Oh dear.

In writing up notes on the pages of Chapter 1 of SCWONKEY DOG, I talked about one-off background characters who wound up so occupying my attention in the writing process that they got full names, backgrounds, and the very strong possibility of turning up again (see here and here). Hey, you've got to find something to occupy your mind while you're coloring and shading artwork and assembling layouts; I occupied my mind by writing these elaborate stories in my head about Steve, and how his little daughter gave him the tie he's wearing, and how he's Leonard's accountant, and how his wife is probably going to leave him because he keeps going to Leonard's parties at the penthouse, and he used to be in a band and the guy next to him in the big crowd scene was his drummer and he thinks the guy's gay because he keeps on hanging on him and so on and so forth. I come up with a guy in the background, and suddenly he's got a whole life laid out. Don't even get me started on Rebecca; she didn't exist before I drew that panel where Dante's talking about her, and all of a sudden she's gonna become a major character starting somewhere around Chapter 7.

So I pop over to my sister's LiveJournal, curious what she's up to, and find that she's talking about naming one-off characters. The one she came up with that spurred the post is ... well, take a look.

The next page is coming along nicely.

In this week's installment of Scwonkey Dog, Vanessa gets kicked in the back during a rescue mission gone sour.

This panel's going to be a big composite piece; finished the background element at Starbucks this evening, working on the foreground next, and then I'm going to have to throw the setting together once I've got the pieces assembled. Then I've got, hm, three panels to go -- all close-up head shots, so they won't be too tricky. Let's see if I can get this done before midnight ...

Omega to this afternoon's alpha.

Last panel to issue #2 page 2/series page 24.

Afternoon coloring.

Things I GIve A Crap About in the Diamond Previews Catalog - February 2008

So I've been without power here in little ol' Southeast Kansas for two days or so -- a stretch of Sunday, the better part of Monday, and all day today 'til about four o'clock in the afternoon. Consequently I did a lot of sleeping in that time, wrapped tight in a blanket for warmth to protect myself from the bitter cold seeping into the house, meaning I'm wired and ready to go for some hours yet.

The end result is that I'm going to make a big list of comic books coming out in February or thereabouts that I would like to buy. I haven't done this in a while, so bear with me. These are the things that I want.

* * *
SCUD: THE DISPOSABLE ASSASSIN #21
By Rob Schrab (Image)


Like all good children who read their Wizards and Hero Illustrateds and what-have-you back in the mid-1990's, I know that Scud -- the story of an assassin robot that came from a vending machine and wound up doing everything possible to keep his original mark alive so that he could go on being a bounty hunter, or something like that, I forget -- is something I should have been reading when I was busy buying my four or five X-books a month. This is probably going to be pretty good if (big IF) Schrab hasn't missed a step since his glory days, and if I were an adventurous sort, I'd be buying this right now; as it stands, I'll likely wait for the big hoo-ha omnibus edition collecting this four-issue wrap up and the original run coming down the line.

CASANOVA #13
By Matt Fraction & Fabio Moon (Image)


I've still got an issue of Casanova I haven't read sitting in my bag here, don't I? I read Casanova, I like Casanova, but somehow it always feels like work. Not like homework -- not like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier (which I'm still not done with) -- but it requires that little extra jolt of effort to make it through, like it's a little too smart and clever for its own good. Probably part of the problem is the fact that it speaks with a certain lexicon and levels of references -- music, kung-fu movies, crime genre thrillers -- that just go, WHOOSH, over my head. (This is how bad I am with music: if it wasn't on the radio from about 1982 to 1990, I probably don't know it.)

Still, Casanova is a fun, action-packed, and sexy sci-fi espionage book that always proves entertaining once I get up the nerve to crack open that cover. It just always takes a page or two to remember just how much fun it really is; the two dollar price tag (cheap!) doesn't hurt matters when it comes to evaluating whether or not to keep buying it from month to month.

G0DLAND #21
By Joe Casey & Tom Scioli


What the hell happened to this book? It's not that there's anything wrong with the series itself -- it's just, the schedule's all gone to hell over the past year, with only five issues released in 2007. And when you're doing a big, crazy Kirby pastiche juggling oodles of wacky and wild villains ... well, actually that's not so much of a problem because the cast of characters is so memorably designed that even if you don't remember their names, you certainly recall where you saw them last. But it does hurt the book's momentum somewhat, and is enough to make a guy worry that they'll never use that third digit out on the cover, let alone the fourth.

