Recommended Reading for 7/29: Dark Night: A True Batman Story

Paul Dini is a creator I've written about often. This guy writes exciting super hero stories for comics and TV, funny stories of wacky animals and equally funny fantastical people. And as he points out right at the top of his graphic memoir, Dark Night: A True Batman Story, this is none of those. Dini's graphic memoir centers around a brutal mugging he suffered in 1993, and the physical and emotional aftermath of the event. It's an uncompromising and sometimes harsh look at where Dini's life was at the time and where it has gone since. But in the end, there's hope, hope inspired by a vigilante who stands in Gotham City.

Throughout the prologue of sorts, the story of Dini's life until the main events of the main plot kick off, and as it continues, Dini talks to the characters he loves, be they Beanie and Cecil when he is at his youngest, to Batman and his rogues in the main story and into the present. I think any of us who grew up as lonely, weird kids, "invisible kids" as Dini calls them,can relate to these kind of imaginary friends, being easier to talk to and interact with than real people. It's an understanding of my own youth that drew me in and immediately got me to empathize with Dini

Narrated by a present Dini, the main story flashes back to Dini around Christmas time in 1993, He's living a good life, working on a hit show and preparing for a feature (the much loved Batman: Mask of the Phantasm), but a lonely one. It feels like most of his friends are people he's just sort of passing by, and his love life is full of would-be starlets that he's using as arm candy, and who are using him for possible connections in Hollywood. He works, he leaves a geeky life that many of us would envy, and he goes to therapy. This is his life.

The mugging scene is the center of the story, and is a singularly bleak and brutal sequence. Eduardo Risso, best known for his work with Brian Azzarello on 100 Bullets and Spaceman, whose art I'll discuss more later on, draws this scene with a brutality that may make some readers uncomfortable. And that's good, because it should. It's an act of violence without conscience, the kind of thing that we are often desensitized to in media, but here it's so stark that you wince when you see what's being done, and Dini's own thoughts, the thoughts of if he's going to survive, of the people he'll be leaving behind,make it all the more painful.

After the mugging, much of the story deals with Dini thinking about what it means to write Batman when he feels like the character doesn't matter. Where was Batman when he was being beaten? Where is Batman now that the police can't find the men who beat and mugged him. I appreciate a memoir that doesn't try to apologize for the person's behavior. Dini not only looks at the dark moments that happened after, the drinking, the thoughts about buying a gun so he can feel safe, the inability to work, with self-harm he had already perpetrated even before these events. It's painful to watch someone do these things to themselves.

It's through the classic Batman characters that Dini deals with what is going on in his mind. The Joker is. not surprisingly, the voice of a nihilistic sort of self destruction. Poison Ivy asks uncomfortable questions. The Scarecrow is the voice of fear. Penguin encourages a wanton self destruction through alcohol. Two-Face is what Dini sees in the mirror in his own broken face. They are a greek chorus of bad thoughts.

Now, all of this sounds pretty bleak. And a lot of it is. But there's hope in it too, and that hope is the voice of Batman, always encouraging Dini to get up and move on. I have always found Batman to be a hopeful character, no matter what dark trappings he is wrapped in. Because Batman took one of the greatest tragedies that any person could face, and he stood up. That image, that wording, that you have to stand up, is Dini's message. "We can accept being a victim or choose to be the hero of our own stories. And we make that choice by standing up." And watching Dini come around to that statement, one he makes at the very end of the book, by realizing that his cartoons matter to people, and why Batman matters to him and to others, it's what makes this book more than just an exercise in casting out personal demons: it makes it a statement of hope.

I've always liked Eduardo Risso's noir tinged pencils, between 100 Bullets and his work on Batman, both in Wednesday Comics, Flahspoint: Batman, and Broken City. His work here is slightly different. It runs a gamut of tones from more realistic to gritty street to surreal supervillains, all while maintaining Risso's trademark style. The colors soften and harden based on how deeply you are inside Dini's frequently damaged thoughts. I love how Risso draws the different Bat villains, from a very traditional Joker, to an Arkham Asylum inspired Scarecrow with the finger needles, to a Penguin halfway between the classic and the vision from Batman Returns. But it's his illustrations of Dini himself, the facial work and body language, that really jumped out at me. There are plenty of heavy shadows and sharp angles, stuff Risso is known for, but it's in the faces and the character work that he really shines in this book, and where Risso shows himself to have whole different layers than the crime artist he is best known to be.

There's a lot more that I could say about this book, but much of it is details that I'd like for you to discover yourself as you read it. I loved seeing Dini interact with his fellow writer and artists on Batman: The Animated Series, and his comment that the story of the produciton of that series deserves its own graphic novel is something I'd love for him to swing back to at some point. It's interesting to see that one particular character, the one Dini is most associated with, Harley Quinn, only makes her first appearance at the very end of the book, but it feels right, as it's only when Dini sort of comes back to himself that Harley, who is so filled with joy and zeal, can talk to him again (although Haroley's voice actress, Arleen Sorkin, appears as one of Dini's few close friends repeatedly in the book).

Also, as a fanboy, I have to point out there are some wonderful nuggets for the Batman fan, despite this not being a book about Batman in the fictional story sense. There's a tidbit about an initial thought on Joker's fate in the world of Batman Beyond that is chilling. And there's a three page scene that reveals a treatment for an episode of Batman: The Animated Series that never was, one featuring characters from The Sandman, that I don't want to spoil any more about it, but wow, I would love to have seen this animated, and if not, Mr. Dini, if you're reading this, that would make a heck of a one-shot, I'm just saying.

Batman means a lot to me, personally. He's been my friend, my confidant, and my inspiration for many, many years. And it makes me feel a kinship to Paul Dini that he has done the same thing. Dark Night is a book about finding hope and standing up. It's one of the best graphic memoirs I've read in a long time, a mix of fact and fantasy that takes full advantage of the medium, and a worthy addition to anyone's Batman library.

Dark Knight: A True Batman Story is available in hardcover at comic shops and wherever books are sold.

Recommended Reading for 7/1: Camp Midnight

It's the beginning of July, so that means summer is really here now, and there are lots of things that people think about when it's summer. One of the things that many kids look forward to most is camp, and all the different fun things you get to do there. I never did sleepaway camp, but I know lots of people who did, and many still fondly remember it years later. But what would happen if you wound up on the wrong bus, to the wrong camp, with people who weren't like you? As a matter of fact, you wound up at a camp that wasn't for people at all, but for child monsters? That's the premise of Steven T. Seagle and Jason Adam Katzenstein's all ages graphic novel, Camp Midnight.

Skye's parents split up a couple years ago, and she's on the way to spend her summer with her dad, and his new wife, who Skye calls her "step-monster." In all fairness, Gayle isn't exactly warm and fuzzy, and when Skye finds out she won't be spending summer with her dad, but sent away to camp, she makes it clear she won't enjoy it. And when they're running late, they arrive to find all the buses heading off to the different camps, and since neither Skye's dad or Gayle can quite remember the name of the camp Skye's supposed to go to, just that it has an M in the name, they get her on the first bus that looks right: the bus to Camp Midnight.

If the name of the camp wasn't ominous enough, the bus was oddly quiet and dark, and the camp itself is... strange. The only person Skye meets who seems normal is Mia, a shy girl who wants to be Skye's friend. Skye is resistant, just to put the screws to Gayle, to make it clear she won't make friends or enjoy anything. But she starts to warm to Mia pretty quickly, But she doesn't warm to the camp, especially when she finds out that most of the camp activities take place at night, and that the other campers aren't normal kids, but monsters!

The story reads like a normal camp story, with games, contests, and scary stories, with the coming of age aspects of making friends, cute boys, and dealing with the popular kids, but mixing in all the monster elements to give it an extra air of creepiness. The cute boy, Griffin, who seems to like Skye just happens to be a werewolf. The queen of the mean girls in Skye's cabin, Abcynthia, isn't just the daughter of Head Counselor Cobb, but also happens to be a witch. And there's the question of exactly what Mia is, something that plays out over the course of the whole book.

Sky's adventures at Camp Midnight are, thematically, about her learning to be herself, and to give new things a chance. She arrives so sure that she won't enjoy camp, that Gayle is wrong, that she shuts herself off from everyone, and makes it hard for Mia and Griffin to be friends with her. The mystique she builds around herself by not revealing her true form (which she doesn't have, since she's human), makes her a mystery at camp, but doesn't help with people getting close to her. And over the course of the book, she opens up. She learns that just because you're a monster doesn't mean you're evil and scary, and even things that monsters are afraid of aren't bad.

