Random Thoughts

Starstruck: The Expanding Universe #1-4 by Elaine Lee, William Michael Kaluta, published by Dark Horse.

I wasn’t going to do any Starstruck-related stuff in this blog series, but it occurred to me that I had the Dark Horse series, and it might be interesting to read it and compare it to the IDW collected edition.

(Oh, Here’s an explanation of what this blog series is. And I wrote about Starstruck here.)

First we get a somewhat revisionist history by Mark Askwith — Archie Goodwin didn’t “commission” the first Starstruck graphic novel so much as reprint it: It first appeared as a serial in Heavy Metal.

But we’re told what this series is: It’s an expanded version of the graphic novel, the Epic series, and then presumably what was supposed to come after the first six issues of the Epic series (which had originally been planned as a 12-issue series).

Let’s see… the graphic novel was about 72 pages long, and the Epic series was about (* 6 30) => 180 pages long, so that’s *gets slide rule out* 250 pages. And they propose to add 320 pages, so it’s going to be more than twice as long as originally published? Right. Let’s look at the versions..

Above is the first page of the graphic novel..

And then the first page of the Expanding Universe series…

… and finally the first page of the collected version published by IDW in 2011. (Yes, I’ve got the floppy IDW version, too, but I think that’s the same as the collected version. (No, I’m not obsessed! Shut up! No you shut up!))

Famously, the IDW version is in comic book ratio (higher or narrower than the magazine/graphic novel ratio), so Kaluta (with Lee Moyer on colours) had to elongate the artwork on all the pages reprinted from the graphic novel. Here he’s just added an almost-repeat row to the bottom, but they use a large number of techniques, like making panels taller, or adding more space, etc.

And then these are the next pages from the graphic novel…

But these are the next pages from the Expanding Universe! These are new pages! So they did the new pages in the graphic novel ratio, even if the book is printed in comic book ratio? Perhaps they were aiming for a final collected edition that was all in graphic novel ratio?

I had assumed the IDW version was in comic book ratio because the new pages from the Expanding Universe edition were in that format, but… nope.

So even these pages have to be elongated.

Then we’re back to the graphic novel pages…

(here in biggenated version) again. It’s pretty seamless! Of course, Kaluta’s artwork has more of a 70s flair in the original version… the hairdos are just a bit more … soft.

The printing in the Dark Horse edition leaves something to be desired. Sure, it’s printed in a smaller format than it was drawn for, but even so, the lines have a tendency to disappear into nothingness…

Basically, the Dark Horse version covers the same stretch of storyline as the graphic novel, and then adds the first issue of the Epic series. That’s ~100 pages originally, and this version is 200 pages long, so that’s 100 new pages.

So what’s on these pages, then? I mean, the original graphic novel was a great, fun, exhilarating ride. It basically… makes things clearer? I know that sounds like the most boring thing ever, and there are a couple of scenes (like the above) where the characters are talking about things that we already know (if we’ve been paying attention).

Fortunately, these explanatory pages are mostly confined to the start of the series, and then we instead get the backgrounds on Galatia 9/Bruscilla the Muscle (and other characters. It’s not that these are vital to the plot, but they’re really fun, interesting reading in and of themselves.

The IDW edition is (except the enlongening) page for page identical with the Dark Horse edition: The dialogue is the same, and everything happens in the same order. There’s basically nothing new, except somewhat minor things like the heading on the page above.

… which has gotten a date stamp and a quote in the IDW version.

And, of course, we get the infamous dictionary entries that Starstruck has had since the Epic days. I love them. They often fill out details, or make connections between characters that you may not have already made. They… broaden and deepen the Starstruck universe without being a cop-out: They aren’t pages of text that you need to read to understand what’s going on; everything you need to know is in the comic itself, if you just pay attention. These are just extra fun bits.

And, if you really piece together what’s happening, the recaps by Lee Moyer are very lucid and to the point.

I guess kids these days may not get that panel, what with people probably more used to seeing themselves in selfies than in mirrors, but I just love that detail of Molly Medea above imagining herself as she sees herself in the mirror. (Not reversed scar.)

