The new comic book series American Vampire, to debut March 17 under DC Comics’s Vertigo imprint, will soon offer a counterpoint to that domestication. “What always appealed to me about vampires was what made them terrifying,” says series creator Scott Snyder before reeling off a list of his favorites: Near Dark (directed by Hurt Locker’s Kathryn Bigelow) and Lost Boys defined the genre as he came of age. The Swedish film Let the Right One In is a recent favorite. And Snyder is particularly interested to get to the theaters to see Daybreakers. “It’s got an interesting concept,” he says, “but more than that, I want to see some scary vampires on film.”

The idea behind American Vampire enables Snyder to explore everything that makes vampires the nightmare creatures they are. Co-written by Scott Snyder and Stephen King (who apparently is a famous writer or something) and illustrated by Rafael Albuquerque, American Vampire is an epic about the evolution of the bloodsuckers. In Snyder’s series, steeped in Americana and taking place in different time periods and locales, not all vampires are alike or have the same demeanors, anatomies, or weaknesses.

Snyder talks rapidly about his creation, as if he’s coming up with new information faster than he can speak. He’ll check himself occasionally, anxious to discuss every facet of his project, but wary of giving away too much detail.

Faster Times: I would expect DC/Vertigo to be really secretive about one of their superhero properties and less so about a creator-owned title.

Scott Snyder: They are being secretive, which I see now is a really good thing. At first, I didn’t get why it was so important to tease things out, and I think publicity was a little worried about me as a loose cannon or something, like I’d give away way too much – and admittedly, they were probably right. So they coached me a bit for the first couple interviews, but now they give me a long leash. I just get excited about talking about what’s coming, because we’re about 6 months ahead of schedule, and I forget that no one has seen the previous issues yet.

FT: The project seems pretty epic. What was its genesis?

SS: I came up with it a few years ago in the most mundane way. I was in a hobby shop in the West Village and I was looking at the statuettes and figurines for a present for my friend who’s a big Dr. Who fan. And there was this statue of an undead Confederate soldier, and I started thinking how I’m a big vampire fan. And other than certain films like Near Dark, which is my favorite vampire movie of all time, there haven’t been things that explored vampires in settings that aren’t gloomy, rainy, gargoyle, urban, and nocturnal.

The aesthetic of everything, from Underworld, Twilight, Blade, it always has that same greenlit leather-and-velvet thing going on. I thought it would be fun to see vampires with a different character to them, something more animalistic and feral. Not so sophisticated and snobby. They’re always in the same kind of settings, speak with that same aristocratic flair. I wanted something more down-and-dirty, more American.

FT: And that led to the core idea driving American Vampire?

SS: I started thinking about (vampires) that way and the real idea hit me: instead of having just one vampire type, what if the vampires themselves were a different species or a different breed? From there it exploded in my head to have a genealogical tree of vampires from different time periods and locations around the world. I wanted a secret history where the bloodline, every once in a while, hits someone new. Not just a new population in a new country—but something that will randomly mutate and create a new species.

I started developing it around this character named Skinner that I thought would be the penultimate vampire. If there was a new species born in this country before the 20th century, where should that bloodline start? What’s the best context for exploring both the heroic and monstrous in American culture? And the Old West came to mind.

From there, Skinner quickly became the heart and soul of the series. He’s a vicious, sociopathic, fun character—kind of the seed of this whole thing. The series itself follows his bloodline and the ways it changes based on the people he turns.

FT: Skinner originates in the American West. Why that time period?

I’m a huge Western fan, so I started thinking back to this Confederate soldier thing. What if it were someone in the old West? What if it was somebody who embodied these characteristics when America was defining itself against certain Eurocentric elements? The idea of the American West is emblematic of what makes us us.

FT: When did you start writing American Vampire? Did you do it immediately or after you started talking to DC/Vertigo and they wanted you to pitch them?

I did it right away. It was a few years ago. I wrote it down and first thought about doing it as a screenplay with a film buddy friend of mine. We talked it through but it was too big to contain. It was a story that needed more chapters than that form would really allow. As fun as it was to try develop it that way, it was all about Skinner and didn’t feel broad enough. Then I started working on it as a book while I was working on finishing my story collection (ed note: that’s the excellent Voodoo Heart) for Dial Press. I started thinking about it in terms of a series of short stories, and that seemed like the best form at the time, even though I’ve been a die hard comic guy.

FT: So strangely, your initial instinct wasn’t to present the story as a comic book series.

SS: I didn’t have any access to that world. Now looking back, it seems silly. I don’t know why I didn’t try to approach any one about that before. The world just seemed locked off and it never occurred to me how to approach somebody in comics.

FT: How did that eventually happen?

SS: I wrote a couple of stories with supernatural elements and one was a superhero story for an anthology a friend of mine did called Who Can Save Us Now? It’s an anthology where writers come up with new superheroes with new origins. Some are really funny and comedic. There’s one that’s about a support group for superheroes who have terrible powers. The lead in that has this power where he never has to go the bathroom and stuff, and he’s just crying, being like Well where does it go?

There were funny stories and straight-ahead stories. And I did a very straight-ahead one about a character in the forties who comes back from the War in the Pacific where he’s been part of the Bikini tests. He develops these powers as a teenager, sort of becomes the super-villain. Anyway, there were some people in the industry who read the book. We did a promotional reading for the book and Mark Doyle, the editor from Vertigo, came to the reading. This was a while ago now—he came to the reading the summer before last summer. Strange. It feels like it was yesterday.

He came to me after the reading and said he liked the story. He asked if I was a comic fan and I said I was. And then he kind of gave me a pop quiz. What are you reading, who do you like, who are your favorite artists? I just told him. At that time it was the start of Secret Invasion.

FT: That’s a Marvel book.

SS: Yeah, but I didn’t know he was from DC at the time. I had been reading frenetically DMZ, 100 Bullets, Fables. I’d heard they were going to redo House of Mystery. But it was sort of “What are you reading at this moment?” and at the time I had Secret Invasion in my bag. So he asked if I’d be interested in coming into Vertigo to pitch ideas, and I was over the moon.

I met with him for lunch the summer before last. They were doing a series of literary graphic novels like Jonathan Ames’s The Alcoholic. He gave me a whole collection of literary graphic novels that they’d done over the last few years.

But I hadn’t been really thinking of that sort of thing – which I think surprised him a little. I think he expected me to pitch something less high-concept. But I’d been chomping at the bit for (vampires). It’s not just popcorn stuff, but it was a real passion project. So I pitched it to them and he loved it right away. He helped me develop a pitch for his bosses.

FT: Did it immediately take off from there?

It went back and forth quite a bit. It took a good six months. I pitched it a certain way, with the series beginning with Skinner and the old west. And at that time, there were some Westerns coming out like Lone Ranger. There were certain elements that made them feel uncomfortable starting with the Western.

So they said they didn’t know if they could do it if I wanted to open with the Western part. But there were all these other decades I was interested in exploring with the (Skinner) character. So I decided it’d be fun to start in the 1920s and have a female protagonist named Pearl, a struggling actress from the silent film era. I love that whole environment with the twenties Studio System, the glamor and the Jazz Age, and what’s coming at the end of the decade, with the crash on the horizon.

I came up with a story that would be five or six issues. It’d introduce Skinner but he’d be a more mysterious figure. It went back and forth for a few weeks: how did I envision it, and what would the process be for each cycle? And they took it. It was about a year ago now.

FT: So let’s talk about Stephen King. How exactly did he get involved?