While Skye is the central character, we spend a lot of time getting to know Mia too. She's very shy, very excitable, and seems to be keeping a secret from Skye and everyone else. She seems to have her own baggage, something that is keeping her from connecting with anyone else, but as opposed to Skye, she seems to want to. The balance of their relationship, and the questions about what each of them are, drives much of the story and Skye's journey.

Jason Adam Katzenstein's art is not photorealistic, but plays with all sorts of weird body shapes and exaggerations. His style gits the world view of a teenager, who when she's angry her head and mouth enlarge to show her rage, for instance. His style makes the monsters especially creepy, since they not only don't look human, but their proportions and body language also seems off. The lettering and sound effects also are eye-grabbing, as little bits of desecration that are coming from inside Skye's head pop-up on page as she sees something. It's not the kind of art you're used to seeing, but it works very well for this book.

Steven T. Seagle is one of the founder of Man Of Action, the studio that has created such all ages hits as Ben 10 and the characters in Big Hero 6, so when it comes to a pedigree for all ages far, it doesn't come a lot higher than that. The book is full of scares that aren't too much for a kid, and a moral about being yourself that is great for kids if all ages. Camp Midnight is a perfect read for a summer afternoon, for both the grown-ups and the kids in your life.

Recommended Reading for 5/20: Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade

So last week, Supergirl was renewed for a second season! I haven't written about it here, which I probably should have, since it is tied with The Flash for my favorite superhero show on television, and the crossover episode, "World's Finest," is one of my favorite episodes of television this season (probably exceeded only by the marvelous "Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster" episode of The X-Files revival). But with the popularity of the TV series, there wasn't any comic to go along with it. I've read a bunch of Supergirl over the years, mostly thanks to Peter David's eighty issue run, but also really enjoyed Sterling Gates's run right before Flashpoint; Gates is actually writing the tie-in comic to the TV series which made its print debut last week. But two weeks ago, an all-ages Supergirl series came back in print, and it is a wonderful, charming series you can share with any kid in your life: Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade.

The series is a six issues and perfectly self-contained: it opens with Supergirl arriving on Earth, and follows her through her first year at an Earth school. There are a lot of references to Supergirl's history: Superman is in there, so is Lex Luthor, as well as Super-Pets Streaky the Super Cat and Comet the Super Horse. Her classmates include Belinda Zee, a duplicate of her in a different way than Superman's classic Bizarro, and Lena Thorul, who it doesn't take a ton to realize whose little sister she is. There's a deep affection for the Silver Age Superman and Supergirl in this series, but it's completely accessible for those who haven't touched a comic from before the modern era.

After arriving on Earth, Superman brings his young cousin Kara to the Stanhope Boarding School so she can learn more about what it means to be human, and she takes on the identity of Linda Lee. The story presents Linda as awkward at the start of the story, not just with humans but in using her powers. Linda crashes more often than lands when flying, and her powers seem to kick out at the worst moments. And she just doesn't get humans. She says things that don't make sense to the human students, and she just gets laughed at. A lot. She feels like an outsider who will never be able to make friends or fit in. So, basically, it's a very true version of what it feels like to be in eighth grade, if memory serves

And friendshup becomes the central theme of the series. Linda tries to make friends with the Kryptonite-created duplicate, Belinda Zee, but Belinda's nature as her opposite makes it hard, but Linda never gives up. And when she does befriend Lena, she sticks by her side. They become very good friends. And when Lena learns that Linda is a Kryptonian, the one who helped put Lena's big brother in jail, Linda tries to make it clear to her that she never betrayed or lied to her, that she really is Lena's friend. And it's that friendship that saves the day in the end of the series.

I'm talking about theme and homages, and all that's important for me as an older reader, as it's something I look for. But when I'm thinking about buying this more my nieces to read, what makes it stand out most is it's just plain fun. Each issue has a nice little exciting beat to play out. Issue one has Linda arrive on Earth and get settled. Issue two introduces Belinda and sees Linda learn to deal with her first villain. Issue three has the whole school get superpowers! Issue four finds most of the students disappearing and a super-powered cat running around the school! And issues five and six are a two parter that brings in aspects from all the previous issues, paying off hints about the sinister nature of the school principal, introducing a time displaced past/future Supergirl called Supragirl, and building to a truly impressive climax. Oh, and in case time travel gives you as much of a headache as it does me, the comics does a good job of handling those messy issues and not leaving you scratching your head, which is impressive.

Eric Jones's art for the series is charming and perfectly suited to the story. It's bright and cartoony in the right way; it's not photo realistic but instead expressive. Every character wears their emotions on their faces. Every character has big eyes that serve as a window to their soul(and the boys have as big eyes as the girls, which is not often done in cartoony animation and comic art). There are some very cool design sketches in the back of the trade that shows the development of the look for Supergirl and how it informed the series. And aside from expressive faces, one of the things I really look for in comic art, his design for everything crisp and clean, he draws excellent backgrounds, and the are just grab you and makes you smile.

When it's hard to find comics featuring classic superheroes that are accessible for all ages, so when pops up, it's always worth checking out. Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade is a wonderful comic you can share with the girl or boy in your life that enjoys exciting superhero comics with heart that can make you smile..

A new printing of Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade was released the first week of May and is available in better comic shops and on-line.

Recommended Reading for 5/5: Term Life

So, last Friday, I'm collapsed on the couch, watching TV, and one of those ads you see for, "Now playing on Direct TV Cinema, the same day as in theatres," comes on, and it's a commercial, so I'm barely paying attention. But somewhere around the end of the commercial I looked up, because this sounded familiar. And when the title came up, I was running to my shelves, because I knew it was. And lo and behold, there is a comic book based movie that came out that no one was talking about! You'd think, in this day, and age, adding, "Based on the Graphic Novel" would have been somewhere in the trailer, but whatever. So, I reread the book, having remembered liking it, and I decided to make it this week's recommended reading.

Term Life is an original graphic novel published by Image back in 2011. Written by A.J. Lieberman (who I've written about before, as he wrote the quirky Cowboy/Ninja/Viking) and drawn by Nick Thornborrow, it's the story of Nick Barrow (a character name the writer had long before he met the similarly named artist), a guy who plans heists and sells the plans to crews to pull off. When a heist he sells to the son of a Russian mob kingpin leads to the death of said son at the hands of dirty cops who set up the heist and slipped the info to Nick, Nick is on the run from the Russians and the cops, and knows he has no way out, so he makes a Hail Mary: he takes a million dollar life insurance policy out on himself, making Cate, the daughter he hasn't seen in a decade, the beneficiary. But when the Russians catch wind that Nick has a daughter, Nick grabs Cate and it's a whirwind road trip so Nick can survive the twenty-one days until the policy kicks in, while still trying to find out how everything went so far south.

The plot of Term Life seems simple enough, and it's a pretty classic set-up for a crime story with the protagonist caught between two rival crooked gangs and trying to find his way out of it. But the difference is in the nuance here. Nick isn't trying to find his way out. He knows he's dead. The life insurance policy is the clock counting down to zero here, and Nick just wants to make it to that. The whole book has an interesting relationship with time. While there is a linear spine of "the present" scenes shift not just around in space, but in time, and not in the traditional flashback way. A scene may pop up that informs the scene before  it on the page that takes place well before that prior scene. It keeps you guessing and thinking, keeps you analyzing exactly what is going on. And in most cases, the time and place shifts are announced by a big banner with a character name or a location, so you do know when these changes happen so it's not confusing to the reader. One exception to this is one of the big twists at the end of the book, which is cleverly done as a reverse angle of an earlier scene that was structured to mislead the readers into thinking one thing while something else is going on; it's like the structure allows the creators to play a game of three card monte on the reader.

Nick is a charming lead. He's a crook, no doubt, and he doesn't make excuses for it. When Cate asks him why he does what he does, his response is simple, "Only thing I'm good at." It would be easy to play on the trope of him being the hands off criminal and have him be squeamish and awkward when it comes to dealing violence, but he's not. When the Russians come after Cate, he shoots them dead without compunction. But he doesn't revel in the violence, and he tries to talk and think his way out of pretty much all the situations he's in before resorting to violence.