I originally picked this up on the strength of Casey's work -- I thought his run on Uncanny X-Men was solid stuff, loved The Intimates at WildStorm, and ... hmm, I could have sworn there was something else I really liked besides that Iron Man mini-series he did. Oh hell, of course, Wildcats 3.0, my favorite superhero book that's not a superhero book ever. Duh. While this lacks the ambition of that, it seems to have the passion down. His Marvel stuff lately? Maybe it has a kind of passion, but it's mostly just an exercise in ... hmm ... Roy Thomasing. I don't know, maybe the dude's just been burned too many times by corporate-published books getting canned out from under him, but nothing else he's doing really seems to have the boundary-pushing power of his work at WildStorm.

I mean, geez, dude's writing this now:

YOUNGBLOOD #2
By Joe Casey & Derec Donovan (Image)


There are two things that make this tempting to me:

A) Joe Casey, who is canny enough that he might be able to find something new to say with the "superhero as celebrity" concept that has since been mined in such books as Milligan & Allred's brilliant X-Force/X-Statix and Millar & Hitch's Ultimates and ...

B) The distinctly non-Liefeldian, very clean-looking art style of Derec Donovan.

But y'know, it's still Youngblood ...

THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #10
By Mark Waid & George Perez (DC)


Because sometimes you just need a DC superhero comic book. And this is the only one DC publishes that doesn't require you to read ten other DC superhero comics to get what in the hell is going on, and it almost certainly won't involve rape or punching someone's head off -- not with Waid at the helm, no sir.

WILL EISNER'S THE SPIRIT #15
By Sergio Aragones, Mark Evanier, and Mike Ploog (DC)


I've loved what Darwyn Cooke has done with Eisner's most famous creation -- just nice little snappy adventure stories, solidly written and drawn, landing somewhere between Eisner's original stories and the Batman Adventures comics based upon the 1990's animated series. I was going to jump off after he wrapped his run up, but Sergio and Mark have enough of my trust that I'm willing to give them a couple of months to see what they do with the character. I wouldn't really mind if it wasn't much different than what Cooke did; I can't imagine Sergio's adventure sensibilities being that far off.

GREEN ARROW: YEAR ONE
By Andy Diggle & Jock (DC)


A couple of years ago Andy Diggle wrote an Adam Strange mini-series that just all-around kicked butt. I have heard nothing but high praise for his previous collaboration with Jock, The Loners. And Oliver Queen is one of my favorite DC heroes ever since I first laid eyes on that crazy one-armed archer jumping around in Miller's Dark Knight Returns. So maybe when this hits softcover, I'll snap this up.

HOWARD THE DUCK OMNIBUS
By Steve Gerber, Gene Colan, Val Mayerik, Frank Brunner, John Buscema, Carmine Infantino, et al (Marvel)


Someone at Marvel has taken leave of their senses and I love them for it. Eight hundred pages of the real common man's Marvel hero, trapped in a world he never made. Love that cover, too. That's just aces.

THE ORDER VOL. 1: THE NEXT RIGHT THING
By Matt Fraction, Barry Kitson, and Khari Evans (Marvel)


Or, the umpteenth Marvel team book to rise in the wake of the Civil War storyline. But I've heard nothing but good things about this, and I enjoyed Kitson's work on his last two projects (Empire and Legion of Super-Heroes, both with Mark Waid), and Fraction's been firing on all cylinders with every other title of his I've read.

It's just ... really, Marvel, another team book? I have a sick feeling that they've been so busy killing off B- and C-list characters that they need to pump out all these team books just to refill the rosters so they have warm bodies to feed to the next oh-so-relevant crying superhero mega-crossover machine in a few years' time.

I also don't know how badly I want this on my bookshelf. I kinda want to read it, but I'd rather borrow it from someone else, y'know? Or maybe the library?

Then again, fifteen dollars for seven issues ... that's quite the bargain. Hmm.

