Escapo

by Paul Pope

Paul Pope is not a very prolific cartoonist, and I find that there are often more older pieces by him that I wasn't aware of that keep resurfacing or showing up almost at random.  Escapo, the 2014 book published by Z2, collects two short stories from the 90s, and gives them the deluxe treatment, with colours by Shay Plummer, in a nice hardcover volume.

Escapo is an escape artist who works in a travelling circus.  He has feelings for an acrobat, has a bit of a facial deformity or wound, and some self-doubt.

In one story, he tries to get with the acrobat, and in the other, he ends up making a deal with the devil when it looks like he might not be able to escape from a water-filled deathtrap.

There's not a lot of story here, but there is a great deal of big, exciting Paul Pope pages, and that's what I bought this book for.  Pope is a dynamic and exciting cartoonist, and this is a very cool looking book.  I'm not sure it would be worth the cover price of $25, but I paid less than half of that, so it's all good.

I do wish we would see more work from this amazing artist.

Doomsday.1

by John Byrne

Like any comics reader about my age, I have been a big fan of John Bryne's work over the years, although that has not always translated into my enjoying his more current work.

Doomsday.1 was a four-issue miniseries published by IDW a few years ago.  It stars a group who were on the International Space Station when a massive solar flare erupted, sending a ball of plasma larger than the Earth crashing into our home, burning and destroying much of the planet.  Our main characters managed to avoid the destruction, and make their way to the planet, where they spend the rest of the series trying to put together a new life.

The concept is a good one, and Byrne has taken some pains to try to keep his story within the confines of what would have most likely happened, but he's chosen to structure the story rather strangely.  Each issue after the first one features the dwindling group of survivors through some episodic adventures.

In Texas, they come across some prisoners who have taken over a penitentiary.  In New York, they find rats and badly burned people.  In Brazil, they find a wild tribe of indigenous people, who are being led by an English-speaking Dutchman.  This issue is pretty unfortunate on a whole lot of levels, the most egregious being the overly stereotypical portrayal of the tribe.

I wonder if Byrne had perhaps intended for this to be a much longer-running series, and then just decided to focus on a few chapters, but the jumping forward in time, and the way in which characters are introduced and then abandoned (like the Cuban kid the group rescued in Miami and took with them to New York, who was never seen again).  There is little in the way of sustained character development, although I did like the fact that Richard Branson was used as a model for one character.

This is not Byrne at his best.  His Cold War series at IDW was a better read, but there is something that I will always find comforting about reading pages of his art.  He still draws the most recognizable rubble in comics.

Grendel: Devil's Legacy

Written by Matt Wagner
Art by Arnold Pander, Jacob Pander, Jay Geldhof, and Rich Rankin

I really wish I'd taken the time to track down issues of Grendel and read the classic series in order years ago.  Instead, my approach has always been piecemeal - an issue here, an issue there, and I extended that into my reading of the trades.  At this point, I know I've read way more than I haven't, so I don't see the need to invest in the omnibi that Dark Horse has released, although it would be nice to revisit the series in chronological order.

Devil's Legacy first ran in the first twelve issues of the Grendel series at Comico starting in 1986, and followed up on the first Grendel story, featuring Hunter Rose, that appeared in Mage before that.

Legacy is the story of Christine Spar, the daughter of Hunter Rose's adopted daughter, Stacy Palumbo.  When this book opens, Christine is a reporter, living with her young son Anson in Manhattan.  They, with Spar's friend Regina, attend a kabuki theatre presentation, and meet the show's star, Tujiro, who comes off as kind of creepy.  We see him snatch a hair off of Anson's head.  Later, the boy gets up in the night and walks off, meeting one of Tujiro's associates, and he's never seen again.

Spar, of course, reacts badly to this, but begins to piece together that this kind of thing often happens in the wake of Tujiro's appearances.  She steals Hunter Rose's mask and fork, and flies off to San Francisco to try to track down the killer.  We get to watch as she takes on the guise of Grendel, and it begins to affect her sense of self.  We also learn that Tujiro is not human.

There's a lot more going on with this story though, as the old conflict between Grendel and Argent, the werewolf figure that runs the police in New York, rears its head again.

Wagner's always been a great writer, and I feel like this is where he began to hit his stride.  He fills this book with strong character work, as we get to know Christine, her friend Regina, and meet Brian Li Sung, a stage manager who falls into Christine's orbit.  The depth of their emotions for one another, considering the rather short timeframe of this story, do ring false from time to time, but I like how Wagner uses their relationship to set up the next chapter in Grendel's history.

This series was drawn by the Pander Brothers, and mostly inked by Jay Geldhof.  The Panders are a bit of an acquired taste, especially since I can't think of another book that is more visually tied to the 80s than this one.  All the characters, men and women alike, have massive shoulders that could only be caused by excessive padding, and the general design of the clothing just screams out that this is what people in the 80s thought that the future would look like.

It works for this series, bringing to mind the fashion drawings of that timeframe, but it does not always make for pretty comics, especially when the Panders are inking their own work.  Still, this is a solid comic, and I'm a bit surprised that I'd never read such a seminal chapter of the Grendel chronicles.

Troop 142

by Mike Dawson

Troop 142, Mike Dawson's graphic novel about a week at Scout camp in 1995, brought back some serious memories.

This book, which was originally published as a webcomic I believe, takes us through the entire week at camp, and while it is narrated by one of the fathers accompanying the boys, we get inside many of their heads and see the experience in a multi-faceted way.

I had my own experiences with the Boy Scouts through the 80s and early 90s, and while there are some differences, there was a lot of stuff in this book that I could relate to, and memories came flooding back as I read it.  The terrible campfire songs, and the endlessly corny skits; the smell of the canvas-covered wooden platforms that we slept in, and the senior leader (in this case, an old white man who goes by Big Bear) whose sense of privilege and morality gives him permission to drone on about character at every opportunity.

More at the heart of this book is the casual cruelty of the boys towards one another.  They jockey endlessly for position, turning on friends, and making life miserable for the boys that they have decided they don't like, such as Chuck, the son of one of the leaders and the camp pariah.  Dawson also captures the weird line between homoeroticism and homophobia that is rampant at these gatherings.  Some of these scenes get pretty awkward, especially when Dawson hints at a relationship growing between two of the youngest boys, but never makes it clear what happened between them.  And, of course, at the end of the week, Big Bear turns one of his morality speeches into a rant against gay Scoutmasters, but no one sees a problem with the troop playing with a carved wooden dildo the next morning.

Even more subtle is the way that Dawson manages to show that no one is enjoying themselves at camp.  This matches a lot of my memories, where the fun is only to be had in retrospect; too much of the time, you are focused on feeling dirty, uncomfortable, exhausted, and frequently unsafe.

The whole Boy Scout thing is a unique experience for boys (and now girls, although that would necessitate some big changes in terms of the shared latrines and showers) and one which I think is on the wane, at least where I live.  Dawson manages to tell a good story and preserve a unique North American experience.  This is a very good book.