#Top5ComicBooks of 2015 - #2 : #DisneyComics from IDW Publishing

When I attend comic book shows/conventions, I wear a button that says "I read Disney Comics", depicting Mickey Mouse riding a rocket through Outer Space, a la Calvin as 'Spaceman Spiff' from Calvin & Hobbes. And now that IDW Publishing has been offering comics with the stock Disney staples in their stable, it's not just a matter of recommending people to search Ebay and grimey back-issue bins; you can read new comics, available at retail, alongside new issues of your favorite incarnation of Doctor Who or Spider-Man or Spider-Woman or Green Lantern or Superman or Deadpool or Batman or whichever superhero has multiple incarnations existing concurrently on shelves.

The Disney Comics by Carl Barks and Don Rosa are available in handsome hardcover editions published by Fantagraphics; Joe Books has the license to comics featuring characters from Disney Feature Films and Television shows (a new Darkwing Duck ongoing series will debut in April); Disney's common-law wife, Marvel Comics, has The Muppets, Star Wars and comics based on Disney Park rides; IDW has Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy (aka Goofus D. Dawg, aka, George Geef, aka, Dippy Dawg), Pluto (when will HE get his own book?), Huey, Dewey, Louie, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Ludwig Von Drake, Daisy Duck, Peg-Leg-Pete, The Beagle Boys, Super Goof, Gladstone Gander, Gus Goose, the Duck Avenger and...big fanfare...Scrooge McDuck. IDW won.

The bulk of the material featured in IDW's lineup consists of reprinted material originally published outside the U.S...one of the advantages of this is a larger page count than most of the comics carrying a $3.99 price tag, plus the stories are densely plotted. The scripts are translated into English with a strong flavor to make them more palatable to readers old & new; kudos to the roundtable of scripters (Joe Torcivia, David Gerstein, Thad Komorowski, Gary Leach and Jonathan Gray, to name a few) for keeping the characterization of these characters consistent while skillfully indulging in many inside jokes and pop culture nods, never once ringing any false notes. I'm positive Gray made a very subtle reference to the Transformers character Ultra Magnus in one Mickey story, and an obvious reference to Jem and The Holograms in a duck tale (not coincidently, both properties appear in comic books published by IDW).

As for the stories featured..these are not the "safe" pastiches of Barks and Floyd Gottfredson that were favored by past licensees like Bruce Hamilton (Gladstone Comics) and Steve Geppi (Gemstone Comics). We're being re-introduced to storytellers like Romano Scarpa, Giorgio Cavazzano, Andrea Castellan, Massimo DeVita and Giovani Batista Carpi. These guys love big concepts that venture into plots with a 1960s-1980s Saturday Morning cartoon air to them, often at risk of defying established character logic, challenging the reader to buy into what's happening: Duck Avenger's initial conception as a trickster allows for a fanwank scenario in which the original author can imagine Donald setting his cousin up as a thief AND trapping him in a decrepit mansion rigged to explode; secret agent Daisy Duck opts to disguise herself as a hapless ratchet tourist, wearing an outfit resembling Carol Burnett's "Charwoman" character; Scrooge tries to pass the buck after losing a wager that results in having to marry a character that exists entirely off-panel (!)...That's where the scripters come in. I'm waiting for that one script that acknowledges Donald concurrently works as a secret agent for three different agencies: the M.I.A. (McDuck Intelligence Agency, run by Donald's uncle), the T.N.T. (partnered with his cousin, Fethry Duck to solve paranormal mysteries) and the Cloak and Dagger (from the DoubleDuck series). Also keep in mind that he also runs around in superhero guise as the Duck Avenger And appears in new tales as the traditional Barksian "Everyman", and this is a very busy drake.

I also noticed a series of stories currently in Topolino featuring the Beagle Boys recalling their days as teenagers in High School; I would love to see Joe Torcivia's take on that, given that his Americanized scripts for solo-stories featuring the Beagles have a lot of fun bringing out the comedic sides to the longtime villains, particularly in "Love Is Never Having To Say You're Sentenced " (Uncle Scrooge #10).