YOTSUBA&! VOL. 6
By Kiyohiko Azuma (ADV Manga)


If there's one thing I hate about my time working at Asylum, it's that my perception of Kiyohiko Azuma's Azumanga Daioh is forever colored by the posters of buxom schoolgirl Sakaki in a bathing suit that the store used to -- and hell, probably still does -- sell. There was always something about the all-girl cast and the way Azuma drew the girls in all their funny outfits that struck me as a little skeevy, and seeing the franchise through the lens of working at a store that sold that poster and was run by a guy who really, really liked the show and himself seemed awfully skeevy has left the franchise forever tainted in my mind.

Thankfully, no such clouds hang over Azuma's subsequent work, the boisterous Yotsuba&!, following the adventures of a green-haired little girl who's really excited about everything in a way that sort of rings true. She lives with her adoptive father, who's lazy and childlike in his own way, and she keeps running next door and bothering the neighbor girls, who are all really nice; in fact, I think the only person who hasn't been really nice so far just showed up in the last volume, and that was more in a teasing way. It's a fun little feel-good series about the excitement of being a kid and being around an excitable little kid. I'm glad ADV got back on the ball and committed themselves to continuing to release this fantastic series.

RASL #1
By Jeff Smith (Cartoon Books)


Seriously, it's a new book by Jeff (Bone, Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil) Smith. How often does that happen? And it's about an interdimensional art thief. That's gotta be fun, right?

24: COLD WARRIORS
By Beau Smith & Steve Bryant (IDW)
The 24 tie-in comics have been pretty tepid so far, but this one's packing some solid talent behind it -- Beau Smith has a good rep for writing solid two-fisted comics, and Steve Bryant is the creator behind the well-regarded and Eisner nominated Athena Voltaire. So this might well be worth looking into, especially since the writers' strike has put the new season of 24 on hold for the foreseeable future.

DOCTOR WHO #2
By Gary Russell & Jose Maria Beroy (IDW)


I like the Tenth Doctor and Martha, and with one of the series story editors on board writing this series, I've got high hopes for it. Though I'd been hoping Nick Roche was handling the art here. I suppose he was filling in on Transformers when this script came up. That's his work on the cover; I really like the way he draws David Tennant as the Doctor. It really captures the way he plays the character without being all photo-real and stodgy. I'm a little worried that if it's some artist IDW employed on a Star Trek book it's going to have that licensed TV comic look about it ...

EAST COAST RISING VOL. 2
By Becky Cloonan (TokyoPop)
When did the last volume of this come out? A year and a half ago? Longer? I guess Cloonan's been busy drawing American Virgin for DC/Vertigo all this time, huh? Anyway, um, pirates. Yeah. I really don't remember much about this series at this point. I remember I liked it quite a bit, I remember the first book ended on a cliffhanger, and I remember a feeling of really wanting to see what happened next. So it's about bloody time.

STEADY BEAT VOL. 3
By Rivkah (TokyoPop)
This is me being loyal and kind of wanting to know the ending. I thought the middle volume of this series, about a young Texas girl finding out her "perfect" older sister is in love with another girl, really dragged its feet and spent way too much time telling through diary entries instead of showing with pictures and dialogue. But maybe that was just my perception. I'd have to reread it to be sure. Maybe I will when this volume, which shows the fallout of Leah's sister's secret being revealed and the effect it has on their mother's place in Congress, is released.

Yep, that's two TokyoPop books, neither of them Japanese. How about that? I'd go for the trifecta with Christy (Next Exit) Lijewski's Re:Play, but I never picked up the first volume, though I'm interested in doing so one of these days.

EXCEL SAGA VOL. 17
By Rikdo Koshi (Viz Media LLC)


Huzzah! Mere months after the last volume of secrets, twists, and inspired silliness (cyborgs should not engage in eating contests, and if you decide to hold a frozen old man over a fire, expect strange looks), a new volume of Excel Saga (celebrating ten years!) emerges! This is, hands down, the most entertaining manga I read on a regular basis. It has a tremendous cast of characters -- a cast capable of real change over time, no less -- one of the sharpest senses of humor I've ever read in a translated manga series (how much of that is the person reworking the dialogue into English, I have no idea, but it's appreciated), and the most unpredictable ongoing storyline I am following anywhere. I have no idea where in the hell Excel Saga is going to go, but I am going to follow it. It will probably wind up somewhere neat.

