Random Thoughts

Indiana Jones and the Spear of Destiny #1-4 by Elaine Lee, Dan Spiegle and Will Simpson, published by Dark Horse comics.

(See this for what this blog series is about.)

Hm! I assumed that this was an adaptation of one of the movies? Wasn’t one of them called something like “Spear of Destiny”? But it’s not; it’s an original story by Lee. Let’s read the first three pages:

On the first issue, the pencils are by Will Simpson, and they’re kinda staid and traditional, which, I guess, suits a Indiana Jones comic book. But the characters don’t really look a lot like Harrison Ford or Sean Connery. It’s very clear storytelling, anyway, and the story is a classic Harrison Ford thing, only set in Ireland. It deals with yet another Christian relic, though.

The characters have a bunch of dreams and/or visions, which sometimes seem to build up to nothing more than a non sequitur.

In the second issue, Spiegle takes over the artwork completely, and things get more lively.

The characters look even less like their movie counterparts, though.

The comic, like the movies, have action scenes with exposition-heavy scenes intertwined. It does work here, but it almost shouldn’t.

Spiegle always likes putting in fun layouts, and his thing here is to do a reverse S reading order, mostly on the right-hand pages, for some reason or other. Brian Chippendale is probably the only comics creator to do the “snake” layout consistently throughout a book — here Spiegle is just carefully leading the eye toward the left in the middle part of the pages.

I like it; it’s fun. And it usually works, but there was a couple of pages where I found myself “er… middle portion to the right or to the left”? But on most of the pages, like the above, it’s virtually impossible to read it in the wrong order.

Well, what do you say about this one? It’s a perfectly serviceable Indiana Jones series. It’s a bit choppy in parts, because the characters didn’t really seem to have much character or motivation, and I found myself going “well… why…?” more than is comfortable.

It’s not very exciting.

The series has been reprinted and collected by Dark Horse. Some fans have made a youtube series with the same name, but it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the Lee series? I just sampled the first episode…

I’m unable to find even a single review of this series on the web, so I guess it didn’t make much of an impression.

Ragman: Cry of the Dead #1-6 by Elaine Lee and Gabriel Morrissette, published by DC Comics.

(See this for what this blog series is about.)

This is the only series Lee wrote for DC Comics proper, but I’ll be covering her Helix and Vertigo (both DC imprints) later in this blog series.

Let’s read the first three pages together:

So it starts with a high-intensity dream… and the guy’s a Vietnam veteran? But is dealing with a lot of childhood trauma? Seems fun!

I vaguely remember reading Ragman as a child, but I don’t actually remember anything about the character. He was tied up with the Batman thing, right? DC had such a range of really strange characters and storylines, and I was fascinated by them as a child. They seemed to come from a very different, strange world, while super-hero comics from Marvel were much more mundane. More sci-fi; sure, but less kooky.

Well… so this is going to be about child abuse? Man.

Wha… uhm… Well, OK, this is where they introduce the rags that make the man into the Ragman, and that’s all the explanation we’re getting. In one way, I admire that approach: Over-explaining the premise of the book gets tedious really fast. I mean, you don’t need to say “Superman, who was sent from his home planet Krypton as a child, and” etc… But a guy who seems to be made up out of rags? That could use some explanation. Leaving it out seems odd here, especially since the book is generally otherwise over-written (which is very unlike all the other Lee books I’ve read).

Oh, they explain the Ragman powers on the letters page. Well, that’s helpful!

*sigh*

Like I said, there’s a lot of verbiage here — we get the protagonist’s internal monologue and a lot of esplainin about what voodoo is, but then we get this silent sequence. Which would have been nice, if it hadn’t been for the thoroughly trite juxtaposition of people having sex with (apparently) a guy getting killed.

So deep.

What… “she”? “Let you down”? Is this a callback to a Ragman thing I don’t know about?

In Starstruck (and Ike Garuda), Lee is a master of telling the reader just enough to keep everybody intrigued while pushing the storyline forward (in many directions at the same time, usually). But there’s always enough information there: You just have to pay attention. I feel like there just isn’t enough information here to even tell what’s going on, and I have no confidence that trying to dig through the vagueness will pay off.

Ragman was created by Kanigher and Kubert, and Kubert does the covers. Quite striking, I think?

Morrissette’s linework is OK, but there aren’t many storytelling chops on display here. You (that is, I) frequently have to skip back to previous panels to try to make out who did what to whom, and just telling the characters apart is a problem. It doesn’t help that Lee has so many of them, and most of them are possessed by a range of different spirits, so we double up on characters, too…

I pretty much gave up during the final two issues to keep track up who all these people and daemons were, because it didn’t seem to be going anywhere interesting. And it didn’t.