Cate starts out the book as a sort of typical, rebellious, snotty teenager, but the more you see her, the more you realize how tough she's had it: no dad and an alcoholic mom who leaves her home alone for weeks at a time at the age of thirteen so she can go detox. And now her dad shows up, uninvited, and men are shooting at them. The slow building of the relationship between her and Nick is the emotional center of the book, and the more time we spend with Cate, the more rounded she becomes, and the more you root for her and Nick to make it; the scene where she finds out about the life insurance policy and Nick's plan is heartbreaking as you see the two have developed a real love for each other.. But this is pretty much a noir, and so you know a happy ending isn't in the cards for everyone.

And while Nick and Cate are the central, most fleshed out characters, the supporting characters and villains of the book are also interesting. Viktor, the Russian mobster after Nick, isn't given a lot of character, but that's ok; he is what he needs to be, a big scary mobster. The Tolstoy brothers, hitmen brothers who work for Viktor, provide some comic relief, as they seem to spend more time punching each other than doing their jobs. Sheriff Braydon, the small town sheriff of a town where Nick and Cate go to lay low, feels like a character who had more going on, and I would have liked to spend more time getting to know him; the same can be said for Chin, Nick's old friend who he used to own a Chinese food restaurant with,

But the highlight of the other characters are the Choirboys, the society of crooked cops who set everything in motion be manipulating Nick and by extension the Russians into stealing evidence against them so they can destroy it and anyone who knows anything about it. Among them, there are two who are key. Matty Miller is the cop who got pinched with the evidence that could send the Choir Boys to jail, and even once it's gone, he's the one having a crisis of conscience, one that will prove deadly for him; in a noir, a conscience gets you killed nine times out of ten. And then there's the big boss; Keenan. Probably the only character who is as good at the game as Nick, he's a cold, calculating bastard, the kind of guy you don't want to get on the wrong side of, and every page he's on is full of tension.

The art for the book suits its gritty crime drama style perfectly. Nick Thornborrow is able to convey the action of the chase and the fights with gusto, and is also able to capture the quieter moments between Nick and Cate. His characters have strong, distinct, faces with a lot of emotion. The backgrounds to most panels are sketchy, which draws the eye more to the action of the characters at the front of a panel, and here feels like a stylistic choice rather than an artist who doesn't feel like drawing backgrounds.

I haven't seen the movie version that drew my attention back to this book yet, and it seems like it was a pretty limited release on the big screen; it is available on Direct TV on demand and for digital download through Amazon and iTunes. The trailer has some dialogue that is lifted right out of the book, and it seems fairly faithful, although it looks like the Russian mob has been replaced by a drug cartel. The cast is pretty a-list, with Vince Vaughan as Nick and Hailee Steinfeld as Cate, Bill Paxton as Keenan, and Terence Howard as Sheriff Braydon. There seem to bee a few new characters in the film, Jimmy Lincoln, a buddy of Nick's, played by Jon Favreau, and Harper, who works with Nick, played by the inimitable Jonathan Banks, whose appearance in anything elevates it to a must see to me.

Term Life is an exciting, enjoyable crime story with a solid story and emotional center. If you enjoy crime comics, this is a book worth tracking down.

Term Life is in print, so should be available or orderable from any comic shop.

Recommended Reading for 4/15: The Sixth Gun

The Weird Western genre has had a resurgence in recent years, and while some of that can be attributed to DC's push on Jonah Hex,as much if not more can go to Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt's The Sixth Gun, a creator owned western out of Oni Press that proved that original Western content had an audience still hungry for it, this writer included (cool fact: issue one of the series was Oni Press's 2010 Free Comic Book Day issue, for which I am grateful, since that's how I discovered the series. Another case where FCBD has done something awesome for me). While Bunn and heart had both done work in comics before (as a matter of fact, they had done a series called The Damned for Oni), this is the series that shone a spotlight on them, and as the series begins its final arc next Wednesday, I wanted to spend some time discussing why you should check it out.

Set in the Reconstruction era American South, The Sixth Gun is the story of a band of unlikely heroes attempting to stop the destruction and recreation of the world using six magical guns. The two main characters of the series are Drake Sinclair, a roguish gunman with secrets in his past, and Becky Montcrief, the innocent young woman who comes into possession of the eponymous Sixth Gun at the beginning of the series, and must keep it out of the hands of undead confederate generals, witches, serpent creatures, and all manner of monsters, or the world is doomed. Throughout the series, a wide variety of deeply written and interesting allies and enemies have lived and died, but Drake and Becky stand at the center of the story.

Before I talk about more plot and character stuff, I just want to address the title and its eponymous weapon. The Sixth Gun has been a tremendous achievement of world building, which I know is one of my favorite phrases, but it's something that draws me to a story. I love when the creators of a comic, novel, movie, or any work of fiction take time to plot out not only a long game, but to give thought to the world around their character, and the objects and locations in it. The Six, the magical guns that are the driving force of the series, are really well thought out. I want to give the description of each gun drawn from The Sixth Gun RPG as they use phrasing from the comic and show that Bunn put thought into each gun as an object on it own, instead of treating them simply as MacGuffins:

The First Gun strikes with the ungodly force of a cannon shell.

The Second Gun spreads the very flames of Perdition.

The Third Gun Spreads the flesh-rotting plagues of old.

The Fourth Gun calls up the spirits of the men and women it has slain.

The Fifth Gun grants eternal youth and the ability to heal from even fatal wounds.

The Sixth Gun speaks to its wielder, revealing the past and the future.

The opening arc of The Sixth Gun introduces readers not just to Drake and Becky, and details how Becky comes to posses the Sixth Gun, but the the current holders of the other guns of The Six. They are a group of former Confederate soldiers who served under the merciless General Oleander Hume, previous holder of the Sixth Gun, as well as Hume's wife. There goal is to retrieve the Sixth Gun so they can return it to the now undead Hume and begin bringing about the apocalypse. Becky and Drake travel, along with Drake's partner Billjohn O'Henry to the Maw, a prison built by Hume, and there, along with one of the prisoners, Gord Cantrell, face down Hume's army of the Undead and the bearers of the Six.

That first arc captures so much about what makes The Sixth Gun a great comic. Not only do we meet a group of fascinating characters, but it's a tense race to keep the Sixth Gun from the hands of General Hume's men, and the final battle at the Maw is a gorgeous set piece, brilliantly put together by Brian Hurtt and featuring monsters and men doing battle.

The series follows Becky and Drake through many different locales, some real or realistic, some decidedly fanciful. The second arc takes place on the streets of New Orleans, but streets populated by Caribbean crossroads gods and demons. There are towns populated by snake people that serve Griselda, the Grey Witch, the mother of General Hume and a powerful sorceress. One whole arc takes place nearly entirely in a supernatural snow storm, with supernatural wolves hunting out heroes. And when Becky goes on a Native American ghost walk, we see the origin of the Six and how they have taken different forms throughout many different ages,

The balance between the western and the weird is another of the charms of The Sixth Gun. While the villains include witches and undead generals, there are also Pinkerton detectives employed to find out heroes. The Native American tribes are always treated respectfully and realistically in their bearing, but there are thunderbirds of myth and the shrunken head of a shaman that possesses his bearer. And while not dwelt on, the social ramifications of the civil war are present, while the possible ramifications of the end of the world always dog the protagonists.

And now it's time to talk about those protagonists. Becky Montcrief is the center of the series, not just as the bearer of the title Sixth Gun, but as she is the character whose emotional journey rests at its core. When we first meet Becky, she is an innocent who has been living with her stepfather away from civilization. But when she comes into possession of the Sixth Gun (which her stepfather had, having been part of the party that liberated it from General Hume), she has to grow up fast. We watch Becky become part of the world outside her limited sphere, and not slowly. She not only has to deal with monsters hunting her, but the weight of responsibility. We watch Becky become a woman to be reckoned with as we move towards the series ending.

Drake Sinclair's path is one of redemption. Drake was part of General Hume's crew during the Civil War, but when he realized just how evil Hume was, Drake broke ties with the General, and tried to live his post-War years as a scoundrel and ne'er-do-well, looking out only for himself, his partner, and his pockets. But when he is drawn into the web of he apocalypse and the Six, Drake does his best to redeem himself for his selfishness and dark actions, and pays repeatedly with his own blood and hat of his friends. I'm a sucker for a redemption story, and Drake is a man who wants to do better, even if he so often falls short.

