Random Thoughts

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.

Vamps: Hollywood and Vein #1-6 by Elaine Lee, William Simpson and others, published by DC/Vertigo.

This is the second Vamps mini-series, and I wrote about the previous one the other day.

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

Let’s read the first three pages.

Oh, the art style has changed substantially since the first mini. I felt that looked very Neil Adams/Dick Giordano-derived, but this has a very different feel. I love the Muñoz-via-Giffen shadow over that guy’s face in the second panel, but that’s unfortunately the only instance of that in the book…

But most of all, the colouring doesn’t suck! It’s really good. It’s Tatjana Wood.

The faces still have a tendency to go all kinds of awry at the drop of a hat, but that’s fine.

Anyway! Lee is a playwright and an actor, and this is set in Hollywood, so we get a ton of Hollywood-related jokes, like the one about the two actors above.

With Wood’s colouring job, it’s easier to keep the characters apart, too, although when they bring in new women to be killed, it sometimes gets a bit confusing.

And, yes, the vampires are still as killingest as ever.

Lee writes an introduction to the series by explaining that she and her sister had been spending lots of time in various Hollywood offices lately, and she’d be killing of numerous people she’d met over the course of the series.

That’s nice!

The artwork is seldom grisly, but scenes like this are torture porn, anyway, aren’t they?

The Vamps are in Hollywood to make a vampire film… and when I saw this scene, I thought we were in for a super-meta commentary on the first mini-series, because this is a scene that happened there, too, but in “reality” that time.

And that was a line from that series! So I was thinking that the “fictional” movie in this series was going to be an exact retelling of the first mini-series, and I was all aboard for postmodern shenanigans, but… that’s as far as it goes, really. The guy writing the script here had a minor part in the first series, and the script touches upon what happened to him.

(Note sudden long and weird face in the right-hand panel.)

I had no idea that underwear was such a class signifier in the US!

The series has a lot of fun little scenes (like the above where the scriptwriter reminds himself to remember to put what he’s experiencing into the script)… but the series as a whole feels oddly static. The first series was a road movie: It has propulsion built-in. In this series, it feels like we’re spinning our wheels a lot of the time without getting much further.

And there’s, like, only a handful of factions plotting against each other, so it feels like a very sparsely plotted series… as Elaine Lee series go. She’s usually got tons of interesting ideas, and that makes for dense reading experience (which is both a positive and a negative). I found myself wishing there was more than just a movie being made, a guy kidnapping a Elizabethan poet vampire and keeping him in a dungeon, and that woman up there letting blood from his fans and trying to find him, and the scriptwriter coming to terms with being a half-vampire, and

OK, there’s enough stuff going on here for a number of series, but still!

There isn’t much of formal interest in the book, but you do have the occasional spread where there’s something fun going on. Here we have a mirroring of the actions of two different vampires, with I don’t want him/I want him. But it’s just aaaalmost mirrored… which moves it from OOOO to hmmm…

Lee writes presciently about Internet echo chambers and bubbles. In 1996!

Part of the feeling of spinning our wheels is that we get the backstory to basically all the characters. It’s not that those bits are boring or anything, but these bits seldom develop the plot itself…

Hm… the first series was meant to be eight issues, but was cut down. And the bits left out served as the starting point for this series. I wonder whether that’s why it feels a bit undercooked…

Huh. An ad for what became Helix, I guess? Somebody had dibs on Matrix already, I guess?

In the final issue, Lee explains that she has tons and tons of ideas for further Vamps series. We’ll see whether they turn up in the next series…

Kent Worcester writes in The Comics Journal #183, page 37:

VAMPS represents a potentially
lucrative property for Vertigo, DC, and maybe
even Time Warner. From a marketing
standpoint, it’ s a sure bet— a steamy potpourri
of blood-lust, motorcycles, scantily-clad
vampiresses, and the usual gothic bombast.
The sales for some of the other Vertigo titles
may be plummeting, but Vamps is an almost
certain winner in today’ s cut-throat marketplace.
The V amps themselves are five tough-and-
tender daughters of the night. In the first mini-
series they broke their bonds of servitude and
now, in series number two, they have arrived in
Hollywood. Perfect. As DC’s rhapsodic pro-
motional material points out, “there are lots of
Other bloodsuckers in Tinsel Town, and most Of
them aren’t even vampires!”

[…]

The “look” Of this kind of comic book is as
important as the actual story line, of course.
William Simpson’s pencils and inks seem well
suited to the material —he has a good time with
the party scenes, and Can draw a mean set of
fangs — and Tatjana Wood will undoubtedly
do a first-rate job as the book’s colorist. (I was
senttheblack-and-white
preview so can’t tell for sure.) Pete Winslade’s
painted covers, along with Vertigo’s hard-sell
marketingefforts, are also likely to help entice the
reader to pall with his or her hard-earned cash.
All ofwhich will conspireto ensure that Vamps
looks the part and finds its appropriate market
niche. But I can’t help feeling that this project is
a glossy vehicle through which DC can
help develop its latest corporate property. Imagine
the B)ssibilities —buttons, t-shirts, web sites, [X)rce-
lain statuettes, movie television rights, the whole
gamut — because DC
is already counting
the cash. •

Uhm… I don’t know whether they were thinking about Vamps buttons, really.

