Welcome to another Weekly Emanata, the MEGATONik review of comics. As these are a combination of readerly reaction and critical examination, expect spoilers. I’m going to write as if you, the reader, has some passing knowledge of comics, but feel free to post questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

Due to excessive real-life attempts to graduate and get a life in order, the Emanata will be coming every couple weeks for the next month or so. On the plus side of things, this means that we’ll be bringing you the best of two weeks of comics in every installment.

Boody. The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers
by Boody Rogers

Fantagraphics publishes such a wide array of books that it’s a little hard to believe that they can bring their focus intensely to bear on any one thing. However, they have, for years, put out beautiful reprints of comic strips such as Krazy Kat and The Peanuts; they’ve recently branched out into Golden Age comics, spearheaded by the amazing volume on Fletcher Hanks and followed up by this absolutely insane book collecting numerous stories by Boody Rogers. Rogers is not really a guy that people talk about; no one would mention him in breaths full of Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, and Harvey Kurtzman. I’m not going to make a case for doing that, but I would definitely make a case for reading this book no matter what sort of comics you like. These stories, mostly about Babe, “the amazon of the Ozarks,” and Sparky Watts, a unique sort of superman that mostly bums around with his friends until his body runs out of cosmic rays, at which point he shrinks to insect size. These shorts are always funny, and not in an ironic or “so bad it’s good” way. The situations are set up in an admirably mechanic way, the pieces introduced in serious fashion until they all click together in a mad mess of an ending. Each panel is packed with visual gags, creating a strange dissonance with the characters, each of whom sees nothing wrong with the situation he or she is in.

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Welcome to another Weekly Emanata, the MEGATONik review of comics. As these are a combination of readerly reaction and critical examination, expect spoilers. I’m going to write as if you, the reader, has some passing knowledge of comics, but feel free to post questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

This week is International Outreach here at the Emanata. Cinebook sent me three volumes from their line of translated European comics and I read a couple great manga, so enjoy.

Pandora’s Box: Pride
written by Alcante
art by Didier Pagot

The first Cinebook I read, Pride reads like an episode of the original Twilight Zone. One of the good episodes. It’s a short, tight political drama with some sci-fi overtones, but the science is pretty hard and doesn’t intrude. The basic setup draws inspiration from the myth of Narcissus, starting with a man who’s extremely concerned with himself. Regular enough, but the man is America’s president, up for reelection in days, and when the opposing party assigns a journalist to dig up some dirt, things get crazy. What begins as a possible mistress with a possible baby spirals out into the edges of human ethics.

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Welcome to another Weekly Emanata, the MEGATONik review of comics. As these are a combination of readerly reaction and critical examination, expect spoilers. I’m going to write as if you, the reader, has some passing knowledge of comics, but feel free to post questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

We’re running a little late again, but that is entirely due to some site problems last night.

Air #7
written by G Willow Wilson
art by MK Perker

This is one of the freshest books coming out of a mainstream comic company and I look forward to every issue, but I’m going to try not to gush about it since I’ve done so in previous columns. I have had a few small problems with the series, which I think is normal for nearly everything I read, but I’m featuring this issue this week because it specifically deals with one of my biggest stumbling blocks in the book so far: the plot has moved along so fast that some of the characters have gotten short shrift.

Issue seven deals with this problem in a unique way that snaps right in to the weird mythology that Wilson and Perker have been developing. The protagonist, through means that I won’t go into detail here, ends up in the body of her mysterious lover… when he was ten years old. In living the key moments of his life, the whole “mysterious lover” cliche is dissolved in a way that also adds a unique aspect to the future of the characters’ relationship. What’s it going to mean if your girlfriend has seen all the important choices you’ve made from your own point of view?

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Welcome to another Weekly Emanata, the MEGATONik review of comics. As these are a combination of readerly reaction and critical examination, expect spoilers. I’m going to write as if you, the reader, has some passing knowledge of comics, but feel free to post questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

This week’s Emanata is a graphic novelstravaganza and, due to that excessive amount of reading combined with a semi-vacation, is running a few days late. Apologies.

The Surrogates
written by Robert Venditti
art by Brett Weldele

Top Shelf Productions was kind enough to send me a copy of their soon-to-be-filmed sci-fi comic, and it’s a pretty cool package. The story is strong; the blurbs on the back cover compare it to Philip K. Dick, and from my limited experience (I had to restrain myself from typing, “from my limited Dick experience”), I think it’s an apt comparison. The Surrogates is set in the near future where people can connect to robotic doubles, downloading all the necessary sensory information straight to their brains in real time. They never have to leave the house.