But if I had to pick a favorite character in the series, it would be Gord Cantrell. Gord is a former slave and a former prisoner of General Hume's Maw prison. He is also one of he few truly and fully good characters in the series. He had dabbled with the dark arts as a younger man, but now has passed through that crucible to be a trusted friend and ally to Becky, using his knowledge of magic to help find a way to destroy the Six. With a past filled with tragedy, Gord is a rich character who feels his own life is worth the sacrifice to save the world.

The final recurring heroic character, and I use the heroic in this case loosely, is Kirby Hale. Hale is a young gunslinger, handsome and charming, and cocky to the extreme. And you're never sure exactly whose side he's on. Kirby's first appearance sparks a romantic triangle of sorts between him, Becky, and Drake. His feelings complicate his life, as he really develops feelings for Becky, which drives him to be a better man and make choices the previously smarmy gunslinger never would have.

The villains of The Sixth Gun are a little more hand-wringingly evil at the time of the series, as most of them have surrendered much of their humanity to the power of The Six or to other forces of evil, but the spin-off mini-series have given us more of an understanding of their times before evil ruled them. The four men who wield four of the guns at the beginning of the series each get a spotlight issue to see what they were after the war and before they returned to hunt the Sixth Gun. Jesup Sutter, a Pinkerton who served Missy Hume and eventually Griselda the Grey Witch, shares a mini-series and we see that he has tragedy in his background. But General Hume and his wife, Missy, and Griselda the Grey Witch, who is revealed as the series big bad? They are more given over the the darkness, and are much less sympathetic figures, which is perfectly fine, if you ask me. When you're trying to bring about the apocalypse, there's a good chance evil is as evil does.

And over the course of the forty-seven issues so far, there are many more fascinating characters. Members of two rival orders, the Knights of Solomon, who seek the secrets and powers of the magical artifacts throughout the world, and the Sons of the Sword of Abraham, a holy order of priests dedicated to destroying The Six, move in and out of the series, the former led by Jesup Sutter, the latter by the noble but driven Brother Roberto. Towards the middle of the series, Becky and Drake gain two Native American allies, the warrior Nahuel and the medicine woman Nidawi, as well as the totem they wield, the shrunken head of the medicine man Screaming Crow, who can possess the bodies of the living and wield his magic through them. And the most odd character of all, Asher Cobb. Cobb was born with gigantism, and after his death was mummified, and whose corpse is now an oracle. Cobb is another character who I found absolutely fascinating, and whose tragic life makes his choices, both good and bad, understandable. And let me boil that down: he's an eight-foot tall mummy who sees the future; if that's not a comic book concept, I never heard one.

 Brian Hurtt's art works perfectly in tandem with Cullen Bunn's scripts. His work captures both the old west and the fantastic elements of the stories, with large and terrifying creatures, like giant white wolves, as well as gunslingers and saloons. The book wouldn't ring with the authenticity without his thoroughly researched work (and if he didn't research the hell out of the period, he's got me fooled).  On top of his excellent character designs, making all the main and minor characters of The Sixth Gun memorable, the monsters and settings make this is visually outstanding series. And on top of Hurtt's excellent work, one of my favorite artists in comics, Tyler Crook of BPRD and Harrow County fame, did three one-off issues focusing on the backgrounds of Kirby Hale, Asher Cobb, and Griselda, as well as my favorite of the the spin off mini-series, the one focusing on Drake's loyal partner Billjohn O'Henry.

The Sixth Gun is a western tale with magic, monsters, romance, and style. If you're a fan of Stephen King's The Dark Tower, another western by way of magic, or traditional westerns of any stripe, it's a great book to try out, and with the concluding arc kicking off this Wednesday, you have three months to get caught up before the big finale.

The Sixth Gun is collected in eight individual trade paperbacks, starting with Cold Dead Fingers, all of which are readily available at comic shops and on-line, that collect the entire series to date, as well as three trades that collect the spin-off mini-series. There are also three over-sized hardcovers to date, but those have not quite reached the most recent arcs, so if you want to get caught up, the trades are the way to go, or if you like big hardcovers, a final volume or two should finish off the series,

Recommended Reading for 4/1: The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Ride of Nerd Culture

I've read a lot of Batman books. Not just books featuring Batman, but books about Batman. Histories, analyses, treatises of all make, model, and manner. But as of this week, I have a new favorite, on I mentioned briefly last week. The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture was written by Glen Weldon, NPR's comic book critic, and it's a book about much more than Batman. It's a book about how we as fans interact with Batman for good and ill, and how the Dark Knight shines a mirror, sometimes a very dark one, on nerdery and those of us who practice it. But, like Weldon and I would agree, Batman is an inherently hopeful character, and so I walked away from the book feeling inherently hopeful about who and what I am, what I do here, and what's to come.

Writing criticism of criticism is an odd little ouroboros (that's the snake eating its own tale, something most nerds know, and which most normals would recognize symbolically but not necessarily know the name of). I'm putting forth my opinion of someone else's opinion. But it seems oddly fitting when discussing a book about fandom and about how we as fans react to other's opinions and views of a character, both fan and "non-fan" alike. I use the quotes around non-fan because I think I've made it clear what my opinion about nerdiness and inclusion is.

Before I get into Weldon's thesis and the points on which we agree and disagree, almost uniformly the former, I want to talk about style. As I said, I've read a lot of books and essays about Batman, from discussion of his morality, his psychology, his history, and his imagery, and rarely if ever have I found any of them as much a pleasure to read as this one. Weldon's prose is smooth, and except when discussing the most grim of topics, specifically the Aurora shooting and the threats surrounding criticism of The Dark Knight Rises come to mind, both of which he discusses with the gravity due them, he keeps things light and flowing. Even when Batman is at his darkest, Weldon is able to find something to make the reader smile about, whether it's a particularly odd character or plot, or a slightly barbed comment directed at reaction to a plotline or person. It keeps the book from getting bogged down in a series of, "And then this happened, and people reacted like this," anecdotes, which could have easily happened.

What pleases me most about the book is that Weldon espouses the idea that every Batman is an acceptable Batman. There's much talk of die hard comic book Batman fans (something I count myself among) who are sure that the only Batman that's a real Batman is the brooding avenger of night, and how history has proven this accurate. Adam West's camp Batman is as much Batman as O'Neil & Adam's lone avenger, who is as much Batman as the Dixon/Grant/Moench urban commando with a large family of allies from the pre-No Man's Land era. And naturally, they're all a part of Grant Morrison's Unified Theory of Batman, which Weldom discusses at length. And I can't help but be pleased since this is a line of thought about Batman I've espoused myself before.

But beyond that, Weldon isn't dismissive of any of those versions or the fans of them (well, with the exception of internet trolls who can't spell and threaten people, But I can't fault him for that one). Weldon talks about being a kid and running home to see afternoon syndicated re-runs of Batman with Adam West, and waiting on line at San Diego Comic Con to get a con exclusive TV series accurate Batmobile. But as a fan of that, he doesn't dismiss out of hand any other version of Batman. He has quibbles with some of them and how they don't represent the core of Batman to him, but that's scholarship and criticism. You will find every version of Batman you can imagine in this book, and get some really cool behind the scenes facts that even all my years of Bat reading haven't provided.

Weldon makes a lot of interesting points about Batman, and while discussing them all would take an entire book of my own, one of the most fascinating ones is the idea that Batman cycles through three distinct phases: "Lone avenger to father figure to head of an extended family." It's looking at Batman in a way I never had thought of, and even in my own time as a huge Batman fan of about thirty years, I can see the cycle repeat numerous times, both in the comics and across media. One of the main examples he uses is Batman: The Animated Series, where the series went from just Batman, to The Adventures of Batman and Robin, to Batman: Gotham Knights, where you had various other Bat characters. It's a fascinating microcosm of a trend in a character that I had never interpreted that way.

The idea of the nerd and the normal, and their different views of Batman, is central to Weldon's discussion of the rise of nerd culture, and how Batman shaped it. And I won't deny shaking my head and feeling a might bit ashamed at times that I consider myself among the nerds who have said some really harsh, and honestly pretty dumb things over the years. But it's interesting to me to look at that rise from the outside in, While Weldon is a self-avowed nerd, he finds a way to look at this cultural phenomenon both from inside and out. I know the internet effected fandom, but it's fascinating to see the difference it had between the time of Batman and Robin and the time of Batman Begins. Also, I never knew how fanzines of the 60s reacted to Batman on TV, and how similar it was to nerd rage that we get today. Also, in what might be my favorite part of the book, Weldon discusses how Batman: The Animated Series serves as the nerd/normal nexus, a product that is steeped deeply in a nerdy love of Batman, but transcends that to appeal to pretty much everyone.