SS: (Vertigo) asked if I knew anybody who would blurb the series, and I know Stephen King—he was incredibly kind to give me a quote for my short story collection. But I didn’t know if he’d have a time to read the proposal, which outlined the first couple of seasons and contained a long description of Skinner. And he wrote back saying he loved Skinner, and that he’d love to blurb it. But if I wanted it, he’d be up for writing a couple of issues, because he loved Skinner so much.

FT: Stephen King volunteered on his own?

SS: Oh absolutely. I didn’t even expect him to even be able to do a quote for it. I asked if he was sure, because if I told (Vertigo), they’d jump at it. He said, “I don’t know. I’ve never done a comic so I don’t know if they’ll be that excited.”

So I called Vertigo on a Friday afternoon after the studios closed. I left a message and said that Steve—he makes you call him Steve—said he’d be willing to do a couple of issues. On Monday morning, at 8:30, I got a call from the whole Vertigo office saying, “Did you say Stephen King would be willing to do an issue or two’? So I told them that he was.

FT: What was the extent of his involvement?

SS: Originally he was only going to do a couple of issues. I gave him the original Western proposal for Skinner, which Vertigo didn’t want to start with, and asked if he wanted to pick a couple of moments to write. I knew he had (the novel) Under the Dome coming out, he was working on a musical on the West Coast, and I couldn’t imagine he’d have a lot of time for this. I wanted to make it as easy as possible so I gave him a very clear, almost a paint-by-numbers couple of short issues with Skinner. The majority of it was already written, but there was no dialogue. Just general outline, almost like page breakdowns. Then a couple of weeks in, he was going to do two sixteen-page issues, and he was going to cut them up so there was a teaser at the end of each issue. And he emailed me a couple of weeks after he started. He said he was having fun and wanted to know if he could go off the res a little bit. I was like, ‘Sure, do whatever you want.’

The next thing I got was a third issue with a cliff-hanger. And then he wrote a forth issue, then a fifth issue. And he wound up doing five full sixteen-page issues about Skinner and about his relationship with his adversary, a Pinkerton who caught him when he was alive. And it was just so good. I mean the series as a whole, not just his part of it, is exponentially better for his involvement. I couldn’t be more grateful.

FT: Of course, you weren’t expecting that much story from Stephen King. How did that affect your plans for the series?

SS: We went back to the drawing board and gave him more breathing room, which is what he wanted. He’d felt kind of cramped. We adjusted my story (which took place during the 1920s) and we’d each do five issues: each issue with sixteen pages of my story, sixteen with his, back-and-forth like a double creature-feature, and it’d be a total of 32 pages. The issues themselves have a lot of overlap because his character Skinner is the catalyst for my character (Pearl) turning into the same vampire as him. There are some fun hidden things that cross over from cycle-to-cycle. But (Stephen King’s cycle) takes place in the 1880s and the early 1900s and mine takes place in the 1920s.

FT: How did you make sure that King’s vision stayed consistent with yours? To what extent was that an issue?

SS: It was an issue only because the characters are very close to my heart. Their stories were set in my mind. So admittedly, when he sent that email asking “Would you mind if I go off the res?” I was nervous because I didn’t know what he was going to do. I’ve read almost everything he’s ever written and I wasn’t expecting him to do something bad, that wasn’t my worry at all. My worry was more about what if he came up with something that was great, but that wasn’t in tune with the bible of the characters? How much should we adjust the blueprint?

It was stupid to worry about at all, though, because what he did right away was breathe extra life into the story the way it had been. He wasn’t about making huge plot changes (though he did actually add a lot of terrific twists) so much as enriching the story, extending it and deepening the characters, adding more layers to them, and adding this layer to the whole story about legend versus history.

FT: What else did he add?

SS: He brought Skinner up to the present and gave him a whole history we didn’t ultimately include. He broadened why Skinner is the way he is—things we don’t quite want to deal with now. But it was amazing to watch once I saw what he was doing, there was no question that he was going to do a better job than I would have been capable of. I feel I’d done ten or 11 drafts just to approximate how good he’s been with his stuff. And that was inspiring, because I had to bring my A+ game to this. It’s been a great process and he was very gracious about taking notes.

FT: Did Stephen King ever go too far off the res?

SS: There were a couple of times where he’d kill a character or have some vampire history come out before it should have, but when we mentioned that, he was cool with taking it out. Overall, he didn’t need extensive notes. I give Mark Doyle a lot of credit for handling that. It’s very intimidating to give (King) even the tiniest notes because so much of what he does is so good on the page. He’s honestly a storytelling genius. And at the end of the day, what he needed notes on at all was stuff where he’d jump the gun on certain things. There were characters we wanted to survive for the cycle and he’d tear their heads off.

FT: How did you get paired with artist Rafael Albuquerque?

SS: (Vertigo) gave me a roster of people they were thinking about beforehand. Rafa was on the list, and I was aware of Rafa’s work from Blue Beetle. I went to his site and saw his creator-owned stuff. There were a couple of images where I thought it was really right.

So we approached him, asked if he wanted to do a few sketches of Pearl and Skinner to see what he thought based on the descriptions from me and Steve. And he just nailed it. He got it. Those sketches are actually used for publicity.

If you see Pearl, images of her dressed in this twenties stuff smoking with a cigarette holder. That’s his audition sketch. And the one with Skinner from different eras where in one he’s a ragged Western character and in another he’s wearing a 1920s swing suit with boots. Those he drew just to say that’s how he saw them.

FT: How do you write for an artist? Do you give him explicit instructions?

SS: My relationship with Rafa is very collaborative. From the start I said I wasn’t going to pretend to know what works best on the page as well as him. If you look at the stuff he’s done on his own, his layouts, his compositions, expressiveness – it’s incredible. He’s the kind of guy who thrives when given some room to breathe. So our deal is that I know what needs to happen with the story. I know what beats, what information, what dialogue and action has to happen on each page, and I write a detailed script, but Rafa can always change it up if he has a better way of conveying things. And same with Steve. The series is a hundred times better for Rafael’s creative input, not just his art.

FT: So Rafael Albuquerque is contributing quite a bit to American Vampire.

SS: Not only did he help design the characters and tweaked them in ways that were different than I thought, he designed the whole look of the series – and each cycle. My cycle is more art deco, whereas Steve’s has a more antiquated feel. He did my cycle with crystal-hard inks, very hard panels, then did Steve’s in washes, so it looks old-timey.

FT: The American Vampire narrative isn’t linear. How are you structuring this thing?

SS: Each arc will be relatively self-contained. We have these stories built out in our minds that are five-six issues or eight-nine issues. It’s not the plot twists, but the mystery of the whole world. Each arc is an exploration of a particular decade and reveals secrets of the history of the vampire genealogy, and the relationships between different breeds and humans.

Part of what’s really enticing to us is that it’s not just a forward-moving narrative. It’s an exploration of a whole world and a mythology. Part of the lure of each arc, of each cycle, is that you’ll see characters that you love because they’ll return sometimes in big ways or sometimes as cameos.

We’re doing a lot of work just so each cycle can be broad and have a huge cast of characters to explore certain aspects of that time period. You’ll have characters at different ends of the socio-economic spectrum and they’ll be ethnically different. We really are hoping for it to be a little about American history, as much as it is a popcorn series.

FT: How much research do you do? How much do you have to know about each decade in order to feel comfortable writing it?

SS: We do a good amount. It’s important that the series feel genuinely invested in the decade that the cycle is exploring. Steve is a tome of Western knowledge. He always keeps things very faithful. He just inhabits whatever decade he’s writing about. He uses that language that gets lost in translation to Rafa. He might write ‘Okay cowboys and cowgirls, in this panel…’ and Rafa might ask, ‘Where’s the cowboy and cowgirl?’