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Welcome to another Weekly Emanata, the MEGATONik review of comics. As these are a combination of readerly reaction and critical examination, expect spoilers. I’m going to write as if you, the reader, has some passing knowledge of comics, but feel free to post questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

House of Mystery #11
by Matt Sturges
art by Luca Rossi & Jim Fern

Sturges has started to put me in my place. After nearly a year of reading about some characters wandering around a house, answers are slowly, or at least seemingly, trickling in. Of course, the characters still seem to serve as mouthpieces for the writer; everyone has similar witticisms that they drop just a bit too much. In good news, Jim Fern draws the back-up story. I’ve been missing his art since the late-and-lamented Crossing Midnight with Mike Carey. As we’ll see below, though, a good back-up does not a good comic make.

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Welcome to another Weekly Emanata, the MEGATONik review of comics. As these are a combination of readerly reaction and critical examination, expect spoilers. I’m going to write as if you, the reader, has some passing knowledge of comics, but feel free to post questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer. Last week’s column got eaten up by the server switch; if any of you got a chance to read it and have it saved in your temporary internet files, it would be much appreciated if you’d sent it my way.

Beanworld vol 1: Wahoolazuma
by Larry Marder

My bias, straight up, is that this is one of my favorite comic books. I’ve written about it previously on MEGATONik here and here, so I’ll try not to repeat my praises.

Yes, Beanworld is an awesome look at the artistic process, ecological relationships, and what comics can do. However, after my last reading, I always bore the caveat that the first few parts of the book weren’t that good. Reading these earliest issues again, reproduced in a great little hardcover volume by Dark Horse, I can see where I got that opinion; the earliest Beanworld stories don’t seem as free and well-developed as the later issues. They were much, much better than I’d allowed in my memory, though, and the stories built upon them later on make them even better. Things that seem to idiosyncratically stick out for awhile are woven into the unique form of story that Beanworld is telling, a cause and effect that is alien to me but makes perfect sense. It’s not a comic; it’s a process.

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Welcome to another Weekly Emanata, the MEGATONik review of comics. As these are a combination of readerly reaction and critical examination, expect spoilers. I’m going to write as if you, the reader, has some passing knowledge of comics, but feel free to post questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

Batman #686
written by Neil Gaiman
pencilled by Andy Kubert

Well, here’s a Neil Gaiman story. There are a few things to talk about, I guess. First of all, Adam Kubert is brought front-and-center again, and he certainly has great moments, but he also has very boring moments, and I’ve never understood why he’s been so highly regarded. He tells a clean story, sure, which is a skill that a lot of “hot” artists lack, but I find a lot of his stuff… boring.

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Welcome to another Weekly Emanata, the MEGATONik review of comics, back after some extended MEGADOWNtime on the site and some sort of terrible old man disease in my limbs. As these are a combination of readerly reaction and critical examination, expect spoilers. I’m going to write as if you, the reader, has some passing knowledge of comics, but feel free to post questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

Agents of Atlas #1
written by Jeff Parker
art by Carlos Pagulayan
This book is, for me, a long-awaited return. The Agents of Atlas miniseries that ran from October 2006 to March 2007 united six characters that had originally debuted when Marvel Comics was called Atlas in the 1950s. The single issues snuck under my radar but I picked up the collected edition and got a huge kick out of it. It’s the perfect pulp team-up: the secret agent, the spaceman, the goddess, the silent robot, the talking gorilla, and the merwoman join forces to fight communist-era threats in the fifties and then again in the modern day. The mini was full of action I can only describe as “rollicking,” entertaining dialogue, and engaging character interaction. A return was always hinted at but, up until a few months ago, was never in sight.

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Welcome to another Weekly Emanata, the MEGATONik review of comics. As these are a combination of readerly reaction and critical examination, expect spoilers. I’m going to write as if you, the reader, has some passing knowledge of comics, but feel free to post questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

Air #6
written by G Willow Wilson
art by MK Perker
The last issue, reviewed here, had the makings of being the penultimate issue of a storyline. Things were coming together, leading to a nice reveal “to be continued.” This issue delivers on what was built in a completely satisfying way as all the big hints get fit together into a clearer image of what the supporting cast has been doing behind the protagonist’s back and the mystical mysteries in what at first seemed like our own world are laid out.

The neat thing is, this is all done in, oh, the first two-thirds of the issue. After that, any sense of status quo is shattered once again. Blythe, the leading lady, was introduced as a flight attendant with a fear of heights. This seemed like a gimmicky quirk at first, a cutesy hook for readers, but it all comes back to kick off the next part of the story as Blythe effectively fails her induction into the hero quest halfway through, falling through time and reality to end up in a very interesting position (socially and… biologically?) given everything that’s happened before.
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Welcome to another Weekly Emanata, the MEGATONik review of comics. As these are a combination of readerly reaction and critical examination, expect spoilers. I’m going to write as if you, the reader, has some passing knowledge of comics, but feel free to post questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

Final Crisis #6
written by Grant Morrison
art by JG Jones, Carlos Pacheco, Marco Rudy, & Doug Mahnke

The big hubbub about this issue is that Batman is dead, burnt to a skeletal corpse by Darkseid’s Omega Sanction. We should just get that out of the way to separate the sensationalism and plot from the things that are actually going on in the construction of this story.
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