And of course, as a Batman fan, I have some of my own favorite stories, and it's nice to see them get some love. The Long Halloween is called out as,"a whsistle-stop tour of Batman's rogues gallery." Gotham Central is mentioned as, "the true spiritual successor to Batman:Year One." And the excellent and sadly out of print, Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth, where the Planetary team meet various different iterations of Batman, sums up a lot of what Weldon says about Batman in general, with, "Ellis's point- a controversial one among many of the most vocal adherents of the "badass Batman" school of fandom- is that all of these versions are Batman."

I consider myself among the most diehard of Batfans. I have tens of thousands of Batman comics. I own every bit of Batman on film you possibly can. And I love my Batman as the Dark Knight Detctive, broody and driven, but still with a heart that would comfort those he rescues. But I also have a signed picture of Adam West as Batman, holding a bomb over his head from Batman: The Movie (a gift from my wonderful former co-workers), hanging in my home office right above the computer I'm typing on now. And when I go to get lunch today, I'm swinging by the Hallmark to pick up the new limited edition (ah, words that make any nerd's heart pitter-pat) Itty Bitty Penguin and Harley Quinn. I love my Batman in any way I can get him. And reading a book like The Caped Crusade, discussing how others like me have interacted with this icon, and how others less like me can still love him in his own way, is a great thing. If you've ever been the least bit interested in Batman or nerd culture in general, please do yourself a favor and pick up this book.

But, just in case you read this Glen, you ever want to talk about Batman or the book, drop me a line. I'm a nerd, after all, so that means I have notes...

The Caped Crusade is available at bookstores everywhere, both physical and digital. The audio book is read by the author, which means I'm going to have to check that out at some point soon.

Recommended Reading for 3/17: Bandette

There are a lot of words I could use to describe Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover's Bandette, words like charming, clever, romantic (mostly in the sense of mystery and glamour and not romantic love, but there's a touch of that too). It is an utterly delightful series that is the perfect cure if you're down in the dumps from all the too serious, too dark comics you might be reading.

Bandette is the world's greatest thief who also just happens to be a teenage girl.  Living in Paris, she steals from the unworthy, mostly criminals, and returns many of the pieces to the insurance companies for the rewards; I say many because she does keep a treasure trove of her own. She does all of this with grace, a sense of adventure, a wide smile, and a cry of "Presto!" She's a thief with a heart of absolute gold and a quirky sense of humor.

And like so many of her progenitors like Sherlock Holmes, The Shadow, and Doc Savage, Bandette has her band of helpers, which she calls her Urchins, to help her make her astonishing getaways when the owners of the ill gotten gains she is "acquiring" are in pursuit. These include Daniel, a Thai food delivery guy who has the least veiled crush in the world on Bandette, the three ballerinas Adalind, Mannon, and Kiyomi, a band of teens lead by a girl named Freckles, and a young girl named Belda. Oh, and while Bandette often likens herself to a cat, and has an affinity for them, she has a pet dog, Pimento, who dons a cape and mask and sometimes adventures with his master.

And what would a master thief be without police officers? Of course, since Bandette isn't your usual rogue, her relationship with the police is somewhat different, with her main police contact, Inspector B.D. Belgique not only having a grudging respect for Bandette, but calling upon her aid when it comes to dealing with more dangerous criminals. Always at Belgique's side is Lieutenant Heloise Price, whose crush on Belgique is only a shade less adorable than Daniel's crush on Bandette.

The first two volumes of Bandette form one big arc, telling the story of Bandette dealing with both a rival and an enemy. The rival is Monsieur, a gentleman thief in the classic mold: educated, erudite, and suave. There are those who believe he is the greatest thief in the world, and he and Bandette maintain a friendly air between them, It is friendly enough that, while on a job of his, Monsieur overhears the plans of Absinthe, the leader of an international criminal syndicate called FINIS, planning the death of Bandette, and Monsieur contacts her and tries to warn her, only to be ambushed by FINIS agents and their top assassin, Matadori, a matador themed hitwoman who banters with Badette as much as she attempts to fulfill her job.

Volume one sets up all these characters and the stakes, and volume two moves us into the great contest. Monsieur has a list of seven of Absinthe's prized possessions, given to him by Absinthe's femme fatale, Margot, who has grown disenchanted with Absinthe's cold, ruthless ways, things like an existing copy of Shakespeare's lost Cardenio, and he and Bandette set out to see who can steal the most. And Absinthe is sending a much more frightening assassin after Bandette, Il Tredici, the Strangler. It's an action packed volume as we get to see Bandette pulling capers and Monsieur invading Absinthe's house, and getting into a game of cat and mouse with the guards, all while Bandette is tracked implacably by Il Tredici. There are set pieces like a fight on a plane, a police raid of Absinthe's manor, and delicious pastries, described in a way that made me want to run to the local bakery as soon as I could.

Tobin and Coover find a way to keep these stakes very high but still make the book accessible to all ages. Sure, there's gun play, but no blood. Absinthe and Il Tredici are truly scary nemeses (especially Il Tredici. In the backmatter for volume two, Coover comments that her inspirations for Il Tredici's look come from James Coburn and Henry Fonda, but when I first saw him Boris Karloff jumped immediately to mind). There's action, and a plot that moves forward at breakneck pace, but the book never stops being fun. And that's probably what helps it the most: Bandette is an inherently fun character, and she moves with such confidence that, while you might be worried for her, she never seems too worried about herself. In his introduction to volume one, Paul Cornell says he thinks that rating of 15+ for this book is over-cautious, and I have to agree: I think there are far worse role models for a little girl (or boy) than a thief/magician who is smart and fun.

The language of the book is light and interestingly accented. Little bits of French pop up here and there, all words that are common in English, or easily translated, and the way the dialogue is written seems like English translated from French, with a very continental style, without using awkward and clumsy accents. And speaking of writing, I have to say that Bandette and Monsieur especially love books. That love of books and the written word warms a fellow bibliophile's heart and endears the two of them to me even more than they would have been as just wonderful characters.

If you're unfamiliar with Colleen Coover's art, well, then you should get on that, whether it's here, her adult comic, Small Favors, her delightful all ages mini-series (also with Tobin), Banana Sunday (the story of a teenage girl and her friends, three talking monkeys. Yeah, it's out of print right now, but I have to dig that one up for a Lost Legends column soon), or the back-ups in the X-Men: First Class comics. Her style is light and airy, perfectly suited to Bandette, with wonderfully expressive faces, which is something I always look for in an artist. Her Bandette moves like a dancer, and that sense of joy and motion comes through in every panel our titular heroine is on. The layouts for the pages are normally in a nine panel grid, but the panels across each row are often linked to make bigger panels. This makes for easy reading, and it another reason it would be an excellent book to give to a new, younger comics reader.

Aside from this main story, each volume of Bandette collects a group of short, two to five page shorts featuring various members of Bandette's Urchins, allies, and rogues. These shorts give the readers a real feel for the characters who would otherwise be cute background. I especially like the Heloise one and the two Monsieur ones from volume one and the Daniel and Pimento ones from volume two. Each short has a different artist, so you get to see the characters in different styles, which is always a treat. There is also a short story with each volume, the first being Daniel's narration of an adventure with, and how he met, Bandette, which is romantic and charming, the second featuring Absinthe's traitorous, and thus better natured, femme fatale, Margot. These are deeper dives into the characters, and are both really exciting.

I read a lot of comics, and I like to strike a balance between all the genres I'm a fan of. And a lot of those genres, like modern super-hero, horror, suspense, spy, and science fiction are often serious and pretty dark. Bandette is the perfect cure for all that. I read both hardcover collections in the course of one  day, and put them down feeling refreshed and cheered in a way I haven't in a long time. Bandette is a comic that reminds you about the joy comics can bring.

Two collections of Bandette are available, published by Dark Horse, Presto! and Stealers, Keepers!. New issues are released digitally through Monkey Brain Comics; two issues beyond the ones collected are currently available.