Steve has such attention to physical detail. Yesterday, I got an email from Rafa asking what’s a hooked rug. Steve had this one character fall onto a hooked rug and the wine from her glass, which is purple because the sun makes glass purple at that time, all falls onto a hooked rug.

FT: Do you ever get overwhelmed by the research?

SS: In one of the cycles we’ve been planning for the thirties, I wanted it to be a murder mystery and to take place in a city that wasn’t really developed yet. I started doing research on Las Vegas, places in the west that Skinner might visit that were being built but that were suffering because of the economy. I looked into which cities got stimulus money for which projects. That was probably a bit too much. But the fun of it is that just to get a sense (of the decade), we absolutely do a lot of research. We want to know what’s happening in each decade to find things that are hopefully relevant now.

FT: Such as?

SS: The 1920s cycle (in the Hollywood Studio System) I’m working on now has a touch of that desire for fame, rivalry, the studio system that fosters these crazy dreams. The 1930s similarly we’re going to explore the hardships people face in tough times and the things they do when they’re desperate. We have a lot of ideas for the forties and the fifties. What about this overseas? What about this country? And why does this vampire species exist?

For instance, the classic vampire species, the Dracula-mode species, we have a scientific name for them: phylum, genus, species. Why is that species almost the only one left when the 1900s roll around?

FT: On that note, what can you tell me about vampire taxonomy? Skinner, for instance, isn’t weakened by sunlight; in fact, he’s strengthened by it. Does he make fun of the vampires that are harmed by the sun?

SS: Yeah, in a less comedic way. We’ve tried to think through a secret history dating back to pre-modern times with vampire species that are primitive and look completely different than what you’d expect a vampire to look. And there are vampire species that are totally contemporary new offshoots that will surprise even Skinner. Once we start to get into the second and third cycle, we want to create a web site and offer a peek behind the curtain of that genealogical tree, with certain things blacked out.

FT: How about human-vampire relations?

SS: Vampires don’t go unnoticed by humans. We’ll touch on what humans know about vampires. Are they tracing this bloodline, are they aware of it in any way? Are they hunting them? We have a big board we’ve been playing with, a big chart. It’s not a provincial mode of storytelling where we’re completely wrapped up in our own cycle and we’re done and it’s like, What do we do next? My hope is to keep it going for ten years. We want to go backwards, forwards, sideways, everything. I want to explore humans, the original history: I mean, who was the first one? We’ve been playing with ideas for these things. But I wish it could come out quicker.

FT: Are there a lot of social tensions between vampires and humans?

SS: It’s not True Blood where they’re trying to integrate into society and have civil rights, as much as I love True Blood. Admittedly, and Vertigo hates when you say anything negative, but Twilight—I’ve read the book and it’s a great YA book, a great teen book—it’s just not the way I like my vampires. To me, vampires are one of the scariest creations of all time. A classic monster. Like zombies and Frankenstein, werewolves too, which I hope get a good treatment sometime soon. These guys have stuck around because they’re primally frightening monsters.

And each series, like Twilight, brings something brand new to the table. Vampires as approachable, romantic heroes is a new thing. And it’s inspiring to see someone do something new, whether or not that’s within your taste. For all my teasing, I’m very glad Twilight exists. It’s a fresh take on vampires, and it’s very well done.

FT: So you want a darker take?

SS: Twilight is appealing because it re-imagines vampires, but they’re not scary. True Blood does that too – re-imagining them as this under-class- but again, they’re not really scary. They’re always like, “Sook-ay, you’re so purty.” And the whle Bill versus Erik thing - that sort of romantic sex symbol pinup direction… I’m just not into that.

So part of the point of American Vampire is to make (vampires) scary again. In the original ads for the series, we wanted to do pictures of Skinner standing on a heap of dead old-fashioned vampire bodies, grinning, all bloody with smoking guns in his hands. And the tagline was “I don’t fucking sparkle.” We thought about using another that said: “This ain’t your little sister’s vampire.” The idea was that American Vampire is not a pin-up. When (Skinner) changes into a vampire, he’s fucking scary. You don’t want to kiss him.

American Vampire is meant to be completely badass. It’s not just, Well he can go out in the sun. He looks different, he’s a different breed. He’s got different claws, different fangs, different musculature. He’s vampire 2.0 in some ways, compared to the European vampires he’s facing off with. In terms of the evolutionary tree, we really are hoping for each cycle to get deeper into that.

FT: To what extent has writing for comics affected your prose?

SS: I don’t know if it’s affected my actual writing that much. The stuff I write about as literature uses a lot of Americana, some of it historical and some contemporary.

The book I’m working on now has a lot of elements that tie into some of the stuff I’m working on in comics. It’s a literary book, but the main character is involved in the comics industry. There’s tie-in in that way. But in terms of the actual writing, the biggest difference is that comics are so collaborative. To see (your writing) come as a sketch, and to have that immediate response and to be able to joke around and play with ideas is what’s so startlingly different than working in the literary world. I knew that would be the case, but when that happens, it feels like a completely different mode of writing. Writing literary stuff as prose is more isolating.

FT: Do you have a preference?

SS: I love the idea of finishing my book and sending it to an editor, but having stuff that you’re working on as a team—well it’s made me a happier person and it’s made my life better for having that input all the time.

FT: Is one harder than the other?

SS: They’re really different. The thing is, with comics, you have such a sounding board. I don’t know how other writers are—you hear different things. I kind of wish I had that sounding board all the time for literary stuff. There are some writers who write the scripts and send them in, who are good enough that they don’t want (the sounding board), but I’m at the other end of the spectrum.

In that respect, I won’t say comics are easier. You have a support system. Whereas with literary stuff, you have the book and maybe it’s good and maybe it’s not but you don’t know until you’re done. It’s scarier. There’s so much alone time not knowing if it’s going to come out well. With comics, there’s someone who can give you a hand.

But in terms of making it good, I don’t think it’s harder to write a literary short story than it is to write a comic. It’s certainly been challenging to go anywhere near the bar set by some of the people I admire.

FT: You illustrated your short stories in Voodoo Heart. Any interest in more drawing work?

SS: I would like to. I had this delusional idea when I sold (American Vampire) that maybe at some point, if I really practiced, I’d be good enough to try to draw a few issues myself later on. Then I started getting drawings from Rafa, and (my drawings) were nowhere near the level where…it would just be a disservice to (American Vampire).

Because the (novel) I’m working on has comic book elements in it, I was going to draw some stuff for that. I still might do a little, but I mentioned it to Rafa and some other comic artists I’ve been in touch with and they were like “Hey, we’ll do it.” The drawings are supposed to be by different characters in the book. So I don’t know, as long as they’re doing this great stuff, it’s definitely on the back burners.

FT: Did you initially want to be an artist?

SS: I grew up wanting to be a comic book artist. That was my dream through high school. I went to college in Providence because RISD was there and I wanted to take art courses and really try to be both a writer and an illustrator. But there just wasn’t enough access to the type of illustrative art that would help me be a better comic artist. I misunderstood, and it was much more conceptual and abstract art. Modern art and theory. There weren’t a lot of avenues for narrative art, so it sort of whithered for me. But I do have secret hopes of becoming good at it again. If Vampire does well, whch knock on wood it will, and I can get time to myself—because I still teach college—if I can get a couple of semesters where I can afford to stay home and write full time, I’d love to take some classes and get better for myself. Maybe at least I can do a variant cover or something issues and issues down the line.

FT: Do you draw every day?

SS: I don’t really, no. I do it for myself on the weekends when I have a moment. But things have been so busy over the last year to devote time to it. I have a whole closet full of everything though, from charcoal pencils and all different sized pens. Everything my parents and my wife have gotten me for birthdays and Christmases. A whole host of art supplies waiting to be used more than they are.