By comparison, Mickey and Scrooge keep a simple status quo in their respective titles: "Detective-Adventure" tales for the mouse, "Comedy-Adventure" tales with Scrooge. Relatively obscure, fanciful, Smurf-like characters like Eega Beva and Atomo Blip-Blip oftentimes serve as Mickey's sidekick in some stories; Scarpa's "The Chirikawa Necklace" is a somewhat routine battle of wits with Peg-Leg-Pete made notable for two milestones: the introduction of Pete's girlfriend Trudy Van Tub, and an awesome scene depicting a traumatic experience in which Mickey recalls himself being kidnapped as an infant. Who needs Geronimo Stilton when you've got Mickey Mouse?

Next to Richie Rich and Bruce Wayne, Scrooge continues to be the most likable tycoon antihero in fiction, this time contending with manic rival John D. Rockerduck ( a character Barks created and used once, but was redesigned and used A LOT by Scarpa, Cavazzano, Carpi and others, even moreso than Flintheart Glomgold, it seems ).

One suggestion: when the current "Zodiac Stone" arc wraps up in Walt Disney's Comics and Stories ( that's a 12-part arc featuring loosely-connected stories with Mickey, Donald & Scrooge built around a quest for twelve pendants corresponding to zodiac symbols building up to a finale and inevitable showdown with Mickey's perennial archfoe, The Phantom Blot; not unlike a storyline from a season of Jackie Chan Adventures ), the book should try to showcase popular characters who don't carry their own books: Pluto, Scamp, Li'l Wolf, Bucky Bug, Super Goof, Oswald, Ludwig, Fethry, Moby Duck ( anyone remember HIM? ) and Ellesworth. A short tale by William Van Horn featuring Donald would be a familiar anchor of sorts, but I suspect Pluto's a safe bet as a big draw; that Pirates of The Caribbean-themed cover to Uncle Scrooge #10 had Pluto prominently. I'm actually surprised Disney Television Animation never thought of a Scooby-Doo-esque series starring Pluto for The Disney Afternoon..or for DisneyXD. Make it in CG, why not?

Honestly, I look forward to these books more than a lot of comic books offered right now. It's good stuff, don't miss ANY of it.

Notebook Covers: Batman vs Nocturna

It's something I like to do..Instead of Photoshop, I take the actual printed matter and cut n' paste 'em together, then slap 'em together on a notebook. You won't find any notebook like this at the Walgreen's! Obviously, I didn't regard the issues in question as anything sacred; the covers were cool, the stories inside...not so much. I discovered I could form a more dynamic image by combining them and making a subtle change. I'll leave it to you readers to spot what came from where. Plus, I love the late-90's title font. They feel more indicative of the character, like one of his gadgets..a Bat-Font.

I became interested in this obscure mid-1980s Batman villain in 1998, when Paul Dini described a rejected idea for a proposed episode of Batman: The Animated Series. It would've been a 2-part episode with a cliffhanger in which Batman appeared to turn into a vampire after his first encounter with Nocturna. I didn't know who she was, or what she looked like (this was before I began using the internet, by about 2 years, but it still would've been a wilderness; pre-Google zeitgeist, pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook/Pinterest, etc..) until I started buying old back issues from that era...

In retrospect, that rejected idea in question is odd, since Nocturna isn't a vampire; exactly what she wants and who she is has a big question mark on top. Her debut offers some background on her early life, but in her dealings with others, Batman/Bruce Wayne in particular, her characterization comes off falling somewhere in between Poison Ivy and Catwoman. I would describe her as an albino goth whose interests include stargazing, riding hot air balloons, stealing jewelry and organized crime. She also has a strange relationship with her brother Anton, who adopts the guise Night-Slayer and wears a drab gray costume. Like a Steampunk-era Vampirella, really ( and that has been done, recently) but does anyone really know who Vampirella is, either?

