was one of the least pleasurable reading experiences here. Finally, Leland Purvis, whom I last recall doing something unintelligible for Dark Horse called Pubo (although that's fun to say), brings us a better-drawn but still hard to parse, "Vulcan & Vishnu."

The production values are top-notch, the cover's terrific, and I sincerely wish all of these creators well. At the same time, I can't say I have any interest in following any of these stories, aside from maybe "Loviathan," which wasn't great but had a clear lead-in to more, on the website. So in that, this primer failed for me. And as a stand-alone object, well, obviously from the test above the stories within left anywhere from no impression to a mildly good impression, but nothing very compelling. I wish that wasn't the case, but there it is.