But the comics that made me love the form as a kid were mostly creator-drawn. Everything from Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns and Sin City. And Mike Mignola: I mean, Hellboy is one of my favorites of all time. When you get something that’s such a complete vision of somebody’s, it’s really inspiring. I’d love to do that, but I’m not any where near good enough. Working with these guys has given me a whole new respect and terror for doing that.

American Vampire will be released March 17 by Vertigo. Scott Snyder is also writing Iron Man Noir for Marvel Comics, which will debut in April.

Warner Brothers purchased a majority stake in British video game developer Rocksteady Studios, the studio responsible for the immensely popular Batman: Arkham Asylum video game. Arkham Asylum is notable for four reasons:

1) For a video game based on a comic book property, it doesn’t suck.

2) In fact, it’s pretty sweet.

3) The first Batman video game based on the comic itself (it borrows a great deal from Grant Morrison’s graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth) instead of some crapass Joel Schumacher movie.

4) Written by Paul Dini, producer and writer of the awesome Batman: The Animated Series cartoon. Also features much of the same voice talent from that cartoon.

Because I geek out over stuff like this, and because Wired published a list of literary classics that should be video games, here are some DC comic book properties that should really benefit from the WB-Rocksteady acquisition.

Superman

A sandbox-style video game that leverages an advanced flight simulator engine. I played Crimson Skies on Xbox a few years ago, and a Superman video game should up the ante. Metropolis is your home base, where you can accumulate points by doing good deeds.

But as in Grand Theft Auto, you should have the option of going rogue and killing civilians.

Green Lantern

First person shooter. You start out as a fledgling member of the Green Lantern Corps, all of your peers murdered, equipped with a power ring that only has the ability to project giant green fists. As you level-up, you can create modular weapons of increasing complexity.

Which is necessary because your enemies toughen, from Cyborg Superman to Sinestro to the Anti-Monitor. Until, at last, you have to throw down with the entire Black Lantern Corps.

Deathstroke the Terminator

A stealth game, like the Metal Gear Solid series. Your goal: Kill the Justice League. Because every hero can singularly kick your ass, you’ll have to use cunning to dodge your opponent’s attacks and exploit their weaknesses. The worst thing? You have to defeat each enemy on their home turf. Not only do you have to evade Gotham City PD, you have to infiltrate the Batcave and challenge Batman to hand-to-hand combat on top of a giant T-Rex. And don’t get me started on squaring off against Superman…

The Flash

This one has the potential to be badass. The premiere game for Xbox’s Project Natal, use your reflexes and physical endurance to navigate Keystone City and beyond, taking out Mirror Master’s decoys and kicking the crap out of Gorilla Grodd.

Seven Soldiers of Victory

In this mmorpg featuring tertiary DC characters, level up, form a team of seven, and pummel all of the other teams of seven until they kowtow to you.

Animal Man

This game comes with a free puppy.

But first, some background:

In September 2009, Warner Brothers Entertainment, which owns DC Comics, announced it was restructuring the publishing company to form DC Entertainment. The purpose of the restructuring was to create more synergies (love that word!) between publishing, film, television, video game, and consumer product divisions. Remember that kerfluffle between Warner Brothers and Fox last year over the Watchmen movie? That’s what happens when you don’t synergize your shit.

The restructuring essentially required long-time comic book editor and publisher Paul Levitz, who had been DC Comics’s president since 2002, to step down or be ousted or whatever. Diane Nelson, who oversaw among other projects the Harry Potter marketing campaign, assumed the role of President of DC Entertainment.

Following is DC Entertainment’s new executive team, announced today by Nelson. I’m cribbing their biographies directly from Nelson’s press release.

Jim Lee

One of the top artists and creators in the business. But he is also an astonishingly smart and experienced businessman. He has a calm, confident and reassuring leadership style that will be enormously valuable to every member of the DC Entertainment and DC Comics team. He is fully adept and experienced at building a publishing program on his own, and will partner with Dan in doing so, but he also brings an affinity and passion for digital that will help the DC Comics business move aggressively into the future.

Dan DiDio

One of the most passionate and energetic leaders I have ever seen. He cares deeply about these characters and stories, and equally about the people who bring them to life at and with DC Comics. He knows how to manage the day-in, day-out mechanics of the publishing program, with his own strong creative sense, and he has great experience from prior to DC in adapting stories for other platforms.

Geoff Johns

An unparalleled creative mind and a huge heart. He brings a level of enthusiasm, passion and optimism to every discussion I have with him that is so motivating. He will be instrumental in establishing the tone and culture of creative risk and business growth that we intend for DC Entertainment. And he will ensure the integrity of how we bring these characters and stories to fans across every entertainment platform.

In other words: Lee, DiDio, and Johns are all creators who have established backgrounds in comic publishing. They’ll oversee the creative aspects related to the publishing arm of DC Entertainment. I’m guessing their collective role will be similar to Paul Levitz’s at DC Comics.

John Rood

A long-time colleague and friend. I have been looking for a way to work with him again ever since we met during his first stint at Warner Bros. 10 years ago. John was smart and accomplished then, but he has built and grown his professional experience in his 10 years at ABC Family in a way that makes him uniquely qualified for the job I envisioned. John will be a passionate, innovative marketer of the DC Comics publishing program, while he helps us build DC Entertainment and its library with internal divisions across Time Warner and Warner Bros. He will treat our retail customers and our consumers like the superheroes they are. And we’re lucky to have him on this team.

In other words: Rood will start creating all of that synergy stuff everyone has been anticipating. He’ll oversee all the cross-platform marketing initiatives and branding opportunities Warner Brothers is so excited about. Superman yamakas, Bat-burgers at McDonald’s, Wonder Woman bondage ropes, Green Lantern wedding rings, and the Flash logo on Toyota accelerator pedals. All that good stuff.

Pat Caldon

What can I say about Pat that people don’t already know, particularly inside DC Comics? He is a rock. He is deeply knowledgeable and much more creatively passionate than he lets on. He cares about everyone and everything associated with DC and he will be an instrumental partner to all of us in building the company for the future.

In other words: He’s the money.

The members of the new executive team also released statements that add clarity to their individual roles within DC Entertainment:

Jim Lee & Dan DiDio

Geoff Johns

John Rood

Pat Caldon

Handey’s troubles began in May 2006, when US Postal Office workers intercepted a package containing seven Lolicon books. This led to a search warrant for Handey’s house, which led to charges under the PROTECT Act of 2003. While the presiding judge struck down some of the charges against Handley on grounds that they violated his free speech, the obscenity charge stood because, as reported by the Anime News Network, the material in question had been “moved in interstate commerce” (the Anime News Network also has a pretty good overview of the case).

Lolicon, of course, is creepy as all hell. But as Neil Gaiman blogged, specific to the case, freedom of speech has to be comprehensive:

…that’s what makes the kind of work you don’t like, or don’t read, or work that you do not feel has artistic worth or redeeming features worth defending. It’s because the same laws cover the stuff you like and the stuff you find icky, wherever your icky line happens to be: the law is a big blunt instrument that makes no fine distinctions, and because you only realise how wonderful absolute freedom of speech is the day you lose it.

And the problem with the concept of obscenity, especially when it’s applied to material meant for private use, is that it’s too subjective to be applied consistently. In September 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court upheld a sexting conviction in which a teenager sent a picture of his erection to a fourteen-year-old girl. The defense argued that the photo only appealed to a “natural interest in sex”, and the court itself admitted that it couldn’t “conclude, as a matter of law, the materials…were not obscene.”

Therefore, even though another jury in a different community may have found this material not to be obscene, the evidence in this record was sufficient for this jury to determine, under its own community standards, that the material Canal sent to C.E. was obscene.