HONEY & CLOVER VOL. 1
By Chica Umino (Viz Media LLC)


This is the story of a group of art students in Tokyo. The thing is, if I remember the anime series based upon this manga right, one of them is an insane spaz who wanders off for long stretches of time, has a mysterious income, and returns from his trips and sleeps like a log for days. There is also the girl on the cover, who I think is a college student too, but looks like she's a young twelve year old, and the spaz makes her nervous because he keeps taking her picture, and puts her on a website. God, my memory's spotty. But I remember really liking the cast of characters and atmosphere the anime built -- laid back, relaxing, downright pleasant -- so I'm certainly going to give the manga a go.

One Piece Vol. 17
By Eichiro Oda (Viz Media LLC)


Oh hell, what's happening in One Piece this volume? Ah, it's the end of the current arc. Thank goodness. The current villain is a tremendous bastard. But then, you can say that for most One Piece villains. Oda's got a knack for creating bad guys that you really, really want to see rubber-bodied, food-obsessed hero Luffy smack around real hard. And happy day, henceforth we're gonna have cute li'l blue-nosed mascot reindeer Tony Tony Chopper in the regular cast, finally. God, he's a cute li'l thing. And seriously, those people need a doctor. (Yes, he's a doctor. No, One Piece doesn't make a lick of sense. I think where they are in Japan they're about to get a skeleton with an afro on their crew. I don't know what he does.)

RUROUNI KENSHIN VOL. 1 (VIZ BIG ED.)
By Nobuhiro Watsuki (Viz Media LLC)


Let's try this again.

I bought several volumes of Watsuki's Rurouni Kenshin years ago, when it was first released in English. Despite the solid craft of the storytelling and the actually quite attractive art, I was constantly distracted and pissed off by the fact that, in the text pieces that opened the book and appeared between chapters, Watsuki would call himself a liar, and admit to making things up and not doing his research and so on and so forth. I rather liked the TV series, and of course I was taking a lot of the historical stuff at face value -- ignorant American and all that -- so to read Watsuki write about how he was so full of it, ho ho ho, got me mad enough to throw the book across the room. I don't expect total adherence to facts in my fiction, but the self-flagellating tone of it all was just so obnoxious; it felt to me like he was taking you, the reader down with him for buying his book.

Let me tell you, I've never heard anyone else complain about this, so maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm the one with the problem. But you know, it'd be like if before every episode of Law & Order: SVU, series creator Dick Wolf came on the screen and reminded you that in the real world, the Special Victims Unit doesn't investigate homicides, and then it went into an episode like the one I saw tonight where they're investigating a homicide. Distracting and off-putting.

But here I am again, buying Rurouni Kenshin. And mostly it's because as a fan of the TV series, I still have this urge to see how it all ended. The TV series took a break from the manga storyline once the second major arc ended and proceeded with its own material -- new stories, a storyline based on a tie-in novel, and then more all-new storylines. And as the TV series continued with its own stuff, the ratings sank like a rock. So the anime never finished adapting the manga, and the big final major storyline remains told only in the original manga. This new edition, including three volumes of the original release per book and clocking in at nine volumes total, seems a more economical way to make it through and finally see for myself what happened to the wandering swordsman and his friends after leaving Kyoto behind. Not that I'll find out right off the bat -- I don't think they'll even make to Kyoto 'til the July release of the third of these things.

Whatever.

So on that semi-sour note, that's my list. And I think I'm gonna see if I can get a couple of z's between now and Wednesday morning.

X-Men & Manga, Together Again

Cover of X-Men: The Manga #2, April 1998.

According to ANN, Del Rey and Marvel announced this weekend that they'll be collaborating on manga projects featuring Wolverine and the X-Men. The X-Men project is reportedly a shojo title wherein Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters is an all-boys school with Kitty Pryde as the sole female student. Interesting creative decision; I'd think they'd at least have Jean around to be with Scott, but maybe they're working off of an X-Men movie model where Scott, Jean, and some of the others are graduates working in a teaching capacity.

I also wonder if Kitty will hang out with Wolverine and become a ninja in this version. Sure, it's a bit far-fetched for this particular manga genre, but you never know.