Anyway, I didn’t really plan on re-reading the series for real, like, but just look at the edition, but again I found myself engrossed in the book. It’s just such a perfect comic book. Kaluta’s artwork never fails to impress: It’s gorgeous through and through, and so inventive, but it’s also so damned readable. The storytelling chops are out of this world, especially considering how much this series is about identities and self, which means that you have a bunch of characters that look (on purpose) very similar… and yet it’s never confusing. (Except when it’s meant to be.)

And reading it this way, comparing and contrasting editions, you’d think would take all the fun out of it. But it totally doesn’t, because it’s already a work that you really have to stop and think and go “but wasn’t… yes! hah! hah!” a couple of times per page, so all these editions just makes it even more of a fun puzzle.

Oh, I said that the IDW version was identical? I lied. There’s (I think) three totally new pages, and they’re mostly like that page on the left. (I looks like filler, but it does totally make sense in context.)

That means that we get a different left/right page dynamic on many of the spreads, but I think that perhaps the IDW spreads are slightly better.

Oh! Suddenly a new page in comic book dimensions? Odd.

And then… we run out of graphic novel pages.

Here’s the final graphic novel page.

And here’s the first Epic Comics page, so we continue straight onto the Epic Comics version.

Trading cards? Well, it was the 90s, I guess…

Anyway, the additional pages stop when we reach the Epic Comics portion in the final issue (which is 64 pages long; the others are 48 pages). So all the additional 100 pages went into the graphics novel expansion.

Except… the page above which was added to the end…

Which is sort of mashed up with an original Epic page. It does help with the flow a bit, because the wax guy came in a bit abruptly originally.

Anyway, I’m guessing that means that the next four issues would mostly reprint the remaining five Epic issues, and then we’d finally get the continuation in the final four issues?

I don’t know. It’d make sense?

Instead we had to wait until 2015, when Lee and Kaluta published the kickstartered Old Proldiers Never Die, which does indeed reprint the remaining Epic issues, but I haven’t done a comparative reading, so I don’t know how much it expands upon it.

Indeed.

Anyway: The more I read Starstruck, the more I love it, and I already loved it to bits the first time I set my eyes on it.

If you haven’t read these books yet, hie thee over to bookshop.org.

“Mischief” by Elaine Lee in Chicks with Capes, edited by Lori Gentile and Karen O’Brien, published by Moonstone.

OK, this blog series is about Elaine Lee’s comics, and this isn’t a comic book. Instead it’s an anthology of short stories about super-heroes. But I’ve bought it, so I might as well read it.

Oh, it’s a whole series of books… I had no idea.

So Lee’s contribution is a 20 page thing about a super-hero called Mischief.

“The thing he was driving looked like the box her car came in.” Her care come in a box? Do cars come in boxes? My car didn’t come in a box. Did her car come in a cardboard box? Does the thing he’s driving look like cardboard?

WHAAAAT

Oh, perhaps she’s thinking of a container, and the thing he’s driving is a square metal thing?

CHECK

Mischief is an odd name for a hero, but here we get the explanation.

So, as you may surmise, this isn’t a Deep And Serious story, which is fine by me.

Hm… how does his exercise bike feel, anyway?

Oh, right.

I’m just saying there’s some lines here that don’t quite… It’s a choppy read: We get a framing story (in a car), and a flashback to a super-hero fight, but most of the energy is taken up with a couple’s counselling session. It’s quite funny, but it’s a lot for 20 pages.

And it would be totally out of line for me to point out some copy-editing issues. I mean, I don’t even read my own blog posts, so they are teh grammer mistak.

It’s an amusing story (complete with revenge power fantasy), but just when I was getting used to the writing style, it’s over.

Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant #1-4 by Charles Vess, Elaine Lee, John Ridgway and others, published by Marvel.

What on Earth is this, then? A… new Prince Valiant? Published by Marvel?

Wat?

Oh, Charles Vess has done the plot, and Lee is doing the words, I guess?