In other words, whether or not the defendant is convicted is simply luck of the draw. Whether an argument around either a “natural interest in sex” or “artistic merit” apply to Lolicon (personally, I don’t think either does) is beside the point; it’s a distraction from the central issue. Lawrence A. Stanley, writing for Comipress, alludes to the Supreme Court’s 2003 strike-down of Texas’s anti-sodomy law in Lawrence v. Texas, that just because most of society believes what happens in your house between consenting adults is completely perverted, they don’t get to use the power of the state to force you to adhere to their standards of decency.

Edit: Handley’s attorney comments to Anime News Network.

In any event, by ‘Best-of’ list I mean ‘Favorites’ list because the following selection is pretty personal and represent the comics and graphic novels that stuck with me after I’d finished them.

All-Star Superman, written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Frank Quietly (DC Comics)

A version of Superman that’s both steeped in nostalgia yet feels completely new. I’ve never been the biggest Superman fan. Recent takes have been burdened by the weight of the character’s own mythology and there was an annoying tendency to write Superman as a Christ-like figure. Which made him ridiculous. But growing up, I had a fondness for the Superman stories from the 50s and 60s illustrated by the legendary Curt Swan, and which I read in collected editions. Those stories were plain odd. Jimmy Olsen would dress up as a turtle. Brainiac was a green bald dude in a leotard with electrodes on his head. Superman would say things like “Great Scott!”

Grant Morrison’s and Frank Quietly’s twelve-issue take on Superman brings back that exhilarating sense of weirdness from those old comics. But at a deeper level, Morrison and Quietly give us more than the world’s-burdens-on-one-man’s-shoulders template. Why exactly does Lex Luthor hate Superman so damn much? Why is the Clark Kent alter ego such a ridiculous buffoon? And why is Jimmy Olsen such a weirdo? Superman was the first superhero to become a cultural icon. And yet it was Morrison and Quietly who gave the character the sense of awe and wonder that he’d been lacking in recent years.

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (First Second)

I usually hate ethnic identity crisis stories. They’re almost always boring and self-serious, populated by characters whose only trait is their minority status. But Yang’s take on the genre (if we can call it that) is different. He weaves in the legend of the Monkey King—a personal favorite of mine growing up—with a story of teenaged anxiety and confusion. It’s an odd combination, and the two dovetail into each other at the end. It’s one of the most inventive and entertaining comics about beginning to grow up.

Black Hole by Charles Burns (Pantheon Books)

Black Hole focuses on a group of teenagers infected with an STD that creates strange physiological changes. On one level, the comic works as an allegory for the AIDs scare in the 90s—the first issue of Black Hole came out in 1995 (though it didn’t conclude until 2005, when Pantheon Books published it as a single volume). You could also read it as a metaphor for adolescence. Well, whatever.

For me, the power of Black Hole is visceral. I’d never been creeped out by a comic before. I went to junior high and high school through the 90s so I was used to wall-to-wall violence and gore, most of it excreted by Image Comics (I still have crates of Spawn action figures). But the dread in Charles Burns’s Black Hole slowly simmers, building through nightmare images—shed human skin flapping on a branch, dream sequences, and characters that find themselves in situations where the menace is obscured but undeniably present.

Fables, written by Bill Willingham, illustrated by a variety of artists, but mostly Mark Buckingham (DC Vertigo)

The aughts were very good for DC Comics’s non-superhero books. While major adult-oriented titles like Preacher, Transmetropolitan, Sandman, and The Invisibles ended their respective runs, DC’s various imprints introduced 100 Bullets, Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, and Fables. All of these newer titles have epic storylines and concepts, but Fables is consistently inventive and surprising in the way it delves into and often upends the archetypes and themes established in well-known fairy tales. The premise: characters from fairy and folk tales (collectively known as Fables) are exiled to modern-day Manhattan, forced out of their homelands by a mysterious enemy known only as The Adversary.

The worlds that the series creator/writer Bill Willingham depicts are deceptively complex: there is the Homeland from which the Fables have been exiled, Fabletown—the secret Upper West Side enclave the Fables currently call home, and the Farm in upstate New York, where the Fables that can’t pass as human (ie the Three Pigs, the Three Blind Mice, assorted dragons) are compelled to live. Each location has its own culture, its own rules, and its own diverse cast of characters. But Willingham weaves all of these ideas into a very human story about people who’ve lost everything, trying to exist in a foreign world hoping to one day return home. Fables is occasionally bittersweet, occasionally funny, but always exhilarating to read.

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware (Pantheon Books)

Everyone, myself included, drooled over David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp in 2009 (except the people that thought it was pretentious which, point taken). But Chris Ware was the creator who really pushed the boundaries of sequential storytelling at the start of the decade.

Certainly Ware isn’t the first to do this, but he’s part of a pantheon that includes Will Eisner, Bernard Krigstein, Jim Steranko, Dean Motter, Eddie Campbell, and Bryan Talbot. These are all creators who worked to redefine the comics medium, just as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and William Burroughs changed the way people read prose and poetry. But the heart of Jimmy Corrigan isn’t Ware’s stylized storytelling; it’s an incredibly sad story about a lonely man in Chicago meeting his long-lost father for the first time.

Parker: The Hunter by Darwyn Cooke, adapted from the novel by Richard Stark (IDW)

Darwyn Cooke is one of the best storytellers working in comics today. He can create entire narrative sequences in what seems like a few strategically-placed lines. I wondered whether I preferred The Hunter—which was adapted from Richard Stark’s novel—over Cooke’s other huge endeavor, Justice League: The New Frontier, which re-imagines the Silver Age of DC Comics’s superheroes amid the Cold War.

But re-imaginings of superheroes were abundant during the decade (in fact, there are two on this list). And while the number of crime comics has increased rapidly, it seems, since the success of Frank Miller’s Sin City, Cooke’s adaptation is far and away the best. The problem with most crime comics is that they incorporate the shadowy look of film noir and a few common tropes (the femme fatale, the disaffected PI), but it all seems more like a parody than a good crime story. Cooke, with the advantage of working from Stark’s novel, avoids that pitfall, and he also gives New York City a unique visual quality, casting the city in cold, steely blues.

The French comic The Killer, illustrated by Luc Jacamon and written by Matz, is also an exceptionally-written and beautiful crime drama.

Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly Publications)

This is the best work Adrian Tomine has ever done. I’ve been a fan since my aunt gave me a copy of 32 Stories, which was mostly a sketchbook charting his evolution as an artist and storyteller. Tomine’s next book, Sleepwalk, had its moments but I don’t feel he really put everything together until Summer Blonde. And, man does he ever put it together.

A friend of mine once complained that Tomine’s artwork is “stiff.” I know what he means I think. His lines are very precise and his storytelling from panel-to-panel is sharp and clear, but the art itself isn’t particularly kinetic. Compared to Chris Ware’s bizarre and brilliant layouts or Jillian Tamaki’s beautiful, swooping linework, Tomine can seem a bit staid. But I think this really works in his favor. His characters, especially in Summer Blonde, have a lot of rage and tension simmering beneath their exteriors, which creates a really neat tension with the artwork.

The Ultimates, written by Mark Millar and illustrated by Bryan Hitch (Marvel Comics)

The Ultimate Marvel imprint feature Marvel Comics’s re-launching of their core properties. It began with Ultimate Spider-Man and progressed with Ultimate X-Men, both of which were critically acclaimed and well-recieved by readers. But it was The Ultimates—a 2002 re-launch of the Avengers superheroes—that really shook things up. Written by Mark Millar and illustrated by Bryan Hitch, The Ultimates is essentially an action movie on the page. Visually, the creative team opted for elongated, “widescreen”-style panels and compositions.