Recommended Reading for 3/11: Nailbiter

I've rarely written a recommended reading for a series that I review on a regular basis; there are so many comics to write about, I want to get to them all. But there a handful of comics going right now that I enjoy so much that I want to give them a little extra boost, and with Image Comics publishing plan that usually allows a couple of months in between arcs when trades and hardcovers come out, it makes for a good time to touch on one of their series. So today, I'm going to be talking about what is my favorite horror comic on the market right now: Nailbiter.

Joshua Williamson has been a busy guy in the past three years. He's been working in comics longer than that, but on 2013 he got onto my radar for writing the excellent supernatural heist comic, Ghosted, and he's been pretty much everywhere since then (this is quite possibly an example of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, that thing where once you notice or learn something you see it everywhere, but give me this one). Not only is he writing two other creator owned series for Image, today's subject, Nailbiter, and Birthright, but he's done ongoing work with Dark Horse, short runs on books for Marvel and DC, and recently became the writer of one of Marvel's All New All Different series, Illuminati. So that's a long way of saying he's a busy guy. And I've read a lot of that output, and I have to say, there's no slip in quality.

But it's Nailbiter, along with artist Mike Henderson, that is my favorite thing Williamson is working on. Nailbiter is the story of the town of Buckaroo, Oregon. Buckaroo would be like pretty much any other small town in the Pacific Northwest, except for one little quirk: Buckaroo has spawned sixteen of the most prolific and disturbing serial killer in the record history of serial killers; it seems like the odds of Buckaroo natives who leave becoming serial killers is extremely high. And the most recent of these, and by far the most prolific, is Edward Charles Warren, the Nailbiter, who took forty-six people who bit their nails, and chewed their fingers to the bone before killing them. But by some miracle (maybe a diabolical one) despite being arrested in his murder den, Warren was acquitted of all charges and returned to Buckaroo.

The inciting incident of the series is the disappearance of FBI agent Eliot Carroll, the agent who had hunted down Warren and was obsessed with finding out why the two spawned the Buckaroo Butchers. He called his old friend Nicholas Finch, an NSA agent, to tell him he had discovered the secret and needed him to come to Buckaroo. But by the time Finch arrived, Carroll had disappeared. Finch's investigation partnered with local sheriff Sharon Crane, formed the spine of the early issues of Nailbiter. Through Finch, we get an outsider's view of Buckaroo. Some in the town revel in the history, setting up murder stores, while many just want this whole serial killer thing to go away.

There are two things that really make Nailbiter pop for me: one is the strength of the characters, and the other is how well it plays with the mystery of Buckaroo and the horror tropes spawned it. I'm going to talk about the second point first. Williamson knows his horror. He knows how to ratchet up the tension and give the reader just enough information to keep us coming back, There's never an issue where nothing happens, and even the issues that seem to be one-offs pay off in the larger scheme of the series.

The mystery of Buckaroo is a deep and complicated one, and every time a layer is peeled away, it turns out there's another beneath it. Oh there's an ancient temple buried below the city? That's got to be the source of the evil, some ancient mystical curse. Oh, that's a fake, and there's a history of people with mental illness being brought to Buckaroo by a doctor? That's got to be it! But is it? We still don't know. You'd think that twenty issues of mystery would get frustrating, but it's paced so perfectly and we get enough answers and big reveals that it never feels like the creators are jerking us around.

It's also a strong statement in the book's favor that it feels like it knows not only where it's going, but where it's been. It would be easy to throw together a concept about a town that spawns serial killers and say, "Well, the first was the Book Burner, then there was... a clown guy (yeah, clowns are scary)... a woman... a few others... and then The Nailbiter" But even though we don't know much about most of the Butchers, every time they come up it feels like the creators know all the details about them, about the town, and about what helped build it into the little slice of nightmare that it is.

And its about much more than the mystery. There are big scares along the way. The different killers and the people of Buckaroo are damn scary. Reverend Fairgold, the local preacher, is the kind of guy who believes the ends justify the means, and has a deep hatred for all the Butchers. There is the mysterious Butcher of Buckaroo, a killer who serves The Master, the man seemingly behind all the horrors of Buckaroo (or at least protecting its secrets), a monster of a man who wears leather and a mask with bull horns who seems to appear and disappear at will, knowing the secrets of the city. And we watch various people, good people, being driven slowly insane and violent by being in the proximity of the city.

My greatest weakness as a critic and scholar of comics is that I feel my vocabulary when it comes to art is fairly limited; that's why so many of my reviews focus on story and only make a general comment on art. But for Nailbiter, I really want to stress how important the art is. Mike Henderson, Joshua Willamson's partner on this book, is an incredible artist. His character designs are excellent, he draws people that look like people, all very distinct in both their facial features and their body types. his designs for the Buckaroo Butchers, some of whom could be comical if drawn by an artist with less of a sense of what makes horror, are uniformly terrifying.

Bet beyond his excellent designs, the thing about Henderson's art that really impresses me is his ability to pace out a scene for the most authentic scares. The pages where Finch and Crane investigate the tunnels below Buckaroo (because what self-respecting town of horror doesn't have tunnels?) are a testament to building atmosphere and making a place as much a character, and as important, as any person. But there's a specific scene in issue nine that sticks out as the best jump shock I can remember in a comic ever. Sheriff Crane gets home to find Reverend Fairgold waiting in her house, and after telling him to get lost, she walks into her room to lay down, and as she does her hand falls off the bed, and the next page is a splash of... Oh, you think I'm going to give that away? Let's just say you mix in urban legends with horror comics and you get an amazing page.

Character is a major part of horror. If you don't care about the people who are in danger, then you might get a shock or some revulsion from something gross, but the creeping horror of tension comes partially from being concerned with the people in the situation. And the characters in Nailbiter are all interesting and well rounded.

It would be easy to just assume that Edward Charles Warren was just a monster who is waiting for another chance to kill. But there's so much more to him. He does have this sinister, wicked sense of humor, and doesn't seem to be afraid of Finch, even when he's being threatened with extreme violence. But there's something more to Warren. One thing, he seems to have a code of ethics about his kills. When children take up a Buckaroo tradition and go to poke around at his house on Halloween,they bump into Warren, and when one gets left behind Warren actually takes care of him, bandages his hurts, and tells the boy he doesn't hurt children. More than that, we've never seen him hurt anyone who wasn't a threat in his or her own right. Warren cares about people, having tried at different times to help Buckaroo natives who left the city make it in the outside world. He's definitely not sane, but the mystery of exactly how mad he is and what is going on in his head is as important as the mystery of Buckaroo.

Finch is also a study in contrasts. When Carroll calls him, Finch is actually on forced suspension, waiting for a trial for killing a suspect in custody. Finch is not just an agent, but an interrogator, and while he might deny it at times, he seems to enjoy his work, and has no problem using, to quote A Clockwork Orange, a little bit of the old ultra-violence to get a result. With a temper and a penchant for beating on suspects, it would be easy to think Finch is as bad as any of the Butchers, but he has the tenacity of a dog with a bone when it comes to solving the mystery about his missing friend Carroll, and about what happened to Carroll after he's found. That dedication, both to his friends and his goals, is an admirable trait, but even the most admirable trait can be pushed too far, and as we see with Finch, he's always walking right on that line.

Sheriff Crane is the closest thing the book has to a legitimate hero. She really wants to do her best by the people of Buckaroo. But she's stymied at every corner by the fact that everyone knows that she was high school sweethearts with Warren. The relationship between those two characters is my favorite in the entire comic. It's not exactly will they/won't they, because she knows he's a serial killer, but at the same tie she cuts him more slack than another sheriff would... until she doesn't. Crane is no pushover, and that's another part of her charm. She isn't Marge Gunderson, the smart but sweet sheriff in Fargo. No, Crane is as tough as nails. And her adversarial relationship wit the previously mentioned Rev. Fairgold is another treat. And it's not that she's defined by her relationship with these male characters. Fairgold is defined by his relationship to her.

And while those are the three principle characters in Nailbiter, the cast is larger than that. Carroll and Fairgold are important, as clearly are the Bucther and the Master. FBI Agent Abigail Barker was another tough as nails officer of the law, bit one who ran afoul of the Master, and her arc, as she does her best to fight what he did to her, and the homicidal urges that comes from that, is a heart breaking arc. And then there's Alice. Alice is Buckaroo's local punk/goth girl, fascinated by the Butchers, and most people's suspect for who will be the next Butcher. And Alice is looking at this history because she's afraid they're right. I think Alice is my favorite character in the comic, because she's just so real to me, the ultimate teenage outsider. And when we learn about her family history? Bam, what a reveal!