What a let-down. It’s such a stodgy, old-fashioned book in many ways, but it doesn’t have any of those stodgy, old-fashioned pay-offs. It’s a total mess.

The series has never been collected or reprinted, apparently.

I really wonder how it came to be, and whether the, er, verbose incoherence of the book is due to editorial interference.

There aren’t many reviews of it on dar intrawobs, but here’s one:

The series starts out sort of effective. Morrissette’s art is suitably moody and effective, mixing realism with atmosphere (I mentioned it reminded me of Hellblazer artists like Steve Dillon and others but it’s actually more atmospheric than some) and writer Elaine Lee has a good feel for scenes and dialogue. So much so that it actually took two or three issues before I started to feel it had problems.

In short — it kind of carries you along for a bit, but then you can find yourself wondering what you’re reading it for and why.

Indeed.

Steeltown Rockers #1-6 by Elaine Lee, Steve Leialoha and others.

I wasn’t planning on doing the Lee comics in chronological order, but I think this may be the earliest one of the ones I’m covering in this blog series, anyway?

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

Let’s read the first three pages of this mini-series:

I’ve always liked Leialoha’s artwork — it’s on the cartoony side of realism, which is the correct side… but his earlier work had all these gorgeous little details, and fun designs and backgrounds. He’s pared it back a lot here: Throughout the series, backgrounds kind of fade a lot of the time…

But I’m really enjoying the storytelling over these three pages: We get a concise view of that guy’s family life, and the short scene with the dad is surprisingly emotional for such a short scene. TV as death, really.

So this is really a comic book, published by Marvel, about a gang of kids starting a rock band? With no super-hero stuff at all? Did Marvel have one of their periodic “let’s try doing something else” periods at the time? And why publish this as a Marvel book instead of an Epic book, where it’d be more of an easy fit?

The copyrights on this book are owned by Marvel (according to the indicia), which makes this all even more puzzling.

Leialoha’s artwork goes super-deformed in the er action scenes, which is fun. But his figures also seem to grow really short, too, which I think is more due to sloppiness.

Lee does the colouring for a single issue, and that’s the one with the best (and most entertaining) colouring job.

It is a very readable book. The dialogue keeps rolling without any hiccups, and Leialoha is a very… clear… storyteller. And reading about these kids putting a band together is entertaining enough.

But we also get a peek at the drama in each of the band members’ families (just a handful of pages from each one), and I’m not quite sure that works as well. There’s just so much drama you can take? Even giving the cat food is dramatic, and it’s just a bit much. (Or whatever it is she’s doing… heating up milk?)

There’s some physical humour, but it’s not really… a funny book? It’s like an 80s teen movie?

OK, they tried selling the final issue by putting “X-Men” on the cover…

… and there’s a song called “Teen Mutant”. Well, OK.

Heh. That’s a kinda fun panel.

Yeah, and there’s drugs (they’re bad, apparently) and alcohol (even worse) in the storyline.

Well, it’s a perfectly pleasant read — nothing that annoys, really. But there’s not much here to work up much enthusiasm for, either.

Amazing Heroes Preview Special #10, page 115:

What do you get when you combine rock ‘n
roll with Marvel Comics? Why, Steeltown
Rockers, of course.
Everything is on the skids in the town of
Steeltown. The mill has closed down,
threatening to take the town with it. For a
group of local teens, the only thing to do is
form a rock band.
The book promises “romance, rock and
roll, rebellion and realism,” and even a few
things that start with other]etters.
The creative team is no stranger to the
subject. Writer Lee wrote the musical play
Starstruck and artist Leialoha has been a
member of the band• “Seduction of the
Innnocent” Let’s hope this will be better than
that Pat Boone title from the ’60s. –TH—

Amazing Heroes #145, page 219:

The book will be completely realistic,
and is aimed at the regular Marvel reader
group—early teenagers—but is hoped to
appeal to girls as well as boys. “There
are no super-heroes, yand not even any
bad guys. Maybe there’s an asshole of
the week,” says Lee. She used her own
childhood experiences and those of her
acquaintances to write the book, but
finds writing a “reality-based” comic
tmk is not always easy, where
the Comics Code is concerned. “If you
have somebody take a drug, do you have
to have five people pop up and tell them
it’s a bad idea, which of course yould
never happen in real life? It’s been hard
because we wanted to deal with the
problems of these kids realistically, and
at the same time, maybe, make it a little
more hopeful, as far as how they solve
their problems. I think that it’s emotion-
ally realistic, for me anyway.

