A Beautiful Gory Display: Bloom County is Back!
At long last, IDW Publishing is collecting the entire run of Bloom County in a series of archive quality hardcovers. The end product is absolutely gorgeous with thick paper stock and beautiful print quality. It’s a prestige package, and it looks better than any strip reprint I’ve ever seen. Even better, the publishers provide plenty of editorial material, including footnotes to explain dated references. Cartoonist Berkeley Breathed even jumps in with his own recollections, or to point out his youthful inexperience. (Refreshingly, he acknowledges that the early strips were inspired entirely by Doonesbury, and he points out that he didn’t know that humans and animals weren’t supposed to talk to one another in comic strips. I never thought about that, but before Opus, animals communicated entirely with thought balloons.)
Despite the rough quality of the earliest strips, the material holds up pretty well. Even the topical references are usually based in a strong enough gag that they still bring a laugh. Funny is funny – if the entire joke is a pop-culture reference, it won’t hold up. But if that same reference is an element of a joke, the mechanics are still there. The early art is surprisingly ugly – there’s a reason that the first year or so of the strip has been largely uncollected until now. Breathed shows strong improvement over the course of this book, and in future volumes you’ll see that his art becomes more and more effective, with occasional moments of real beauty.
If you remember Bloom County, you’ll be surprised how few of the familiar elements are introduced over the course of this book. The early material centered on Milo Bloom and his grandparents, who ran a boarding house. In later years, the boarding house remained, but the grandparents disappeared. Also, Milo stopped being a vehicle for the strips about adolescent uncertainty that you’ll see here – I’m convinced he was just a very short adult when the strip ended. Mainstays like Steve Dallas and Cutter John are here, with their personalities mostly intact, as is Opus the Penguin, though he has another year or two of development before reaching his iconic incarnation. Binkley doesn’t have his signature hairstyle or “anxiety closet” yet, and Bill the Cat appears in a mere two strips. It’s not the strongest period of the strip by any means, but it lays a great foundation for the genius to come in future volumes. By my estimate, Steve Dallas should be managing Billy and the Boingers by the end of Volume Three, and if Breathed had never done anything but that storyline he’d still be Hall of Fame material.
Planetary 27 (DC/Wildstorm) – Back in 1999, writer Warren Ellis and artist John Cassaday
launched Planetary. A weird blend of every speculative genre imaginable, it followed the adventures of Elijah Snow and his team who chronicled the fantastic and tried to right certain wrongs. It was a book where the ghost of a murdered Hong Kong cop walked the streets dispensing justice with his spectral guns, and where a Japanese suicide cult based their apocalypse prophecies around the corpse of Godzilla. Superheroes wiped out the pulp heroes in a deadly bottle, and thinly-disguised versions of the Fantastic Four made the world a worse place to live. The series’ tagline was “It’s a weird world. Let’s keep it that way.”
launched Planetary. A weird blend of every speculative genre imaginable, it followed the adventures of Elijah Snow and his team who chronicled the fantastic and tried to right certain wrongs. It was a book where the ghost of a murdered Hong Kong cop walked the streets dispensing justice with his spectral guns, and where a Japanese suicide cult based their apocalypse prophecies around the corpse of Godzilla. Superheroes wiped out the pulp heroes in a deadly bottle, and thinly-disguised versions of the Fantastic Four made the world a worse place to live. The series’ tagline was “It’s a weird world. Let’s keep it that way.”And for the most part, it was a great series. But note what I said – it started in 1999. Ten years later, the 27th and final issue came out. Even worse, the twenty-sixth issue came out in 2006. Let’s put that in perspective. Planetary premiered the same month as HBO’s The Sopranos. While David Chase was often criticized for taking too long between seasons, he did produce a full series and 87 episodes in the time it took Ellis and Cassaday to bring us 27 issues. The last time an issue of Planetary came out, Mr. Eko was still alive on Lost. The last time an issue of Planetary came out, AMC didn’t offer original programming. Pixar has put out four movies since the last issue of Planetary.