Back to our goth/cosplay vampire/astrologer. Her best moments allow for spectacular visuals from reliable journeyman artists of the decade: Don Newton, Gene Colan, Tom Mandrake, Rick Hoberg and cover artist extraordinaire Ed Hannigan, whose classic Detective Comics cover image of Batman & Nocturna embracing amidst the red skies and thunderstorm (these stories were published around the time of Crisis On Infinite Earths and the use of blood-red skies was intended as a subtle thematic  continuity link) was so awesome that I tried re-creating it in my sketchbook (the end result was I made her posterior larger and his cape & cowl a brighter blue...I knows what I likes..). So in short, the artwork makes her an iconic Batman foe, but the stories keep her in the D-list with Magpie, Mr. Polka Dot, King Snake, Whisper A'Daire and The Planet Master. Because they're just..boilerplate storylines - Doug Moench was juggling scripts for two books a month, often with the "story" for Detective being a thinly-veiled recap of what was happening in Batman. Only the hardcore completists still hold onto these - once Frank Miller arrived, all this stuff was abandoned in favor of aping Miller's Batman. It's still not clear if Moench ever thought of reviving/revamping the character when he returned to the Bat-books in the 1990s,

I remember finding a sketch - purportedly by Bruce Timm - of what this character was going to look like on the net..and better than that, I found a fan-made image, purportedly from Deviantart, of a 3-D maquette image of Nocturna..the end result resembles Timm's designs for the silkier femme fatales of the series: Red Claw and Talia Al Ghul. Pity he didn't go for the blue hair. Angelina Jolie could play her opposite Ben "Batfleck" Affleck, but again, wouldn't you want Jolie to play Catwoman? Sorry, Nocturna. Maybe they'll incorporate you among the cast of Gotham...

"Doctor Who: The Glamour Chronicles" - "Royal Blood" by Una McCormack, "Deep Time" by Trevor Baxendale and "Big Bang Generation" by Gary Russell (A Review)

Three Doctor Who novels, three treasure hunts - one big quest. The Glamour Chronicles sounds reminiscent of The Key to Time serials from the Tom Baker era of Who, in which a series of adventures is loosely connected by a hunt for pieces of a large artifact, culminating in a showdown with the enemy. That's not quite what we get here...

What is the Glamour? It's a maguffin, that's for sure - the plot element that motivates a character to go from here to there, as Alfred Hitchcock would establish in a lot of his cat-and-mouse thrillers, but even if the answer wasn't entirely interesting, we knew what it was: Roger Thornhill was mistaken for a guy named "Kaplan", Richard Hannay was trying to find out what "The 39 Steps" are, etc..but it feels like we got 3 different answers to what the Glamour is. In Royal Blood, it's a shapeshifting sentient being. In Deep Time, it's a parasite/honeypot trap linked to an ancient race of "elder gods". In Big Bang Generation, it's a lodestone, a key that sets off a doomsday machine...I think (that one is a little muddy to me). It's implied the 3 books follow in that sequence via various remarks said in each book, but either of the last two have conclusions that could easily wrap it up, so this double solution (an Ellery Queen shoutout in Doctor Who - remarkable!) allows you to choose to read no further..ultimately, the Glamour isn't as interesting a prize as the situations wrapped around it. Regardless, the sales receipt revealed the numbering, so that was handy.

Royal Blood is the Doctor Who fairy tale story. Think The Curse of Peladon, The Androids of Tara, The Keeper of Traken, Robot of Sherwood, even Day of The Doctor, with Queen Elizabeth and the Zygons. Two warring kingdoms, the Doctor and Clara in the middle, then Sir Lancelot shows up, plus we get a "magic" amulet. It's all good stuff, plus McCormack employs a mixed-narrative with jumps from 2nd to 3rd person perspective, so we get to care about who these characters are that the Tardis team befriended. One problem: the Doctor has no scenes with Lancelot! I didn't get that at all...maybe the dialogues would've sounded too reminiscent of Twelve's with Robin Hood in Sherwood, particularly since he has the same skepticism about the Arthurian legend that he had with the green archer. Clara gets a lot of nice moments, here, although that might add fuel to the vitriol from fans who loathed the character and joked about changing the title to Clara Who. Grade : B+