This series was reprinted in the recent complete Vamps collection.

Vamps #1-6 by Elaine Lee, William Simpson and others, published by DC/Vertigo.

I’m guessing this is the most commercially successful series I’m covering in this blog series — it’s got two followup mini-series and has been collected later.

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

Let’s read the first three pages.

Hey! This is a signed copy! Look at the top of the first page. Now I feel all special…

Anyway, this seems to be a book about… vampires? I know, the title sort of gave the game away.

I can’t really say I’m finding the artwork very inspiring… it looks like Simpson is sort of going for Neal Adams, but not really… getting there? I’m also finding the colouring to be kinda annoying, for some reason: Doing stuff like the bottom right panel (with characters in a block of colour) can be a very effective tool, but here it just seems ugly and sloppy. It’s just so pedestrian.

Aaargh! I have to find a different solution to these blurriness issues: I had hoped that with the better stabilisation in the Sony camera, I could do away with extra sources of light (because that’s so boring to set up), but apparently not.

Anyway, I do think that sated, gorged vampire is funny.

And then the other vampires kill him! It’s a fun set-up: You have these five vampire women freed from their vampire master, and then he can come chase them down, too, when he comes back to life (which I assume that he will).

Writers usually go out of their way to make modern vampires either reluctant to kill innocent people (so they only choose bad people to kill), or make them all tortured about it. Lee will have none of that: These vampires kill random people in gruesome ways, and they have great fun while doing it.

So what do we have here? Just pure nihilism? If your protagonists are just evil monsters that you’d rather see die on the next page, it can get difficult to keep the audience interested…

So Lee writes a very defensive introduction. Her defence seems to be “it’s only entertainment, dude”, as if that … makes much sense.

Again, I’m finding this colouring strategy pretty off-putting and confusing, and I’m just generally having a problem keeping the characters apart. I can tell the one brown-haired from the other because she says “mommi” in every speech balloon (thanks!), and she has slightly rattier hair, but that’s it. Their names don’t help, either. I think it’s… Whitesnake, Howler, Screech, Slater, Mr. Belding, Skeeter, Mink and Zack. Those are very confusing names.

(I may be misremembering some of those names.)

But one thing I do like about that page above there, is the way Lee perfectly describes the drunken/stoned state of these vampires (a major plot point is that vampires get really high from drinking blood).

And then they swear to never, ever kill any bikers (or mechanics) again! Just when you thought they had no sense.

“Mommi”? Is suddenly the other brown-haired one (Screech? Howler?) saying “mommi”? (I can tell it’s the other because she has an ear ring.) Or perhaps the letterer just got as confused as I am as to which one is which and pointed that speech balloon at the wrong person…

This page amused me greatly. Lee has a background in science fiction, and this sort of logical exploration of what it means to be a vampire is very sf.

That must be one of those southern sayings: “A man is like a cabbage with a handle. When you need one, just grab that handle and pull.” I’m going to put that into all git commit messages from now on, because of course I totally understand what it means. (Please leave notes in the comments section.)

The prize for Least Insightful Letter goes to this one, I think. I’m not sure there is any logic there…

For a six-issue mini-series, we do go over the same plot points more than you’d expect. It’s like a mini-recap here and there, which is something most comics had stopped doing, since everything was going to end up as trade paperbacks, anyway…

But, to recap, the main plot of the series is that this vampire (Zack, I think), had a baby before she became a vampire, and the series is really a road movie to go and fetch the child. There’s complications with a sister and a… detective?… and it does really help with keeping things rolling. It’s a well-constructed series, really.

The artwork… not so much? Look at that second figure in the first panel (well, it’s the same character, but) that looks very odd and short indeed. I think the artist is going for a foreshortened downwards view, but it doesn’t really work at all… and the Batman-era Dick Giordano vampire is pretty out of keeping with the rendering of the other vampires… and it’s… I mean, it’s not a horrible page or anything, but it’s just boring.

A letter writer opines that killing so many men is a turn-off (for male audiences). *rolls eyes*

Oh, and the cabbage? Now I feel like a copy-cat, but I really didn’t understand that er southern saying. Is it a double entendre? Is the handle the penis? Why would you need the cabbage anyway?

Anyway, I think this is the most straightforwardly successful Lee comic I’ve read: It’s a snappy read and it’s quite entertaining, and I’m not surprised that it’s apparently a commercial success as well.

It’s no masterpiece like Starstruck, though.

A collected edition of this series has been published:

william simpson is one of the best comic book artists today. lots of detail, great action and character. elaine lee is one of the best comic authors today.

And:

This book, which collects the complete 6-part miniseries, is not really a big and well-built tale storywise but it IS a fun, uncomplicated road trip which has it’s own take on the habits and what can and can’t hurt a vampire. And unlike most of the titles in this particular genre it’s NOT a T & A story.

A complete edition of all the mini-series has also been published.