Reviews - Review - FA Online

Superman 711

For such an iconic character, there are few truly memorable comics featuring Superman. There’s a balancing act that few creators manage to pull off successfully, and the result is a comic that’s staid, or twee, or camp, or disastrously modified to fit current trends. In this issue, they’ve opted to create a comic that reads like a throwback from the 1970s.

The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics

This huge collection is great value at £12.99 for nearly 500 pages, and it’s nearly all top quality material, from a range of periods.

Dungeon: Monstres 4: Night of the Ladykiller

This is the first book I’ve read in the long-running Dungeon series created by French masterminds Sfar and Trondheim. Despite being the fourteenth translated volume in the sprawling spoof saga which has veered out to five individual branches detailing life and bloody death in this fantasy land making mockery of Dungeons & Dragons, I felt I hit the ground running.

Batman: Gates of Gotham 1

I’m not entirely sure what to say about this – I found very little to get my teeth into. The story starts in the late 19th Century with a Wayne and some other guys planning some unclear but ambitious architecture, including some bridges. Cut to now, and the bridges are getting blown up by someone new, to me at least, for unstated reasons. And that’s it. We are given no reason to particularly care about the bridges, no reason they are more important to the city than bridges naturally are, no sense of what the attacks are for or who the perpetrator is.

Toys in the Basement

Stephane Blanquet has been an active figure in the French comics field since the early 90s. He’s a prominent figure in a movement that’s been given various names: “baby art”, “art brut”, “visionary art”. In a comics context it’s one of those movements that difficult to define, but easy to recognise when it’s seen. It draws on illustrations in Victorian children’s books, underground comics, 1950s pre-code horror comics and the actual style of drawings made by children, and blends the lot into something typically rather grotesque and disturbing.

Yossel

In this graphic novel, one of the all-time great American comic artists imagines how his life might have gone had his family not left Poland in 1926. As with other Jews, they end up in the Warsaw ghetto. Joe, at 16 (in reality he was a successful artist at DC by then), is soon left orphaned, treated better than most by the Nazis because his drawings entertain them. The story climaxes with the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, one of the most desperately tragic events in modern history, where handfuls of half-starved Jews with a few stolen and improvised weapons tried to fight back against thousands of German soldiers, with tanks, flame throwers and so on, because they knew that not fighting back meant a trip to the death camps.

Superboy 7

Recently nominated for an Eisner award for Best New Series, Superboy is one of the best superhero books DC is publishing. If you haven’t tried it, give it a go.

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.

Flashpoint 1

I wasn’t sure whether to try this, since I have been ignoring the Prelude to Flashpoint comics, and it’s another series that crosses over into countless other titles (a checklist lists 22 of them in June alone), but I believe the intent these days is generally to make the central series readable in isolation, so I gave it a go.

Commando 4388

Commando is a British comics institution. The title has been appearing continuously since the early 1960s and is one of the last of the old-school British comics. Each diminutive issue presents the reader with a self-contained war story, usually set in the Second World War. The book typically presents a rather unreconstructed version of military events, with the British and their allies as the good guys and the Germans, Japanese and so on as sinister villains.