I know I've talked more about theme than plot here, but so much of Nailbiter's plot is tied up in its serialized mystery narrative I don't want to give too much away. But the uber-plot is never sacrificed for a good story, as there are some really memorable one off issues of the series. Issues six and seven completely sold me on this book; the first five issue arc was great, but when a book can shift gears from a big horror procedural search for a missing FBI agent plot to a one off about Crane and Alice trying to help a girl who wants her baby to be born in Buckaroo so he can be a serial killer, and an issue where Brian Michael Bendis comes to town, and make them all as intense and interesting, well you know it's something special. Issue sixteen, the earlier mentioned Halloween issue, mixes a touch of Stand By Me into the comic for an issue unlike any other in the series. And the last arc, which took Finch and Warren out of Buckaroo, made for a different kind of story, much more of a whodunnit, and really did start giving readers answers. Just not all of them.

I love horror comics, both of the suspense and the supernatural variety. While we still don't know if there's any supernatural aspect to this comic, when it comes to pure suspense, you can't beat Nailbiter. If you like a horror comic with a brain that still doesn't shy away from some gore and a good shock, you couldn't do any better than Nailbiter.

There are three volumes of Nailbiter available right now, which are, in chronological order: There Will Be Blood (Issues 1-5), Bloody Hands (Issues 6-10), and Blood in the Water (Issues 11-15). Volume four, Blood Lust, comes out in April. Nailbiter Volume 1: The Murder Edition HC, collecting the first ten issues of the series in an oversized hardcover, comes out this Wednesday, March 16th.

Recommended Reading for 2/26: Superman Versus the Ku Klux Klan

The title of this book and this post, if you are unfamiliar with the history of it, paints a very vivid picture. You can see Superman, the man of steel, swooping down and grabbing the white garbed members of the racist Ku Klux Klan and taking away their weapons, tying them up, and leaving them for the authorities. And while a remarkably satisfying fantasy, that is sadly not how life works in the real world, and not what this book is about. This book is non-fiction, about the dawn of comic books, the dawn of the Klan, and how they came to intersect in 1946, when the Adventures of Superman radio show aired a series of episodes aimed to teach kids about tolerance and about what was wrong about the KKK.

Rick Bowers book, a YA book geared for middle shcool on up, has two narratives that run separately for the first two-thirds of the book. The first is well trod territory for comic book scholars and fans: the story of Jerry Siegel, Joe, Schuster, and the creation of Superman. The story of two kids from Cleveland and how they came up with the iconic hero is a story of the American dream, but Bowers does also get into Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz, the men behind what would become DC Comics, and some of their less positive traits. There are lots of books that discuss this stuff, I've read more than one, but Bowers presents in a quick, concise form that doesn't get bogged down and gives readers who don't know these stories of the Golden Age of Comics a good entry into them (if you're interested in knowing more about this aspect of comic history, I couldn't recommend Gerard Jones's Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book highly enough).

The the narrative is the story of the Ku Klux Klan, and of Stetson Kennedy, a writer who stood against them. In case you're unfamiliar with the KKK, they are an American society dedicated to racial and religious purity; this means white, Protestant men. They wore white cloaks and hoods, and since the inception of the society in the wake of the American Civil War, have been responsible for uncountable numbers of acts of racial and religious oppression, including harassment, assault, and murder.

Stetston Kennedy was a southern writer and civil rights advocate, who worked for Roosevelt's New Deal collecting stories of workers in Florida, as well as many other writing projects over the years, usually aimed at calling out racists and bigots of all stripes. Bowers does point at the Kennedy was a shameless self-promoter, so often his own stories inflated his own roles in his stories of going undercover in organizations like the KKK, but he was still an engaging figure who did put his life on this line, and whose work with the Anti-Defamation League helped provide inside data on the KKK that was used in 1946.

In 1946, in the wake of World War II, the Adventures of Superman radio show needed new villains and a new direction, so producer Robert Maxwell decided to try to give the series a message, to make it educational: he wanted to use the radio show to talk about tolerance. And after an arc that was a success, featuring a former Nazi spy as the villain, he moved on to a more present threat: the resurgent Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Working with the Anti-Defamation League, who provided intelligence by way of Kennedy and other Klan infiltrators, "The Knights of the Burning Cross," shed light not just on the racism and ignorance of the KKK, but the avarice and disingenuous nature of its leaders.

While the material is heavy and dark, and is never handled with anything but the utmost respect, Rick Bowers prose style and is light and easy to read. While the narrative of the first two third of the book bounce back and forth between the comics business and the life and death stakes of the history of the KKK and its repeated rises and falls across the American landscape, neither narrative is lost in the other. And Bowers does his best to balance the more fantastic assertions made by Kennedy, about his sole responsibility for the intelligence, and the wonderfully sentimental but far from factual idea that Superman alone put the Klan back in its grave (if temporarily) in the late 40s.

On a personal note, there was something in the book that really impacted me. I'm a born New Jersey Jew, about as liberal as they come. I look around and I live in what I view as a predominantly blue state with many progressive people, vastly outnumbering the voices of hate. I know intellectually that isn't true, but part of what gets me through the night is thinking I live in a place that isn't all that bad. What I had sort of known, but never really read, was the KKK's largest bastion in the North during the 40s was in New Jersey, and it also headquartered the US Bund, the American wing of the Nazi Party, and that the KKK and the Bund had massive joint rallies in New Jersey before the war really broke out.

I think in the time where superheroes are big business, and a big business that seems increasingly aimed at an adult audience, we can forget the power the superhero has with kids. The story of Superman being used as a way to teach kids about accepting people for their character, and not their race or religion is something the people who produce Superman for the media should remember. To know what the Man of Steel once did, well there's some learning from history to be done here.

Superman Versus the Ku Klux Klan is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

Recommended Reading for 2/19: Nixon's Pals

In my trades and back issue reading, I've been on a Joe Casey kick lately, and I realized that I had never written about anything Joe Casey before, and I knew that immediately needed to be remedied, as Casey writes some of the most interesting comics on the racks, with his work often about the intersection between current culture, technology, corporations, and super-heroes. His work is sometimes deconstruction (Automatic Kafka and The Intimates), sometimes straight superhero with a twist (Adventures of Superman and Cable), sometimes a mix of the two (Wildcats and Uncanny X-Men), and sometimes something completely unique and interesting (Godland). The book I picked today is a perfect example of Casey's ability to bend and mix genres together in ways that few other writers can: Nixon's Pals, the story of the parole officer for Los Angeles's super-powered criminal set.

Things aren't going great for Nixon Cooper at the beginning of the graphic novel. He's fighting with his wife about the odd hours his job makes him keep, and he's about to do an after hours home visit on one of his parolees who has missed a couple of check ins. And when Nixon goes in to check on The Bricklayer, you quickly learn something about him: while he might work with super-powered criminals, Nixon doesn't have any super-powers of his own, as The Bricklayer basically beast the crap out of him, breaks his arm, and when the house comes down on them, it leaves Nixon far worse for wear.

Nixon's status as an everyman is part of what makes him such an interesting protagonist in this world of supercreeps. He's a good guy who really wants to do right by his parolees, especially when set against his coworker Carlisle who happily admits to enjoying smacking around his parolees. But the couple of days that the story takes place over are those kind of days that push an everyman beyond the point of no return, Falling Down style. He finds out his wife is cheating on him with a supercriminal; all his parolees seems to be sliding back towards their criminal past; and he's having these frighteningly realistic alien abduction nightmares. It's a bad day.

If Nixon wasn't a sympathetic protagonist, you might take some glee in watching his life collapse, but he is one, and so you're rooting for him. But he's also a realistic protagonist, and that means he isn't always the nicest guy. As much as his wife tries to explain to him what was going on with her to get her to the point where she'd cheat, he won't listen; as a matter of fact he's cold and bordering on cruel when dealing with her. It's not an easy situation to be in, but he's not helping it. And eventually he reaches the point where he feels like the system just isn't working, so violence becomes his answer. This is a super-powered character comic, so you expect a degree of action, but this isn't a guy who's fighting the good fight because that's what he does, this is a guy out for revenge much of the time, but while still trying to do right by the people who are his parolees. It's a slippery slope he spends much of the book sliding down.

