Honour Among Punks: The Complete Baker Street

Written by Guy Davis and Gary Reed
Art by Guy Davis

Between 1989 and 1991, Caliber Press published Guy Davis's series Baker Street.  At that time, I was just beginning to experiment with independent comics, and remember reading an article about this book in Comic Scene (please don't ask), but never picked up an issue or gave it a try.  Later, Davis began working on Sandman Mystery Theatre, and I became a fan of his scratchy art and portrayals of women who looked more like real women than what I found in most comics.

I recently came across Honour Among Punks, the ibooks collection of the original series, and knew it was time to read it.

Baker Street is a series about punks, mysteries, and relationships.  Davis and his co-writer Gary Reed transposed Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes into the punk underground of an alternate history Britain.  Our point of view character is Susan, an American studying medicine in London.  She answers an ad for a cleaning woman that included room and board, and meets Sharon Ford, a former police detective who now lives the punk life, and her close friend Sam, who is a ball of punk rage.

As the series progresses, the women get involved in two separate cases that test their friendships and sense of self.  Davis puts together a complicated world of rival gangs, jewel thieves, transvestites, and a serial killer targeting men in the area around the Baskervilles, a rundown theatre that is the heart of the community.

Much of the storytelling here is rough, but Davis's art shows serious growth from the more cartoonish first pages to the scratchy glory of the last storyline.

Sharon is a truly memorable character; devoted to her notions of deduction, invested in protecting her community, but completely unaware of the needs of the people around her.  This is a book worth reading, because of her.

Swords of Rome Vol. 1: The Conquerors

Written by Jean Dufaux
Art by Philippe Delaby

Ancient Rome has long held a fascination for me, but not to the extent that I've ever made a concerted effort to study it.  Instead, I've just sort of gleaned my knowledge from TV shows like Rome, movies like Spartacus(the TV show of the same name doesn't interest me), or comics like David Lapham's Caligula.  Therefore, my knowledge base is especially specious, but I don't really care - stories set in this time are usually pretty interesting.  It is in that spirit that I picked up the first volume of Swords of Rome, a French comic published in North America by ibooks, the same people who published Don Lomax's Vietnam Journal(at least at the beginning).

Swords of Rome tells the story of the assassination of Emperor Nero, and his succession by Nero, his adopted son.  The change of power has been orchestrated by Claudius's wife, Agrippina, who he had planned to divorce.  We've seen all of this before - the intrigue, the alliances between different nobles and power-hungry slaves.  I don't want to say that it doesn't work here, because this is a decent read, but it doesn't stand out.  I frequently found it difficult to remember which character was which (especially among the women), and found the plot a little predictable (and yes, I know it's based on historical events).

Artwise, this book is as lovely as most French comics.  Delaby's faces are expressive (if rather similar), and he has a good handle on period details.  I often found the colouring in the book to be strange - some pages look like they've been purposefully grayed, and so I'd assume we were looking at a nighttime scene, but then the next page would be bright and colourful, while still showing the same scene.  Also, it looks like the people at ibooks edited out some of the nudity in this comic - that doesn't really bother me, but it's kind of strange.

Vietnam Journal

by Don Lomax

I love a good war comic, and Don Lomax excels at the genre.  He is a veteran of the Vietnam War, who began writing about it in comics in the 1980s with his Vietnam Journal series.  This graphic novel, published in 2003, collects some of the issues of that comic, although I'm not really able to tell which ones.  I know that Transfuzion Publishing is currently reprinting the whole series; I'm going to guess that this book contains the contents of the first two of the Transfuzion books, but I'm not sure.

Anyway, Vietnam Journal is about a journalist, Scott Neithammer, called Journal by the troops, who is reporting on the Vietnam war, having embedded himself with a group of front-line soldiers.  The stories in this comic are the standard, grounds-eye view of war tales we've come to expect from good war comics.  Lomax, and Journal, are prone to sentimentality at times (such as in the first story, which talks about a 'lucky' field jacket), but they also never shy away from some of the darker aspects, and decisions, of warfare.

At the core of this book is Journal's respect and regard of the troops.  It's central to how the character interacts with them, and in his willingness to pick up a gun or do anything else necessary to help out when they're in a tight spot.

Lomax's art is dense and detailed.  He has a good eye for military equipment, and for human facial expressions.  This is a very enjoyable read.

Gulf War Journal

by Don Lomax

I entered into this with no preconceived notions or expectations. I like a good war story, and this looked like one, so I figured I'd give it a try. I have heard of Lomax's earlier Vietnam War Journal, but don't know much about it. Anyway, this is a pretty good comic, mixing both a fictional story of a journalist trying to cover the early days of the Gulf War with a pretty detailed breakdown of events in the war, including some first person narratives of soldiers.

The protagonist, Scott Neithammer, is a retired journalist who had written some amazing stories during the Vietnam War. He is pulled out of retirement to travel to Saudi Arabia and cover Bush I's conflict with Saddam Hussein over the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. At first he doesn't want to go, but then uses the opportunity to visit his semi-estranged daughter in Tel Aviv. Once in Saudi Arabia, Journal (as he is called) makes a pest of himself within the highly micro-managed press pools, and eventually sets out on his own (with his Sinhalese assistant/translator) to enter Kuwait.

The book constantly switches from Journal to reporting the war itself, and I like the context that this method provides. I was in high school during the Gulf War, and there is a lot of stuff included here that I never knew about. Lomax's art is quite serviceable, and he is able to draw the detailed military equipment very well. His tanks look like tanks, which is sometimes not that common.

Now I guess I'm going to be hunting down the Vietnam books too....