But what makes The Ultimates so good is that it has some of the sharpest writing in a superhero comic since Peter Milligan’s and Mike Allred’s run on X-Force (which was released around the same time as The Ultimates). During their 13-issue run, Millar and Hitch explored how the presence of a US government-sponsored superhero taskforce completely skews the global balance of power, and what other countries might do in response to this sudden shift. For a series featuring shape-shifting aliens, superheroes frozen in icebergs, and Hulk rampages, the incisive political subtext was, paradoxically, grounded in the real world.

The Walking Dead, written by Robert Kirkman and illustrated by Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard (Image Comics)

I did my due diligence about this in a previous post, so I’ll just link to it and we can all move on.

We3, written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Frank Quietly (DC Vertigo)

This is essentially Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey. Except instead of two dogs and a cat, We3 features a dog, a cat, and a bunny. All of whom are cybernetically-enhanced assassins. And it’s one of the weirdest-saddest-funniest stories I’ve ever read.

This is the second appearance on this list by both Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly. Apparently, they had a good decade. Morrison especially has been busy; he revamped X-Men, Batman, and the entire DC superhero universe. He jumpstarted seven lower-mid-tier superhero properties with Seven Soldiers of Victory and completed a wild series called The Filth. Morrison is known for his looping, ambitious narratives and yet his writing is most effecting when he’s telling a simple, straightforward story about three animals just trying to find their way home.

But in October, TCJ announced, in a letter printed to its subscribers, its intentions to move the majority of its content onto its site. The print version isn’t dead: Fantagraphics will ship twice a year a prestige format, large-scale print version of TCJ.

Why this is good:

As TCJ pointed out in its notice to subscribers, readers will have quicker access to content. In putting the bulk of its content online, TCJ can leverage video and all the different scripting languages to build a more interactive and richer reader experience.

Also, it’s free content. TCJ now has the opportunity to expand its audience. In turn, this will give the creators and books featured in TCJ more exposure. Bear in mind, TCJ approaches comics as art; they’re essentially the antithesis of the fanboy culture established by the superhero books from Marvel or DC. The creators featured in TCJ don’t have the marketing apparatus of a corporate backer, so publicity in TCJ is highly beneficial to them.

And there’s the matter of expediency: TCJ can eliminate the time-consuming and costly logistics of assembling, shipping, and distributing a print magazine eight times a year.

Why this is not-so-good

There are some interface issues. The new-look TCJ is laid out like a blog. But it’s not a blog, it’s a magazine, which should be reflected by the site’s design. There’s plenty of time for the site to grow and evolve but right now, I think TCJ still needs to figure out how to present a massive amount of content in an intuitive, online format. They’ll still retain their loyal subscribers, but the point of making its content more readily accessible should be to attract new readers.

Which leads to another issue: TCJ now needs to manage  subscribers of its print periodical as well as maintain a steady flow of web traffic. Though it’s not exclusively an online periodical, TCJ is now more or less in league with comic book news sites like Comic Book Resources and Newsarama. Both CBR and Newsarama, according to rankings on Alexa, enjoy significantly higher traffic than TCJ. Of course, CBR and Newsarama have both had strong online presences longer than TCJ. They also cater towards more mainstream superhero comics with built-in fan followings, the type of comics that eventually become Hollywood movies.

So while TCJ will save time and money by putting most of its articles, news, and interviews online, it still needs to maintain the site and the traffic that goes through it. The quality of TCJ’s writing has always been its strong suit and probably always will. But now the magazine must worry about its delivery.

Asterios Polyp

Writer/Illustrator: David Mazzucchelli

Type: Graphic novel

To describe Asterios Polyp as a comic about a disintegrating (or disintegrated) family is pretty reductive. The book took Mazzucchelli nearly a decade to complete and the final work is continuously rewarding after second, third, and even forth reading.

On the surface, Asterios Polyp follows a former professor of architecture and divorcee (the title character) who loses the contents of his entire apartment in a fire. He embarks on a road trip, much of which is interrupted by flashbacks of his failed career and marriage. The synopsis seems pretty benign, but the point of the book isn’t entirely what it’s about, but how it’s about it. Scott McCloud and Douglas Wolk are both better at breaking down Mazzucchelli’s work than I am.

Mazzucchelli is a veteran illustrator. He’s been active since the early 80s and he’s most well-known for his work in mainstream comics; after illustrating Batman: Year One for Frank Miller, he devoted his time to more personal projects. It’s exhilarating as Mazzucchelli pushes the boundaries of what one can do with sequential storytelling. The result is a book that’s as much about the form and structure of comics as it is about love, loss, and trying (perhaps too late) to make amends.

Essex County

Writer/Illustrator: Jeff Lemire

Type: Graphic novel

Jeff Lemire is almost the opposite of David Mazzucchelli. The latter is an incredibly disciplined artist and a bit of a chameleon, able to change his style to accommodate the story. Lemire is much more limited. His artwork is scratchy and loose, bordering on crude. But it’s also moody and atmospheric; Lemire is excellent at depicting the stark Canadian farmland where the three stories contained in Essex County take place. I actually don’t think the volume would be as affecting as it is if Lemire’s art had more polish, if he didn’t have such thick brushwork and opted instead for a tighter style. The sketchiness of Lemire’s lines–and this is especially true when he draws faces–always seem to suggest some underlying tension, that the characters that inhabit his stories are on the verge of completely losing it.

The chapters were originally published as three self-contained, though connected, graphic novels (Think: Winesburg, Ohio). The first chapter follows a ten-year-old boy named Lester who, because of his mother’s illness, lives on a farm with his uncle. Their relationship is strained, mostly due to the circumstances surrounding the boy’s stay, and Lester spends his days fantasizing about superheroics until he befriends the owner of a local gas station. It’s a short, sparse story about being in circumstances that force you to grow up faster than you ordinarily would.

The second chapter is Lemire’s masterwork, charting the deterioration of the relationship between two brothers through the decades. Lemire does a lot here that’s difficult to do in a comic: he jumps around chronologically, and from one geographic locale to the next. He also illustrates some truly memorable sequences. One of the final images of the chapter, a double-page spread, continues to haunt me.

And the final chapter, though it can also be read on its own, ties everything together. It’s actually an anti-climax (the book essentially ends with a family tree), but don’t let that hold you back.

Identity Crisis

Writer: Brad Meltzer

Penciller: Rags Morales

Inker: Michael Bair

Type: Trade paperback, originally published in single magazine form as Identity Crisis 1-7

Identity Crisis is the most controversial book on this list, which you probably wouldn’t expect because it’s a superhero story featuring Superman, Batman, and Green Arrow. Also, it centers around a third-tier character named Elongated Man, whose only superpower is that he’s stretchy. Kind of hard to court controversy if that’s all you do.

But the book opens with the violent murder of Elongated Man’s wife. That, followed by a subsequent revelation, pretty much reignited the whole Women-in-Refrigerators debate and with good reason. The incident that kick-starts the narrative in Identity Crisis is a horrific one, and I don’t think Meltzer handles the material particularly well; it’s primarily just a seedy little plot device to get things revved up.

That being said, I do like almost everything else in Identity Crisis. The concept is great: a murderer targets the family and friends of various superheroes. Meltzer is exceptional at showing the fraying alliances within the superhero community, especially as some choose to secretly cross a line in order to safeguard their loved ones. Brad Meltzer is a novelist, a writer of thrillers and mysteries. The tightly-plotted whodunnit aspect is the biggest strength of this book; this is unusual for mainstream superhero comics, which can be discursive and tend to focus on whether superhero X will foil supervillain Y’s evil plot Z.