(Oh, Here’s an explanation of what this blog series is.)

But what on Earth can this be? It sounds so outlandish that there’d be new Prince Valiant stories published in the 90s… by Marvel… so I wondered whether it had fallen into the public domain, but no — it’s licensed from King’s Features.

But let’s read the first three pages.

Well, that didn’t really tell us much, other than that they’re using Foster’s storytelling, broadly, with a lot of captions and no speech balloons.

Oh, wow. This is like the Götterdammerung des Camelot or something? I hate to talk about plot, but I kinda have to here: Don’t read this unless you want spoilers.

It starts off with basically everybody from Camelot being killed off, including King Arthur and Gawain and most of the knights of that oval-ish table. This approach does remind me quite a bit of revisionist super-hero books in the 80s: Destroy the status quo and then go off from there. It’s fun! It’s exciting! It raises the stakes to previously unimaginable levels! But once you’ve done that, you can’t really go back to the stuff that people liked about the characters/concept, so you have to reset… and that explains all of what’s been going on at DC Comics since 1985 and is still happening to this day.

Which made me wonder whether this was just a dream sequence intro, or something, because I couldn’t imagine that King’s Features would let Marvel do this to their characters.

But no: It’s not a dream, not an imaginary tale, not an alternate dimension: Arthur is dead, Valiant’s son and granddaughter is kidnapped, and England is in ruins.

OK, let me just touch upon my relationship to Hal Foster’s pap pap series a bit: I grew up reading the various collections, badly printed as they were, and I was absolutely captivated as a child. Absolutely totally. But I only had the first, say, dozen or so? years, so I never really got to see Arn go off on adventures of his own and all that stuff. When Fantagraphics started their Prince Valiant reprinting programme, er, a decade ago? I got back into it, and I’ve been reading the volumes as they come out… but I stopped when Foster stopped doing the artwork. Not because that new guy (Murphy?) was horrible or anything, but the stories had become repetetive and dull over the last decade, and that was a good jumping-off point. But my point to all this is that I don’t know how far into the “future” of the newspaper strip this takes place. I think… at least a couple of decades from where I left off? And I don’t know stuff like whether Aleta still lives, or how many children they have and… this series doesn’t go into any of that, and I think that’s such a good idea.

The story starts with that cataclysm, and then Valiant gets his quest, and then we’re off for the rest of the 200 pages this series lasts. No contextualising, no text pages of backstory, no “as you remember, Boltharsson is the son of Bolthar and a Native-American woman”. I love it! It’s full on! It’s Hal Foster storytelling!

Not that he didn’t do flashbacks, but he was fond of keeping things moving (at least in his heyday).

What isn’t quite Foster is… and I’m ashamed to even say this… is Ridgway’s artwork. It’s not Hal Foster. But what is?

The artwork is wildly variable. Some panels look great, and in other panels, people look like random collection of body parts, with head sizes having little relation to body sizes or perspective, and with arms that don’t quite seem to connect with the bodies. The linework also seems quite coarse, as if it’s drawn the same size it’s printed, almost.

But this is a blog article series about Elaine Lee, right? Right. So what about the text?

It’s pitch perfect Hal Foster. It’s more Hal Foster than Hal Foster himself was. It’s just the perfect amount of text, making this feel like a speedy, propulsive read, while in reality it took me all night to read this. I wasn’t bored a millisecond. The text is touching when it should be, witty when needs be, and fierce as a Prince Valiant text should be.

Ridgway does a lot better on the moody panoramas than when doing detailed faces.

Hm… Prince Valiant has a black, tormented soul? OK, I don’t think Foster would have said that, perhaps…

So is this a modern take on Prince Valiant? Hm… I don’t quite know… there’s a lot of female characters here, and they are not at all incidental to the storyline (which I won’t go into further details about, but the storyline is really exciting!), but are integral and important to the outcome. But then again, that’s something Foster used to do, too… perhaps not with as many female characters at once, though.