Deep Time is the most suspenseful of the three volumes. The Doctor and Clara are last-minute passengers on a spaceship with a crew on a archaeological expedition that goes sour when the ship crashes on a planet that's evolving through time in increments, with the whole team along for the ride (reminds me of the planet from Star Trek III). There's frozen tundras, deadly plants, poisonous bugs, catacombs, haunted spacecraft, ghosts, the Tardis in peril and - the fans always eat this up - Time Lord mythology. Also, Twelve tries making coffee from recycled waste material. It's a good Doctor Who sci-fi/horror tale. Grade: A

Big Bang Generation, in theory, seems like an easy sell. It's got a reunion with one of the Doctor's old companions from the Doctor Who novels of the 1990s and audio plays by Big Finish Productions - Bernice Summerfield, who was one of the conceptual prototypes for River Song (the other being 'Time Lady' Iris Wildthyme). The problem is Bernice has too many supporting characters along for the ride, so the adventure is always digressing to what they're doing, what they're thinking. Imagine if The Husbands of River Song had Clara, Danny Pink, Rigsy, Oswin AND Missy tagging along with Twelve - there's no room for any of the scenes with the Doctor & River to have any weight. There are moments of Twelve & Bernice together that are very fleeting, but considering that this is the only companion known to have had sex with the Doctor (the documented kind, of course) and appeared in one the most acclaimed Doctor Who novels ever (Paul Cornell's 7th Doctor novel Human Nature, which was adapted into a two-part episode with David Tennant) then it feels like this is meant to get people interested in digging back into the old material to see what all of it means. Or not, since I  think there are limits to how much of that material should be considered canonical, even if it's name-dropped in episodes of the TV series. The adventure itself feels like a mashup of Time Heist with assorted special effects from The Christmas Invasion, The Stolen Earth, The Bells of St. John and Doomsday, with the alien bar from The Witch's Familiar. It's a book that warrants a 3rd or 4th read to get a handle on the details. Grade: B- (A- if you're familiar with the continuity of Bernice Summerfield and her adventures).

With 2016 featuring no new episodes, aside from a Christmas special, these 3 books are entertaining, brief and worth a look during the looonnnggg wait. Of course, I posted quotes. Enjoy!

#Top5ComicBooks of 2015 - #4: "The Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows" by Dan Slott and Adam Kubert

Spider-Man...married? With child? That's the way Spider-Man comics should've continued, in my humble opinion. No crazy stalker-kidnappers, vampires, Gwen Stacy-Norman Osborn shippers, Iron Spidersuits and deals with Mephisto. Just stories about Marvel's greatest superhero defying his hard-luck existence by becoming a husband and father while continuing to fight the good fight using his unusual powers, intelligence, resourcefulness and wit, because that's what a responsible grown-up man does. THAT'S the real Peter Parker. That's the real Spider-Man.

And if it required a tie-in mini-series set in a parallel universe showcasing a preposterous new villain as part of a patchwork crossover to dust off this status quo and show what readers lost in favor of a bizarre, myopic, "not-on-my-watch" possessivenes on the part of higher-ups, so be it. It's only on the final page that Dan Slott hints that even he's aware that The Regent is an incredibly stupid villain whose m.o. has him miscast as a Spider-Man foe and he may have been working off an outline that was handed to him from editorial, but the dialogue between Peter, Mary Jane and Annie May Parker rings true in a way that many Spider-Man comics orbiting this mini-series haven't in almost two (!) decades. It ain't perfect, but it's the best I've seen or read with the webhead in a long time. My one regret is that this feels like the end - the "Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow? "-esque execution has me suspect that Peter Parker will never be portrayed in this manner anywhere again. His default characterization will be either a teenager ( example: the new Spidey comic book series), or a late-twentysomething "millennial" sap.

Now if only we knew who is that kid in that one panel of issue #2...who is he looking at?