Leonard S Wong writes in Amazing Heroes #179, page 78:

Marvel’s advance hype on Steeltown
Rockers promotes it as “angst in the
X-Men vein—without the mutant
battles.”
I dunno; I just find that description
really amusing. Still, it’s not totally
inaccurate—there aren’t any mutant
battles in this first issue (though there
is a guitar war).
Steeltown Rockers is the story of a
group of blue-collar who sæ
rock music as an escape from their
lives in an economically depressed
city. It’s a pretty familiar idea that’s
been seen before in TV, mwies, and
novels aimed at young teenagers, but
rarely in comics. So kudos to Marvel
for trying something alittle different,
in a format that is potentially acces-
Sible to a young audience.

[…]

Although these are mmiliar charac-
ters they all have individual person-
alities and are interesting enough to
hold the tuder’s attention. Elaine Le
has a very good ear for dialogue. The
story is told via conversations and
actions; thought balloons captions
are almost non-existent.
ne result is a story that moves
quickly and smoothly. The pacing of
this issue is not unlike that of the first
act of a play or mwie (Not
considering Lee’s previous writing
include the Starstruck play
comic book adapntion).
Artwork Steve Leialoha is al’*ays
a welcome sight to these eyes, and this
comic is no exception. Leialoha is one
of the handful of artists who can draw
believeable characters, a necessity for
a “real world” story such as this. As
Lee uses dialogue to pace the story,
Leialoha successfully combines a
variety of art styles throughout it to
set the mood.
Despite the rather formula plot and
characters, Steeltom Rockers is worth
a look. Lee and Leialoha are trying
something a little bit different here,
and while it undoubtedly won’t appeal
to everyone, I found it a lot more
enjoyable (and readable) than Marvel’s
usual super-hero fare.
GRADE: ! ! !

Well, that’s a very reasonable review.

The series has never been collected or reprinted, so there are few reviews of it on der intarwebs, but here’s one:

And for all the working-class melodrama, it’s a really entertaining read. The text is minimal, the art evocative, the story compelling; occasionally sublime, largely ridiculous, totally rock and roll.

Not everybody was as impressed:

On a side note — much to my surprise, in the course of my research on the book I found that Steeltown Rockers apparently has a bit of a following. It even has a Facebook page. So maybe I’m just the one out of touch. Maybe I need more small town poverty experience (Gritty!) to really appreciate Steeltown Rockers. Maybe I need to listen to more early Springsteen and Yngwie Malmsteen. Maybe I need to stop being a snob and understand the inherent beauty and gritty reality of this comic. Or maybe liking a book like Steeltown Rockers is just ironic enough now that it has been co-opted into the new hipster cool.

I couldn’t find that Facebook group, though.

Hm:

“A 1990 Marvel comic about some teens who form a rock band” might sound like an ideal candidate for Nobody’s Favorites in theory, but — stupid title aside — Elaine Lee and Steve Leialoha’s Steeltown Rockers ended up winning me over with its goofy charm.

Oh, there was an interview with the creators in TwoMorrows’ Back Issue #101:

And it was originally supposed to be an ongoing series (according to Lee; Leialoha says that 12 issues were planned), but Hama left Marvel, and the editors there didn’t have much enthusiasm for the project (which had been in the pipeline since 1986), but finally published it as a six-issue mini-series.

I guess not.

Starstruck, written by Elaine Lee and with artwork by Michael William Kaluta is one of my favourite comics. It’s certainly my favourite genre comic — it’s an exhilarating reading experience, and seemed to hint at an entirely new way of doing comics.

Over the years, I’ve re-read it many times… mostly because they keep releasing new versions of it, changing and rejiggering parts of it. And it never seems to grow any less powerful.

A couple of months ago, while doing the Epic Comics blog thing, I read The Transmutation of Ike Garuda, and I was flabbergasted: It was great! It’s written by Lee, and that made me wonder: Perhaps Starstruck wasn’t some kind of strange fluke? How was is possible that I had never even considered getting her other books, or even looked into whether she’d done any other comics?

Well, it’s timing, really. In the 80s, as a teenager, I paid attention to what was happening to US comics. I mean, really paid attention. Then I went off to university, and I basically lost interest in anything published by the mainstream publishers. I didn’t buy much, or care much about, anything published by Marvel or DC in the 90s, but just read, you know, art comics and stuff. And most of the things she wrote were published by those two publishers, so I just wouldn’t have heard of them.

Which gave me an idea for a new, shortish blog series: How about if I just bought all the comics she wrote in the 90s, read them, and wrote a bit about them?

As I’m typing this, I haven’t read any of them, and I’m hoping that they’re going to turn out to be great. Otherwise this blog series is going to be slightly embarrassing? I mean, it’ll just be me griping about some thirty year old comics? That’s no fun.

But… Clive Barker Saint Sinner? And an Indiana Jones adaptation?

Perhaps this wasn’t a good idea anyway. *gulp*

Wish me luck.

I’ll be aiming for a couple of posts per week.