Swallow Me Whole

Writer/Illustrator: Nate Powell

Type: Graphic novel

Nate Powell is probably one of the best creators at conveying his characters’ interiorities. He uses deep shadows, extreme close-ups, and irregularly-shaped word balloons filled with illegible characters to create the ominous paranoia surrounding the two siblings in Swallow Me Whole. Ruth suffers from OCD and communicates with insect armies; Perry battles the onset of childhood schizophrenia, which manifests as a wizard commanding him to draw. This description notwithstanding, Swallow Me Whole is completely devoid of whimsy and sensationalism.

Powell, who works with adults with developmental disabilities, treats Perry’s and Ruth’s afflictions matter-of-factly, as nuisances that add to the usual confusion of adolescence and the other irritations in life. Strangely, this is what gives the book its tension–that though Ruth treats her insects as another aspect of her life, and though Perry tries to ignore the wizard (which he knows isn’t ‘real’), these hallucinations will sooner or later play a much more disruptive role in the siblings’ respective lives.

In the end…well, I’m not really sure what happens in the end. The events in the narrative become ambiguous, and I’m still not certain whether this is a deficiency in Powell’s storytelling or if it was entirely a creative decision.

Three Shadows

Writer/Illustrator: Cyril Pedrosa

Type: Graphic novel

This is a sad book, a kind of nightmare allegory about parents confronted with their child’s inevitable death. In this case, death manifests as three horseback riders, who emerge one summer day by a cottage belonging to a farmer and his family. They keep reappearing, each day getting closer, until it becomes apparent that they are there to take the farmer’s young son. Out of desperation, the farmer flees with his son, and I think I’ll end the synopsis here.

Pedrosa is an excellent artist. He conveys a range of moods, tones, and settings using a few economically-placed lines or a strategic splash of ink. One of his most effective sequences is when the farmer, preparing to flee with his son, says goodbye to his wife. It’s a two-page sequence and from a visual standpoint, not much is happening. And yet Pedrosa, with only a few smudges of ink, evokes the conflicting senses of loss, resignation, and defiance that alternate through the book.

The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite

Writer: Gerard Way

Illustrator: Gabriel Ba

Type: Trade paperback, originally published in single magazine form as The Umbrella Academy 1-6

The Umbrella Academy is a superhero book, but it’s also one of the most unusual superhero books since writer Grant Morrison’s run on Doom Patrol in the 1980s (It’s not surprising then that Umbrella Academy creator Gerard Way, who’s also the lead vocalist for My Chemical Romance, was inspired by Doom Patrol). Unlike most superheros, who juggle private lives alongside their heroics, the characters in Umbrella Academy are wholly defined by their powers and the adventures that they have because of them.

The story: the estranged step-siblings that constitute the Umbrella Academy return for their guardian’s funeral. They argue, only to be confronted by Vania, the most-estranged of the siblings, and whom everybody assumed had no powers. She does, in fact, and they’re incredibly destructive.

The Umbrella Academy really isn’t about its plot; it’s about the oddities that inhabit its world and the irreverent and ironic way in which Way and Ba tell the story. There’s an annoying tendency in mainstream superhero comics to explain everything. Why does Bruce Wayne dress like a bat? Because a bat once flew through his window while he was sulking in his study. The Umbrella Academy makes no effort to explain anything. The defacto leader of the Academy, apropos of nothing, has the body of a gorilla. Their nanny is a dress form with an intestinal tract. There are talking chimps. In other words, things are weird for weirdness’s sake. And that’s refreshing in an era where there’s a tendency to ground superheroes with real-world tedium.

The Walking Dead Compendium Volume 1

Writer: Robert Kirkman

Illustrator(s): Tony Moore (issues 1-6), Charlie Adlard (issues 7-48)

Type: Hardcover collection, originally published in single magazine form as The Walking Dead 1-48.

So here’s one where the families disintegrate quite literally.

The Walking Dead is my favorite ongoing series right now, despite the fact I started reading it years after its debut. I was put off by the title, which seemed overly-descriptive and a little dull, and by the covers, which constantly featured close-ups of zombies. So I figured that the title would mostly be about survivors in a post-apocalyptic world massacring hoards of the undead. I’m into that sort of thing, but mostly in video games.

But The Walking Dead really isn’t about the zombies; it’s about the survivors who band together and the tensions that arise as they struggle to find food and shelter and as they experience death, love, and jealousies amongst each other. But now I’m making it sound like an Oscar-bait dramedy, and it’s not that either.

In a few words: this book is fucked up. It’s about people trying very hard to cling to their humanity when there’s really no reason to do so, when in fact it would be very inconvenient and possibly life-endangering to do so. And it’s also about waves of zombies who overwhelm with sheer volume and whose bite guarantees both death and the fact that the victim will eventually turn him or herself.

Writer Kirkman gives a great deal of attention to the survivors. I’ve noticed in almost all zombie epics each surviving human typically has precisely one personality trait: This man panics, That man grieves, That woman is pregnant, etc. But there’s a lot more depth to Kirkman’s characters; they don’t just shoot zombies–they also try to study them and figure out their tendencies in the hopes that that knowledge will help them survive. They develop a taxonomy, for instance, describing how some zombies have a tendency to wander whereas others are more sedentary. They note that zombies are attracted by loud noises, and when that happens, they tend to arrive in herds.

The Walking Dead is a much more detailed study on human nature than I expected from a series about lurching, moaning corpses. Throughout the series, the survivors’ personalities change and their alliances shift. Favorite characters die suddenly and often unexpectedly. And that’s what makes this series so great: events change rapidly and, when they do, the impact resonates as much with the characters in the book as with the reader.

To celebrate Mr. Moore’s birthday (not really), two Kentucky library workers were fired for conspiring to keep Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume IV: The Black Dossier from the hands of an 11-year-old girl. The scheme was initially simple: one library worker, appalled by the sexual content of the book, kept checking out the book to keep it from circulation. When the 11-year-old girl placed a hold on it, another library worker-and this is where the real fun starts-accessed the library’s system to remove the hold, thereby preventing the precocious reader from obtaining a copy. Both workers were fired.

The worker who initially kept renewing the book, Sharon Cook, still has it in her possession and is currently being fined 10 cents a day.

The proof is in her knapsack, in a bright yellow flexible file folder, hidden from prying eyes. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume IV: The Black Dossier. It has pink and yellow highlighter tags sticking out, marking the pages that contain explicit sexual content.

And according to Cook:

People prayed over me while I was reading it because I did not want those images in my head.

Harrowing. In fairness to Cook, Black Dossier is highly sexualized, more so than the two previous League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volumes.

And also, the very last section of the book is in 3-D and requires you to read it with these nifty paper-and-plastic goggles. Which probably just intensified the problem.

From: Boing Boing via The Beat

But the X-Men? Supposedly, they fight bigotry, which isn’t always convincing because they can all pass as human supermodels. Also, you can’t fight bigotry by killing people who are bigoted (Actually you can, but it won’t win you any hearts and minds). The X-Men occasionally fight evil mutants and aliens but with a few notable exceptions, the X-villains also tend to lack direction. So mostly, the X-Men fight each other. In the first X-Men comic I ever read, a basketball game went from sexually-tense bickering to a super-powered brawl.

