Poké-King-of-the-Mon-Hill

Combined Review: MARCH and NAT TURNER are a fascinating contrast to each other despite similar subject matter

Taylor Lilley: Well Elkin, if we’re going to do this I owe you the true genesis of this article. I picked up March: Book Onebecause of Nate Powell and shame. For someone as enamoured of comics as I, the opportunity to drink in some Powell and plug gaps in my Civil Rights Movement knowledge was too good to miss. Learning with a side of beauty, if you will. Around a week later I found myself in a small English town, in the only comic store for many miles around, eyeing a copy of Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner. If you’ve ever been to Bedford, you’ll know how crazy unlikely that seemed.

I was impressed by the contrast between the two book’s varieties of monochrome, and wondered whether their visual disparity reflected anything more than the artists’ inclinations. I wondered at the contrast between Nat Turner’s rear cover list of comics industry plaudits and March’s New York Times bestseller status. I couldn’t stop noodling, so I read both books over, and started listing contrasts.

Nat Turner came out in a collected, mass market friendly edition only a few years pre-Obama. March is launched in the first year of Obama’s second term. Where Nat Turner tells of a small, violent uprising against slavery’s greater brutality, its sparse narration “quoted” from the uprising’s leader, March is one man’s memoir of his part in a larger, peaceful movement. One is generally impassioned in tone, visually expressive almost to a fault, the other more measured, elegantly arranged around a through-line of resolve. One garnered Glyphs and Eisners, the other instant NYT bestseller status.

Before long, I reached the obvious conclusion. A largely silent comic culminating in infanticide will never beat a tale of idealism and non-violent struggle to the NYT’s #1 spot. March is easier to swallow, less painful to grapple with as lived experience than the rending of the Nat Turner story. Fine. So then my next question is, does March render Nat Turner obsolete?

Has history reached a remove from Turner’s rebellion that degrades its instructional value? Is John Lewis’s experience, faith-tempered but rationally directed, more useful than Nat Turner’s superhuman determinism? I don’t believe so. Nor do I believe that graphic works of the Civil Rights Movement should be bound to depict bloodshed and visceral excesses of inhumanity.

Short of a comprehensive Civil Rights Movement graphic novel reading list, where do we place these works in relation to each other for the comics reader, rather than the historian?

Elkin? Did I lose you?

Daniel Elkin: I was lost, but now I'm found. Having found my way, though, I'm not sure if we are in the same space, Lilley.

I see March and Nat Turner as a proton and an electron circling the same nucleus. While ostensibly about the same general theme of overcoming racial oppression, they are opposites in execution.

Sanctuary

Sanctuary from The Seventh Movement on Vimeo.

The Golden Gate Way

The Golden Gate Way from The Seventh Movement on Vimeo.

Review -- Melissa Pagluica's ABOVE THE CLOUDS CHAPTER 1

Above the Clouds Chapter 1

(Melissa Pagluica)

It's always nice to unexpectedly stumble across something beautiful. I mean, there you are. You slug through your grind getting slathered in the detritus of missed opportunities, dreams deferred, and failed expectations, weighted down, weighted down, and then, out of nowhere, hovering in your peripheral vision, there's something that re-establishes your faith that the universe can actually be a basically positive entity because something of beauty can push through the cracks and bloom.

Something like this happened to me a couple of weekends ago at this thing called Super Sac-Con (I know, right) in Sacramento, CA. I had made the journey there to see Howard Chaykin and Bill Sienkiewicz, then I wandered into the "Small Press Zone" and accidentally found Melissa Pagluica selling her gorgeous comic Above the Clouds.

Which is truly a thing of beauty.

And, from what I can gather, is her first comic book.

Damn.

On her website, Pagluica says that Above the Clouds is "a project aimed at learning how to make a comic." From what I've seen, if this is what she considers the learning stage, I can't wait to read the books she creates after mastering the form.

Rumble and Sway

Rumble and Sway from The Seventh Movement on Vimeo.

Review -- THE OTHER DEAD #1

The Other Dead #1

(Joshua Ortega / Digger T. Mesch / Qing Ping Mui / Blond / Tom B. Long; IDW)

Okay humans, imagine a world in which every other sentiment thing on the planet, from the giant grizzly on the mountain to the cute, fluffy bunny at the petting zoo, all wanted to eat your flesh. What if the threat of the zombie apocalypse came not from the hands of our fellow citizens, but from the jaws of our household pets. If “every tier of the animal kingdom, from cats, dogs, and mice to lions, tigers, and bears, are transformed into super-strong, turbo-fast, bloodthirsty zombies, how will mankind survive? When a vicious attack can come at any moment from a fluffy tabby, a sleepy hound dog, or a ten-point buck, how can you stay safe?”