And in the end, he doesn't solve his problems legally, but he confronts supervillains with supervillains, and he gets a new and different life. It's a noir ending, where not even the hero walks out unscathed in the best noir traditions. I write often about Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillip's comic book noirs, and my favorite is still Sleeper from Wildstorm (Joe Caeey also worked on a lot of great Wildstorm titles in that imprint's salad days), and if you're a fan of that book and its grey morality and crazy supervillains, this is right up your alley.

Surrounding Nixon are a group of parolees who are fascinatingly conceived supervillains. Sputter Kane is a man who can't miss with a firearm, and really wants to go straight. Maxfield Reactor is a guy walking around in a super-powered iron lung that gives his super strength and vents rocket fuel from his *ahem* derriere. And Alcehma is a former call girl turned stripper who has faces in her breasts and nipples where her eyes should be. In case you didn't get it before, this is NOT an all ages comic. There is also mad scientist Hugo Blivion, whose parole ended and he's out and about who has a real problem with Nixon, and is behind one of the book's most disturbing sequences.

That sequence is the continually more graphic and brutal alien abduction visions that Nixon experiences. Blivion is demonstrating his dream invasion tech on Nixon for the mob to see, and is doing it by trying to slowly drive Nixon insane with visions of alien experimentation on him. They're truly creepy and disgusting as they should be.

Chris Burnham, best known to me before this for his run on Batman Incorporated, is the artist in the book, and he really does great work here. He keeps Nixon looking like a normal guy even when surrounded by some truly obscene and bizarre figures. I don't know if the book was done full script or Marvel style, and how many of these villains sprang from his mind and how many were specifically designed by Casey, but if you factor in the tons of background villains in the restaurant where Nixon has his final confrontation with Black Eyed Pete, the never convicted super crook whose been sleeping with his wife, you know this is a guy with a wild imagination for grotesques in the best way.

But if you've stuck with this piece this long, here's a bonus recommendation, sine Nixon's Pals isn't the only Casey/Burnham collaboration. And as much about character as that book is, Officer Downe, a one-shot from Image from a couple years ago, is in many ways the opposite. So much of Nixon's Pals is understanding and liking Nixon, while Officer Downe is just a madhouse of chaos and violence.

Officer Downe is an immortalish LAPD officer who goes out and fights crime by killing it. He's brutal, packs a lot of firepower, and doesn't fear death. Everytime he dies, the collective telekinetic power of the world's most powerful psychic puts him back together and resurrects him, and he goes out and fights another day. It's one of the most brutal and bloody comics I've ever seen, and is told with a slapstick sensibility to it. In an interview at the back of the issue, Casey says he and Burnham worked off each other in a free form process, so this insanity is both of their brainchilds. There's not a lot more to say about this book other than if you enjoy a comic that's Judge Dredd meets Deadpool meets Axe Cop, then this is one to try. And a film is in post production starring Kim Coates (Sons of Anarchy) as Officer Downe.

Oh, fun fact, Joe Casey is part of the Man of Action collective, best known probably for Ben 10 and Generator Rex, and both of these books were published under the MoA banner, so for those of you who think that MoA is just for kids... yeah, not so much.

Nixon's Pals and Officer Downe are available at better comic and book stores in a nice premium hardcover format that expands on their original releases.

Recommended Reading for 2/5: Super Hero Society: Study Hall of Justice

The concept of younger versions of adult characters meeting and having adventures isn't anything new. I remember Muppet Babies when I was a kid, and to this day, once of my favorite movies of all time is Barry Levinson's vastly underrated Young Sherlock Holmes. I've written about Skottie Young's charming Little Marvels, Art and Franco's Tiny Titans and Itty Bitty Hellboy,and Yale Stewart's JL8. A couple of weeks back, a new entry into this genre was released, from creators familiar to The Matt Signal, I hope: creators of Li'l Gotham, Derek Fridolfs and Dustin Nguyen released Secret Hero Society: Study Hall of Justice through Scholastic Books.

Study Hall of Justice isn't just Li'l Gotham in a new form; there are two very distinct differences. Firstly, the characters in Li'l Gotham were the regular adult versions of the characters, just drawn in Dustin Nguyen's most cartoony style. More importantly, the format is completely different. While there are comic pages, this book falls into the same journal mixed with comics style similar to the popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid, My Dumb Diaries, and Jeffrey Brown's Jedi Academy books. Told from Bruce Wayne's perspective, the book is the story of Bruce at his new school, Ducard Academy , which is filled with familiar faces, both heroic and villainous (although mostly villainous).

If the cover didn't completely give it away, while Bruce Wayne might be our narrator and lead, his friends are also recognizable stars of the DC trinity, Clark Kent and Diana Prince. Each of out leads are recognizable as who they will become, but are clearly still finding out who they are. Bruce is the detective, investigating and curious, and takes himself a bit too seriously. Clark is as earnest as you'd expect from a young Superman, but doesn't entirely have the mastery of his powers or of not occasionally mentioning he might be an alien. Diana is still finding the balance between the Amazon teachings of peace and war, and has a bit of a temper. Much of the book is the three of them, all kids who are different and don't have many friends, learning not only about the mysteries of Ducard Academy, but also about friendship.

The other students in the school are not quite as concerned with friendship and doing right as our three leads. One of the joys as a longtime fan of DC Comics in reading this book is seeing all the characters Nguyen crams into his illustrations. Some villains have prominent rolls, like Lex Luthor (class president), Circe, Poison Ivy, and Mister Freeze (the staff of the school paper), Bane (the school bully), Talia, Catwoman, and a gang of clowns led by Joker and Harley. But pretty much every student is a recognizable villain, and it's fun to play the game of, "I know that character!" The teaching staff, by the way, is of as dubious character as many of the students, including history teacher Vandal Savage, Mr. Jervis Tetch teaching English (just one book, Alice in Wonderland), a Brainiac robot as the librarian, and teaching Boy's Gym is Coach Zod.

The plot that drives the book and makes it more than just a cute bunch of in jokes for nerds like me and lessons about getting along is the mystery of what exactly is going on at Ducard Academy. Bruce is immediately suspicious when he sees ninjas hiding around the school, and the fact that bullying, cheating, and generally bad behavior seems encouraged, as well as the fact that the teachers aren't really teaching much, has his detective senses on high alert. Once he meets and becomes friends with Clark and Diana, they begin trying to find out the secret of the school, as well as its mysterious, never seen principal. If you've seen Batman Begins the school's name is a pretty good hint as to who is behind this whole school for villains.

The investigations leads the "Criminal Investigations Unit," as Bruce calls them (and don't call the Junior Detectives! That's for kids), to try to join sports teams, run for student office, write for the school paper, all to no avail. There's a lot of comedy in these attempts, and in the interactions between our leads. Bruce's too serious attitude alienates his friends at time, and  the ever optimistic Clark doesn't understand Bruce's brooding or Diana's anger. These are really well defined versions of the characters, even if they're different from the ones I read about each month, and I like how Fridolfs and Nguyen handle them. They're relatable to kids in a way that the grown up versions aren't, but the book never talks down to the younger readers who are the target audience.

As is the custom with this format, the book also has "artifact" pages, almost like scrapbook items, as part of it. Report cards, student evaluations, and pages from the school paper give readers a better idea of what's going on around school. Aside from the text of Bruce's journal and the comic pages, we also see "screen grabs" from various on-line chats between Bruce, Diana, and Clark. These pages can also be packed with Easter Eggs. The report Bruce gets from an outside, grownup detective about some of the clues at the school comes from Vic Sage, P.I., and a page that shows Bruce's locker has photos of Sherlock Holmes, Zorro, and the Grey Ghost, as well as a copy of Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs, and a can of shark repellent.

The art throughout is top notch, something I'd expect from an artist like Dustin Nguyen. His character designs are stellar, not drawing little adults but kids, aging the characters down but making them still recognizable. The highlight of the art are a few two-page spreads that really let Nguyen show off. The Halloween spread shows many of the kids in costumes that they will wear again as grown-ups, the Valentines Day spread is full of Easter Eggs as we see Valentines from various girls to Bruce, all of which have hints of what their identities will be as adults villains and heroes. and the Christmas spread shows the home lives of our three leads.

I've always enjoyed all ages comics and YA books, and like championing them to as wide an audience as I can. Super Hero Society is a perfect book to share with the kids in your life, or to read on your own: it's charming, well structured, well illustrated, and a blast to read. Every fan of DC Comics should give it a shot, and if you aren't? Read it anyway. You might become one.

Super Hero Society: Study Hall of Justice is available at comic shops and book stores now.