At its worst reading the ongoing series is a slog, like a bad episode of Big Brother, full of muscular people bitching and moaning. But at its best, the sharp interplay between the characters elevates whatever ridiculousness is happening in the plot.  Joss Whedon’s and John Cassaday’s 2004-2008 run on Astonishing X-Men falls into the latter category; Marvel Comics released the hardcover omnibus collecting their entire 25-issue arc in late October. Whedon is best known for his television series—namely as the creator and top writer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and Dollhouse. His writing in Astonishing X-Men captures the best of his television work: swiftly-paced action with a sharply ironic undertone. He’s also exceptional at individuating characters in ensemble casts; the traditional problem with X-Men comics is that they tended to feature an indistinguishable group of heroes, plus Wolverine.

Astonishing Sex-Men

Whedon’s run on Astonishing X-Men breaks down into four chapters, each of which can be purchased individually as trade paperbacks. The first chapter, called Gifted, is the best and focuses on a cure for the mutant gene that gives the X-Men their powers, and the presence of which makes them hated and feared by the human populace (I’ve never understood why, in Marvel Comics’s superhero universe, those born with powers are treated with suspicion whereas those who got their powers via radiation or some superman serum are revered. It’s kind of like worshiping only athletes that dope).

Gifted is the most compelling arc because it confronts the way in which each X-Man deals with his or her responsibility to the team and to his or her outsider status. This could be overwrought in the wrong hands, but Whedon’s X-Men are witty enough to keep the narrative from becoming a slave to this more grandiose “theme.”

If Whedon’s run falters, it’s because of his villains; they never seem particularly ominous and trend towards the goofy. He creates two for his arc: the alien Ord of Breakworld and the robot Danger, who originates when the X-Men’s Danger Room gains sentience (Don’t ask. Not worth going into here). Neither character is particularly interesting and it’s unfortunate that chapters two and four feature these villains so prominently.

I wonder if the end of Whedon’s run would have been more successful if he hadn’t demonstrated such fealty to closing off Ord’s and Danger’s respective storylines. In the fourth and final chapter, the X-Men are spirited off to Breakworld, where they confront both Ord and Danger, things blow up, the Earth is imperiled, and a fan-favorite X-Man dies. And yet, despite these pyrotechnics, the book ends in a whimper. Shit blowing up? Earth in danger? A comic book superhero dies a comic book death? It’s all pretty standard fare, and though I kept expecting Whedon to put a unique spin on these conventions, it never happened.

And yet, Whedon’s and Cassaday’s run on X-Men is one of the best. X-Men has always been one of Marvel Comics’s best-selling titles. Paradoxically it’s also been, for the most part, one of its worst-written largely because the title is overrun with characters each with a completely convoluted backstory. While Marvel’s other characters have or have had problems grounded in the real world (Spider-Man has to reconcile his superheroics with his personal life; Hulk needs anger-management; Iron Man was an alcoholic), the X-Men’s problems tend to originate from comic book absurdities (Wolverine has memory blocks; Beast became a big blue furry thing; Jean Grey died, came back to life, died, came back to life again, died again).

A new X-Man decides her codename while Wolverine's face grows back

Whedon acknowledges these bizarre backgrounds, but he also pokes fun at them and he doesn’t allow them to overburden the stories he wants to tell. He gives each character room to breathe such that Astonishing X-Men is actually most compelling when the cast isn’t doing anything other than sitting around talking.

The Astonishing X-Men Omnibus retails for $75 and collects Astonishing X-Men #1-24, as well as Giant-Size Astonishing X-Men (which is essentially the finale).

* Yes, I realize Justice League of America is published by DC Comics. I was just trying to make a point. Don’t be such a nerd.

-Warren Ellis from his 1997 proposal

Earlier this month, WildStorm Productions—one of DC Comics’s publishing imprints—quietly released the twenty-seventh and final issue of the comic book series Planetary. It was an inauspicious close to one of the most exhilarating ongoing titles in recent memory.

Planetary #27. Currently available at your local comic book retailer.

Planetary’s release schedule had always been erratic. The comic book debuted as an ongoing series in early 1998 and though each issue was supposed to adhere to a bi-monthly schedule, there were times when it felt like a quarterly. The title went on hiatus between 2001 and 2003. Production eventually resumed—as did the familiar delays in the title’s schedule—until it more or less wrapped in 2006. Which is likely why the release of the single-issue “finale” three years later was met with so little fanfare.

Within that decade-long timeframe, the creative team—the writer Warren Ellis and the artist John Cassaday—had become involved in much more high-profile projects for Marvel Comics. Ellis, for instance, wrote an Iron Man one-shot; Cassaday had a stint as the penciller on Astonishing X-Men, written by Joss Whedon.

The eponymous organization in Planetary is comprised of three superhuman archaeologists intent on discovering the secret history of the 20th century. “Sometimes, things best left covered emerge into ordinary life and do not have the world’s best interests at heart,” Ellis wrote in his original proposal. “These are the times when Planetary arrive, invited or not, and deal with the situation while learning from it, adding to their own knowledge of how this world really works. In every issue, they (and we) learn and see something new, something that evokes that old mythical Sense Of Wonder that so few people do any more…”

Each issue of Planetary, at least during three quarters of its run, was entirely self-contained—almost like a collection of vaguely-connected short stories or, in Ellis’s words, a “three minute pop single.” It’s a canny decision, from both a creative and a practical standpoint. The world of Planetary is one in which giant monsters rampage on a secret island off of Japan, where giant ants await buried in the deserts of New Mexico, and where Sherlock Holmes once lead a team whose members included the Invisible Man, Thomas Carnacki, and Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. Planetary is an explosive fusion of 20th century pop culture—from Japanese monster movies, British adventure novels, American superheroes, and Hammer horror pictures.

How do these disparate elements cohere? They don’t, really. One of the brilliant aspects of Planetary is how each issue adopts the characteristics of the genre from which it borrows. Ellis and Cassaday use the language of comics such that each story has a unique feel and design. Ellis is one of the best authors at writing to his artist’s strengths. He and Cassaday make an exceptional pairing, as Cassaday is a chameleon, constantly altering his style to accommodate Ellis’s genre mashup. Each cover fields a completely different aesthetic. Issue five comes straight from a Doc Savage novel, for instance; issue eight is an homage to monster movie posters from the 1950s.

Even the interior artwork changes depending on the issue’s genre. Dead Gunfighters, about a murdered Hong Kong detective returned for vengeance, is a clear homage to Hong Kong action films. Check out the opening sequence:

All wide panels, like a cinema screen, with the credits flickering in and out as they would at the beginning of a movie. The “widescreen” paneling continues as the ghost cop emerges and, in a hail of gunfire, ventilates the villains. This layout breaks only when the Planetary team appears.

Issue five, called The Good Doctor, mixes prose and black-and-white illustrations—a tip of the hat to American pulp fiction.

But the creative team loses this energy towards the end of their run. Ellis ties some of the book’s various threads loosely into a more cohesive narrative, the details of which I won’t go into here. But as the book began to feel more like a conventional superhero story, I grew bored. And the series climax was a letdown; after Ellis’s exploration of so many wonderful and strange ideas, it’s disappointing when the good guys solve their problems by kicking the crap out of the bad guys.

For all intents and purposes, Planetary’s run had completed in 2006. The recently-released issue 27 was meant mostly as a coda to the series, and it reads as such. If anything, its release might rejuvenate interest in the earlier issues, currently available in three trade paperbacks which collectively feature issues 1-18, or in the Absolute Planetary hardcover edition (for rich people only), which features issues 1-12.

There’s an extent to which Planetary, read today, feels slightly dated—and not just because of its subject matter. Planetary is a pre-9/11 title, reaching its peak when a line of dialogue about a head-of-state who “ran the most shameless vote-grabbing artifical war scam in fifty years” referred to Margaret Thatcher and not to George W. Bush. And frankly, there’s something unsettling about the strange utopia depicted in the opening pages of issue 27, where a single organization, despite its benevolence, wields so much power.