I’m just amazed at the pacing of this book. They cram so much in here without it feeling overstuffed at all, and there’s no boring padding. Look at the above page: The two children make their escape and are then recaptured… in four panels! Without the captions, this would have taken no time to read, so it would have felt rushed and strange. But read as is, it feels like a little satisfying mini-adventure, and it’s exciting! I’m all in!

And I have to grudgingly admit that Ridgway is a good storyteller, too, because look at the smug expression on the face of the boy in the first panel, and the sheer horror in the final panel. OK, the features of those faces in the latter panel look like they’re on a random walk around the faces, but still!

So… I had no expectations going in here, but I was thoroughly entertained this evening. I was thrilled, I smiled, I almost cried… what more can you ask for?

Apparently this series has never been reprinted? SHAME! SHAME!

But you can pick it up cheaply from Ebay, which I guess means that I was the only person who liked it.

Let’s see… it’s really difficult finding reviews of this book… Here’s one:

What gradually emerges is an absorbing, atmospheric saga that does have an epic quest feel to it, as if you’ve just finished a work of literature — not surprising as it clocks in at almosst 200 pages. But then, I’ve read similar lengthy comicbook sagas that don’t generate the same sense of sweep to them. There are machinations, and shifting alliances; the characters find themselves taking detours in their quest, but detours that add to the overall story, not that seem like extraneous sidebars. This makes for a work that doesn’t just trod along in a predictable fashion.

Actually… that’s the only one I could find.

I’d love to know how this came to be, and why Marvel published it, but I’m coming up with zilch.

Anyway!

Vamps: Pumpkin Time #1-3 by Elaine Lee, William Simpson and others, published by DC/Vertigo.

This is the third and final Vamps mini-series, and I wrote about the first one here and the second one here.

(Oh, Here’s an explanation of what this blog series is.)

Let’s read the first three pages.

Well.. the first thing that strikes me is that Tatjana Wood is gone. She was the colourist on the second mini and did a fabulous job, not only with a great sense of colour, but also by managing to make the action a lot clearer, because… that’s not really Simpson’s forte. So we’re back to where we were in the first mini, where my eyes are skidding all over the place, and I have to go “oh, that’s Howler or whatsername in that panel… so that’s probably her again in the next panel? or is that Screecher? or Screamer? Or Zack?”

This colourist has an absolute mania for picking a single colour palette per page, and doing the figures and the backgrounds in different shades (whether it makes sense or not), making everything look samey and awkward. Just why are the people on that TV show all wearing brown against a lighter brown/yellow background? No TV shows look like that… it’s just bizarre.

Anyway, plot-wise, Lee is adding a lot to the vampire mythology: In the first two series, there really wasn’t a lot to it; just some vamp gals riding around killing people. But here she adds a whole society of vampires that keep the unruly ones under control… but she doesn’t really do much with that setup except put one of the Vamps in danger, and…

… the rest of the three issues is basically one long fight scene.

And for some reason, one of the Vamps has now become an omniscient narrator, talking about things it’s difficult to see how she’d know about. But I do understand the reasoning behind adding a narrator, because otherwise it’d have been pretty difficult to interpret what’s going on on these pages of muddled action.

It’s a book from 1999, and most writers were trying to pretend that cell phones didn’t exist, because they close off so many traditional plots: All those running-around-not-being-able-to-find-each-other plots. But Lee, prescient as usual, embraces the technology.

The obligatory sex/death juxtaposition page.

Although… Trying to interpret what’s actually going on in the sex portion of the page will give you a headache, I think.

And then it ends.

We seem to be promised a continuation, but I think this is the final Vamps appearance? It’s not a very satisfying ending: Everything is left up in the air, really.

This is easily the least inspired of the three mini-series, so I can understand why there wasn’t a followup.

This guy liked it:

The best of the three Vamps miniseries. Lee keeps it simple with this one. A vampire council sends out a group of vampires to kill Skeeter for being too public with her kills. This is also the most action oriented. Most of it is a big chase sequence on Halloween during a biker rally across the Golden Gate Bridge and into the redwood forests. It’s a killer sequence.

The complete Vamps was reprinted recently in a single volume.