Cover to Uncanny X-Men #417 by Kia Asamiya, March 2003.

Manga and the X-Men are old friends at this point; even discounting the manga and anime-flavored art of Joe Madureira that graced Uncanny X-Men from 1994-1996, there was the manga adaptation of the early 1990's cartoon show, released in the U.S. alongside Ryoichi Ikegami's Spider-Man manga in the late '90s. Each episode was adapted, over the course of two issues' worth of material, by a different artist, making it an interesting survey of then-modern Japanese art styles at the very least.

In 2003, manga artist Kia Asamiya joined worst X-Men writer ever Chuck Austen on Uncanny X-Men for a six-issue stint which, at the very least, was very attractively designed and drawn. I really do like some of those costume designs Asamiya came up with, even the ridiculously over-the-top Archangel costume that fed into Austen's bizarre preoccupation with bitterly anti-Christian mythic storylines about angel mutants and demon mutants and what-have-you. I sold off all my Austen issues, but bought the collection of those issues, even if it does contain the story where Wolverine gets Martian Manhuntered by a pack of werewolves. (Does Austen not understand the whole "best there is at what he does" thing?)


Art from X-Men: Ronin, issue and month unknown, 2003
Around the same time, Marvel published a mini-series called X-Men: Ronin, based on their "Mangaverse" versions of the X-Men. The Mangaverse was a 2002 attempt by Marvel to grab themselves some manga money by creating anime/manga-style pastiches of all their top-tier characters. It sank like a brick because, frankly, the only people such a thing would appeal to would be people like me who have a foot in both worlds, and personally if I wanted to read anime/manga pastiche material, I'm sure Ben Dunn (and those that followed in his footsteps) has hit each and every manga & anime pastiche note over the past few hundred issues of Ninja High School.

Anyway, about a year or so later, J. Torres and artist Makoto Nakatsuka -- a relatively unknown Japanese artist that former Fanboy Entertainment president and Marvel's Man in Japan C.B. Cebulski signed up while looking for Japanese talent to add to the Mighty Marvel Talent Roster -- did a mini-series about the manga-influenced X-Men team. The series is actually some pretty good, straightforward action/adventure comics -- a riff on the whole Massachusetts Academy/Hellfire Club Vs. Xavier's School recruiting young mutants rivalry, except with more hitting and explosions -- but again, mostly I bought it for the art. The designs would make for a hell of a cartoon show, too; it could air after Naruto or Bleach on Cartoon Network.

I expect that there will be a lot less hitting in the shojo X-Men book. But then again, I seem to recall there being plenty of action in Yuu Watase's mid-90's hit Fushigi Yugi, which featured one girl surrounded by a host of hot heroic guys, so who knows?


Wolverine: Snikt #5 cover by Tsutomu Nihei, date unknown

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the last time Wolverine was mangafied, the pointless but pretty mini-series Wolverine: Snikt by BLAME! writer/artist Tsutomu Nihei. I think this was 2003 as well. Basically, it was the story of Wolverine entering a world not unlike that of the artist's other major work, running around, and cutting stuff up. Pure action with no plot. I expect that the upcoming Del Rey manga project -- which has no artist attached yet -- will be a little less pointless.

I'll probably buy the upcoming books -- heaven knows I bought all this other stuff -- but I'd be much more interested if this was actually all coming from Japanese talent. Again, much like the Mangaverse project, when you have American fans of the material working on such things, they feel more like pastiche than anything else -- as Paul O'Brien said in his review of X-Men: Ronin, it becomes a parlor game: "How can we take manga tropes and weld them to the X-Men?" Even if that's basically what the Japanese creators wind up doing, it feels less tacky when it's coming straight from the home of those tropes, you know?

The new manga X-stuff is tentatively scheduled for Spring 2009. I suppose that's just about when the Wolverine solo movie is scheduled for, hm?

Beginning to Continue

Nathaniel Bostworth and his wife Regina sit at a Centropolis coffee house; Nathan is engrossed in his reading, but Regina notices something outside -- a little something having to do with the events of the last half or so of Chapter 1. Background elements still pending, of course -- it's gonna be a few years before I become so stuck-up-my-own-butt and audience-hating that I'd do something like that ...