Now, I understand that you can’t rush art. I accept this. However, it also seems like the artist, especially one in a serial format, has a certain obligation to the audience. Matthew Weiner can’t take a full year between episodes of Mad Men, after all. And true, years down the line, it won’t matter to anybody. Nobody cares how late the final issue of Watchmen was back in ’87, and it was really late. When Planetary is collected in full, the glacial publishing pace won’t matter anymore. However, what I’m looking at is the 27th issue of Planetary as an item in the present, and it’s that item that’s disappointing.
See, the final issue is an epilogue to the main series, tying up a loose end. In the collection, it will make a nice, positive note on which to end the series. But as a single issue, it’s a dreadful bore. The issue is centered on recovering a minor character from early in the series who was frozen in time, which is all well and good, but there’s absolutely no conflict. The first half of the issue consists of the characters discussing how they’ll rescue him, and the second half consists of them doing exactly what they said they would do. There’s no conflict and no suspense. People talk about things and then they do those things. In the book, it’ll be a satisfying epilogue after all the excitement of the previous chapter, but as an item that I spent money on, and that took three years to create, it’s only a disappointment. And considering that the whole story hinges on a character who was last seen before Arrested Development premiered, only the obsessive fans will even care.
Warren Ellis runs hot and cold with me. Sometimes he’s brilliant, but sometimes he hits the same tropes over and over. One of those tropes is to have characters regurgitate theories from issues of New Scientist. And that’s what they do here. He actually presents an interesting theory about how time travel would actually work, but there’s not a real point in breaking this theory up into word balloons and illustrating it. The characters are just ciphers to present this theory, which means that John Cassaday essentially illustrated a lecture on theoretical physics. And he did a fine job of that, at least. He’s one of the best artists in the business, and his work is always jaw-dropping. Still, what he’s given to draw here is only a letdown.
Future EJ will probably be very happy with The Complete Planetary, but Present-Day EJ is a little miffed that he spent money on an issue where nothing happens and that showed up three years too late.
Invincible Iron Man (Marvel) – I like the idea of Iron Man. I loved the movie. And yet, there are very few actual Iron Man comics that manage to be good. After all, the “Tony Stark is an alcoholic” story from the 80’s is usually cited as the best Iron Man story ever, and it’s really not that good. (I feel like I’ve mentioned this before, but Tony’s big come-to-Jesus moment in that arc is when he’s so drunk that he *gasp* forgets an address.) In fact, it sort of stripped the character of any sense of fun. And for the last few years, poor Tony has been so badly mishandled as to be seemingly unsalvageable. I’d reconciled myself to waiting for the next movie before I could enjoy Iron Man again.And then, they relaunched the Iron Man series and put writer Matt Fraction in charge, and he fixed everything in record time. Fraction gets that Iron Man is a billionaire playboy genius who wears a flying tank and there is nothing about that description that isn’t awesome. It seems like all the good things about Iron Man have been lost lately, overwhelmed by the way he was portrayed as a villain in 2007’s Civil War crossover. So Fraction just moves on from there. Tony thought he was doing the right thing and regrets it now. He doesn’t have to justify himself to the reader – after all, we know that Tony Stark is smarter than we are. Forget the hand-wringing and get the man to battle a squadron of human bombs.
His run on the book has been consistently enjoyable, but the just-wrapped “World’s Most Wanted” story was nothing short of fantastic. Basically, to keep sensitive information away from Norman Osborn (Yes, the Green Goblin. It’s hard to explain.), Tony wiped his own mind. Over the whole storyline, his mind has been slowly degrading. In a neat gimmick, the story found Tony going back to don older and older armor as his intelligence decreased – he couldn’t handle the more sophisticated armor anymore.
Besides being an exciting story that made great use of Iron Man’s supporting cast (Pepper shows more personality here than she did in 40 years of comics and the Iron Man movie combined.), “World’s Most Wanted” is emotionally powerful. Watching Tony gradually deteriorate is legitimately powerful, and a Flowers for Algernon-style e-mail that he writes near the end is heartbreaking. I really didn’t think I could be this involved with the comic version of Iron Man, but this is genius.
The arc ends with a barely-functional Tony Stark wearing a primitive suit of armor and fighting for his life. I can’t even guess where the story is going from here, and that’s really exciting. For the first time in the many, many years that I’ve been following Tony Stark, there’s an Iron Man series that actually lives up to the character.
That’s all for this week. Next time, I promise to find a way to bring Batman into this.