#Top5ComicBooks of 2015: #5 - "Resident Alien: The Sam Hain Mystery" by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse

I'm surprised Resident Alien hasn't been optioned for a TV series..yet. From Dark Horse Comics, this sci-fi/detective series has good characters that would be fun to watch, but part of it's appeal is that it has a nice quiet, low-key tone to it. It's protagonist looks like an older Chameleon Boy from The Legion of Superheroes mixed with the cool demeanor of Mister Spock..it's the Martian Manhunter comic book I would love to read from DC Comics, but they're not delivering. Thankfully, the team of Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse are offering something much better.

Stranded space alien Dr. Harry Vanderspeigle lives in the small town of Patience, Washington and presides as the resident 'town doctor'. He has a recessive telepathic ability that allows him to cloud minds and interact casually among humans without an elaborate disguise. Part of the suspense comes from his telepathy allowing a margin of error; there are humans capable of seeing his true form, particularly Asta, his nurse at the clinic, who became his friend and confidante. Since his showdown with a serial killer in the first arc, he's often shown walking with a cane after a leg injury. There's a subplot involving government agents slowly investigating his whereabouts, and a lingering mystery about the orange lunchbox-shaped object he's carried with him (the only article he's kept since his spaceship crashed) but that's still in the background. It's a bit Northern Exposure meets Diagnosis Murder with 5% Twin Peaks thrown in...those are awfully dated refrences..I'll add Gravity Falls to it...like if Ford was revealed to be half-alien, less of an egghead and solved mysteries rather them compile them in journals, he'd be Harry Vanderspeigle.

At the forefront of the series is Harry's aplomb as an amateur sleuth. In The Sam Hain Mystery, he discovers the mystery novelist he admires may have resided in the town of Patience and left behind an unpublished manuscript with the town doctor - Harry's predecessor, but the only known writer of note is a cookbook author...

It's the third arc of the series and a fourth - The Man With No Name - will debut this year. It's schedule is similar to new episodes of Sherlock - a series of mini-series, so there's no chance the creators will tire of it or give in to nonsensical storylines. This series is a class act that is worth your time.

"Gilliamesque: A Pre-Posthumous Memoir" by Terry Gilliam

I wonder if cartoonist/writer/actor/director/producerTerry Gilliam regards himself as boring. Gilliamesque, his memoir, seems awfully preoccupied with name-dropping encounters and collaborations with other people - so much so that he only has enough time to discuss his work almost as a collection of asides and afterthoughts; recollections of  his films scarcely take up a 1/3 of the book! I feel we're left holding a product - a coffetable book - very attractive, with bits and bobs of acute insights planted here and there to highlight and appreciate, but not something meant to be taken seriously. "I'm not dead; a more-comprehensive (i.e. "stuffy") look at my life and career isn't really my bag, ok?" - that's the message I got, so just enjoy it for what it is - a Gilliamesque book about Terrry Gilliam!

He's kind of a hoarder - he's saved lots of stuff going far back, even having his ancient battered edition of that Preston Blair how-to book on animation that many cartoonists took swipes from ( seriously, though - THAT book is good stuff; I still own a 1990s edition of it ), or yellowed sketch pad scribbles of aliens shaped from vacuum cleaners. I DO find him to be the most interesting of the Monty Python troupe, largely because he's continued to do stuff, whereas the others cashed in and have coasted off the past to varying degrees. I look forward to seeing his Don Quixote adaptation in whatever form it finally takes ( as of right now, it's going to star John Hurt and premiere on Amazon Prime ) and the likely Criterion Collection DVD/Blu-Ray editon of that ( Almost all his movies end up released with Criterion editons - it's their afterlife).

Naturally, I highlighted the bits I liked in the gallery below...the book reminds me a lot of the two memoirs animation director Chuck Jones wrote/illustrated in the late-80s and late-90s: Chuck Amuck and Chuck Reducks - bon-bon-size acute insights packaged in an attractive way for the coffetable..I have both of those as well, but while I keep a chessboard hogging the space on my coffeetable, they look nice on my bookshelf. Gilliamesque looks nice there, too.