Peter Campbell - Review

Love From the Shadows

The painted cover of Love From the Shadows is deceiving, featuring as it does a rather anonymous looking woman half-lounging on a beach. Deceiving, because the woman bears little resemblance to any of the characters contained inside, and also because it’s painted by Steve Martinez, not Gilbert Hernandez. It has an old-fashioned, pulp paperback quality of the sort that promises the book contains a rather lurid and titillating storyline. Which indeed it does: but it’s also the most ambitious and successful of Gilbert Hernandez’ post-Palomar works to date.

The Arctic Marauder

Fantagraphics continues its programme of issuing the works of Jacques Tardi with this, a translation of a comic from the earliest stages of his career. It’s a slim volume (64 pages), written and drawn in a style that reveals another facet to his diverse abilities. It’s also the least satisfying of his works to appear in English to date.

Dark Horse Presents 1

Does anyone bother reading anthology comics any longer? Dark Horse appear to think so, and credit to them for attempting to bolster what’s never been a particularly popular format, in the US at least. Most of the names here appeared in the original DHP when it first appeared many years back, giving this comic an aura less of a new series than of a title that’s been temporarily out of action.

Booster Gold 43

Ah, I’m about to read my first Booster Gold comic. Let’s read the portents. Keith Giffen? He’s done some good stuff, some bad. JM DeMatteis? Never liked his writing. All bathetic poetics or studiedly unfunny zaniness. Chris Batista? Rich Perrotta? Never heard of them, but the cover isn’t the abomination that you see on many other comics. Mmmmm – this one could go either way.

Blazing Combat / It Was the War of the Trenches

What makes a comic an Important comic? Here are two collections that are thematically linked, and which can both be considered to be landmark comics of their type.

Caligula 1

Oh look: someone’s been watching HBO’s Spartacus and has decided to rip it off. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s a long tradition of comics inspired by popular TV series and films, and some of the results have been as good or have exceeded the standards set by their source of inspiration. This is one of the better ones.

The Dingbat Family (The Family Upstairs)

Before Krazy Kat there was The Dingbat Family. It was, in fact, the comic strip that gave birth to Krazy, who literally emerged from the margins of the strip to occupy his/her own series. Thanks to Fantagraphics, the Krazy Kat strips are readily available, but its progenitor is only very occasionally reprinted. That makes the appearance of this collection very welcome.

Hellraiser 1

You would think publishers would learn by now. Every so often they get the bright idea of commissioning a well-known author to write a comic, under the misapprehension that the ability to write a novel automatically results in the ability to write a good comic. You can count the numerous casualties who have attempted this in the past, and you’ll find their efforts lying in many a book store bargain bin. Will Clive Barker’s Hellraiser change that trend?

Stigmata

When Lorenzo Matotti’s Fires appeared 25 years ago, it was one those unexpected works that redefined what comics are capable of. It brought a painter’s sensibility to comics, and a sense of ambiguity that was rare in the medium. If I had to compile some sort of imaginary list of comics to take with me to a desert island, I’d still number it among my top ten. Since then, translations of his comics have been rare and, perhaps inevitably, none have recaptured Fires’ impact and unreal quality. Stigmata comes close to equalling that work though, and in some ways perhaps surpasses it.

The Walking Bread 1

With a title like The Walking Bread, you suspect that you’re not in for an intellectually stimulating read. Yes, it’s a return to the world of lame comic parodies of other comics, in this case, if you hadn’t guessed, The Walking Dead.