This is the concept behind IDW's newest series, The Other Dead, and, if you ask me, that's one serious hook. I mean, have you been outside lately? Have you seen all the things crawling around out there? Now try to imagine all those things trying to kill you. Geez. Hard-core.

Just when I thought this whole zombie thing had been done to death (pun intended), here's a group of guys who have taken the concept to its ultimate nightmarish conclusion. Even a shotgun totin' Dick Cheny isn't safe in this world (seriously).

What Keeps Mankind Alive?

Review -- Elijah Brubaker's JEZEBEL

Jezebel

(Elijah Brubaker)

Continuing our love affair with the great work put up by Study Group Comic Books, I submit for your enjoyment Jezebelby Elijah Brubaker. This comic is a retelling of the Biblical story of Jezebel, Ahab, and Elijah and all the hijinks inherent within – it puts the “ho ho ho” back in “holy” as it were, and I have no shame whatsoever for writing that.

For those of you less Biblically oriented, the story of Jezebel goes something along the lines of: Jezebel, once she married King Ahab, got him to go anti-Yahweh and go pro-Baal. This, of course, runs counter to that whole “You shall have no other gods before me” commandment.  God comes to the prophet Elijah and tells Elijah to set up some good old-style smiting and stuff and, from there, the comedy erupts.

Comedy?

Elijah Brubaker has taken this tale of heresy, drought, and slaughter and made it pretty damn funny. He recasts everyone as either insane, petty, stupid, or clueless and, by doing so, turns a horrific story into some jocular comic-making. And he may be going to hell for it.

Hypocentre

hypocentre -short film- from Claire&Max on Vimeo.

Metalocalypse : Weather Bureau

GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

Convenient Truths -- RUDE DUDE

Sometimes the most universal truths can be found in the smallest slices of life. That’s what makes independent documentaries so powerful, engaging, and entertaining. Not only do they show you little worlds to which you’ve never had access, but they oftentimes also tell the larger story of what it means to be human. Armed with this intellectual conceit, a bag of Funyuns, and a couple of Miller beers, Daniel Elkin curls up in front of the TV and delves deep into the bowels of Netflix Streaming Documentaries to find out a little bit more about all of us.

Today he and his friend Jason Sacks found 2013's Rude Dude directed by Ian Fischer.

Jason Sacks: At SDCC this year, I was interviewing Tim Bradstreet – a super-nice and smart guy, by the way – when a friend of Tim's walked over to his booth and handed Tim a DVD. "Here's that documentary of Steve Rude. He's crazy," the friend said. The two buddies chatted for a minute and then Tim and I went back to our interview, shaking our heads and happy that we weren't complicated, difficult people to work with.

Rude Dude is the portrait of a brilliant artist who has bipolar disorder. It doesn't skimp in presenting Steve Rude's mental illness or attempt to show the artist in a manner that minimizes his strange behavior; instead, this film ended up for me being a deeply moving sketch of a deeply thrilling man, a documentary that was surprisingly honest in how it shows the effects that his sickness has had on his family and his ever-dwindling set of friends.

Back when Rude and writer Mike Baron created Nexus, at the dawn of the direct sales comics movement in 1981, it seemed Rude was poised to be the metaphorical Next Big Thing. Possessed of an incredible artistic talent – partially influenced by the great Russ Manning, partially influenced by great illustrators from the early parts of the 20th century – Steve Rude's thrilling art style seemed a bolt of lightning, a revelation for any comic fan used to the grittier style that then was popular in comics.

Muppet Mash

Review -- HABIT #1

Habit #1

(Josh Simmons with Wendy Chin, Karn Piana, and The Partridge in the Pear Tree)

Habit #1 is a showcase for the talents of Josh Simmons as an artist and storyteller. Within its pages are five stories that will bend your brain with confusion, amusement, repulsion, pathos, and glee. What they all have in common, other than the hands of Simmons smacking everything about, is that all these stories will push you out of your comfort zone and make you re-examine all your preconceptions about narrative, entertainment, and comics.

This collection opens with Simmons writing and drawing (and inking thickly and darkly) a story titled "Seaside Home". This eleven-page tale starts off as a subtle exploration of the dysfunctions inherent in a particular family. It then quickly shifts gears, taking a dark, unexpected turn towards complete devastation and despair. As the family's relationship problems manifest themselves in the very environment they inhabit, the reader can only bear witness to the horror and stare gaping at the reality of Simmons' denouement. It's a hard opening and sets the tone for the rest of the collection that follows. "Seaside Home" is no bedtime story, that's for sure, but it prepares us by unsettling us, taking us into a place where we can no longer trust our prior knowledge of how stories are constructed and drowning whatever expectations we have of traditional narrative in a wave of the unexpected.

YOUR CHICKEN ENEMY -- \m/ -- Bring on October!