This is (the front half of) the first panel from Page 23, the first of the second chapter of Scwonkey Dog, Waking Nightmare. Hopefully the entire page will be done by tomorrow evening and ready to post to the site. But I'm stopping here for tonight. Got some TV viewing to get caught up on.

Just got back from The Golden Compass ...

I'm sort of not sure what the big deal is ... perhaps it's that the Church just doesn't want the children to migrate from the film to the book, but while the villains of The Golden Compass look all churchy, the film gives off the impression of merely being anti-authority, pro-freedom, pro-iconoclast -- like so much children's literature and entertainment, come to think of it, though not in the obnoxious way of children's advertising and some of your lesser cartoons. It's anti-authority in a way that free-thinking -- or at least anti-authoritarian -- adults can get behind.

Maybe that's the problem. Maybe despite having the names filed off, the message is a little too on-point.

Anyway, a good film, if not a great one. Two hours of hands being held as our plucky young lead is brought from place to place, person to person, plot point to plot point. Solve this problem to receive this person's aid, earn this pearl of wisdom to solve the puzzle later on down the line ... it's very much like a fantasy video game of days gone by, when text boxes were small and had to be cut down to the only the essential information. I expect if there were a little more fat on the story it'd be a two and a half hour beast; as it is, it still feels long, even at just shy of two hours.

What saves it is the uniformly excellent cast -- not enough Daniel Craig, I was hoping to see him again before the end, but the film ended before his character came back on stage. It took me a moment to recognize Ian McKellan's voice coming out of the giant fighting polar bear of the party; strange hearing it coming out of a mighty, strapping beast, and even stranger hearing it boom in such a way that it belongs there. Man's got a lot more fire in him than I gave him credit for! And Nicole Kidman puts in one of the best performances I've seen from her; she seems to be playing little more than a vicious ice queen for a while, but then the cracks and conflict begin to show -- obviously there's more to her story than is showing. But of course at the center of it all is -- oh, I need to look up her name. Dakota Blue Richards, yeah -- the clever, oh-so-resourceful girl at the center of it all. I'm not sure why anyone would say she puts in a less than excellent performance. If she is hampered by anything it is, again, the way the movie leaves not quite enough room for her to slow down and take in what's going on. Sometimes she comes off as a little too clever, a little too overly resourceful. But I was happy to play along, because Richards sells it quite well.

Actually, something else rather saves the movie, and that's the big armored polar bear duel towards the middle of the story, between the nasty and creepy king of the polar bear tribe -- voiced by Deadwood's Ian McShane -- and McKellan's proud guardian figure. It's actually quite shocking in its brutality; a couple of minutes after it was done, the music that played seemed rather incongruous with the sight both Levi and I had just witnessed. You'll know the moment when you see it. We're still staring at the screen agape, and movie wants us to come along, nothing more to see here, we're going to the next plot point. Right.

One observation Levi made about the film was how satisfying it was when, when one of the baddies got offed, their animal souls -- demons, the mythology calls them -- exploded into twinkling stardust. Quite right; actually, it rather reminded me of when a character dies in Usagi Yojimbo, how a speech balloon with a little skull in it rises from them. No balloon, no death. Here it works in the opposite way; you see the familiar explode into light, you know that guy's not coming back.

Which also brings me to the mythology of the film's universe, interestingly conceived and rendered beautifully on the screen. Kidman's demon is a nasty little ape, quite an infuriating and brutal little piece of work that gives us one of the more interesting visual representations of a character's struggle with the two sides of their nature that I've seen. All of them are exquisitely rendered CG creatures, but that's the one that I found most interesting from a character and story perspective. And of course, there are the aforementioned bears, which are quite a sight to behold. The architecture and setting are lovely from a design standpoint, and work well from the standpoint of giving off the sense that this is the parallel world they keep yammering on about throughout the plot. Yes, it's a very important plot point that this is a world parallel to our own, similar but not the same. I'm sure the religion bashing comes into play once they really get onto that point in the later tales.

All in all, I rather enjoyed it; the flaws stood out, but didn't take away from the film once things really heated up. The cast makes what could have been a very dry tour through a potentially imaginative world an enjoyable ride, and the giant fighting bears more than seal the deal. Totally worth the two hours and eight bucks.

My computer right now.