The First Rule of Pod Club [67:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In Episode 3, our intrepid podcaststers talk about the top movie at the box office right now, Tranformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen.  After that, Scott is interested in picking up the HBO series Eastbound and Down on DVD and Ty describes the scene that perfectly encapsulates the show for him.  And just to prove that Gutter Shots is a comic podcast, the duo talk about Incredible Hercules, Unwritten, Detective Comics, Captain America and Green Lantern.

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• Green Lantern Corps Vol 2 #38 (lcs) — Both Green Lantern series have just been biding time until the start of Blackest Night.  I think after this crossover, both titles go back to a trade-only status.
• Green Lantern Rage Of The Red Lanterns HC (dcbs)– We’re finally getting the GL issues that followed up Sinestro Corps War in this book, featuring some fine Mike McKone and Ivan Reis artwork.
• Spider-Man Election Day HC (dcbs)– Here’s another book that I’m trying to figure out what to do with.  I’m only getting the collections but even the collections are starting to get a bit tired.  This book features John Romita Jr. artwork which I have to imagine is good and a storyline that I’ve been waiting to read.  I may just drop getting every Spider-Man collection and get only the big storylines.
• Disney Pixars Toy Story Mysterious Stranger #2 (lcs)– For Jakob.  I really enjoyed the first issue of this series.  It was squarely aimed at kids and was a lot of fun.  I want to see how they continue the “mysterious stranger” theme from the first issue.
• Comics Journal #298 (dcbs)– Featuring the Fabio Moon/Gabriel Ba interview.

Note:  I’m on a semi-vacation this week so I’m going back into the archives for a review or two.  Aaron McGruder, Reginald Hudlin and Kyle Baker’s BIRTH OF A NATION came out in 2004.  Going into the Independence Day holiday, it seemed like a good book to revisit this week.  This review was originally written when the book was released.

Birth of a Nation

Published By: Crown Publishers
Written by: Aaron McGruder & Reginald Hudlin
Illustrated by: Kyle Baker

What you should know:

The presidential election was a shambles. Due to “errors,” a number of important votes were not counted and the wrong man quite possibly won the White House. Sounds a lot like Florida, doesn’t it? Except in this world, it’s East St. Louis that is the center of controversy as many residents of that city aren’t allowed to vote. So, what do they do? They secede from the rest of the United States. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

What happened:

What happens when you get the people responsible for the movie HOUSE PARTY, the comic strip THE BOONDOCKS and the graphic novel THE COWBOY WALLY show together? Would you believe political commentary?

BIRTH OF A NATION tells the story of Mayor Fred Fredericks, mayor of one of the poorest cities in the nation– East St. Louis. It’s also predominantly African American. Loved by most everyone, he’s the kind of mayor who takes a garbage strike into his own hands. He drives around picking up everyone’s garbage. He knows everyone by name and he’s a good leader for his city. And when he leads his city into secession, he thinks he’s doing what’s best for everyone. And the hilarity just goes on from there.

Have you seen the movie BARBERSHOP? Have you at least heard of the documentary FAHRENHEIT 9/11? To borrow from Reeses Peanut Buttercups, these are two great tastes that taste great together. The humor behind BIRTH OF A NATION is the same humor in the two BARBERSHOP movies. Like BARBERSHOP, BIRTH features humor about race without making an overtly racial book. And it’s not a black vs. white book. The story is about what happens when national and global events start overwhelming the common man. When that happens, your gang lords become your new national army.

Those national events appear to be a fictitious and false presidency. When election mishaps have major impact on a presidential election, you naturally get a nation divided (much like the 2000 Presidential race and Florida.) Unlike Michael Moore and his movie, this book only looks at the results of the election and don’t have an entire war to also try to argue against. In his introduction to the book, Hudlin says that this story originally started as a screenplay that he did with McGruder that no one wanted to buy so they made it into a graphic novel. I wouldn’t be surprised now to see this book get optioned somewhere down the line.

It’s always great to see a new book featuring Kyle Baker’s artwork. His cartooning and sense of design of a page only gets stronger and stronger with each book he puts out. On each page, you have anywhere from a couple to eight panels a page with any dialogue or caption typeset below the panel. Baker arranges the panels of varying length and height to time out and to establish a rhythm and pulse to the story.

BIRTH OF A NATION is a bit of an oddity, a graphic novel published by a major publisher (meaning not a comic book publisher.) It is encouraging to see companies outside of Marvel, DC and Image looking to publish major works. BIRTH OF A NATION is a fun and entertaining book that makes you stop and think about what really could have happened four years ago.

BIRTH OF A NATION is available on Amazon.com.

The United States is a land of myths and tall tales but other than a handful of Native American stories, I don’t know if we have any honest to goodness fairy tales that originated in the States.  Maybe the closest we have is L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, with Dorothy the closest we come to having our own enchanted princess.  Of course, our princess is a farm girl and she never gets to become a princess or meet her one, true prince.  The United States is full of tall tales like Paul Bunyon and Babe, Uncle Sam, Johnny Appleseed and they’re all tied into a basic fabric of the American experience but where are our princesses, evil step mothers, magical worlds and happily ever afters?

Like Dorothy, Jeremy Love’s lead character Lee Wagstaff is no royal princess.  In Love’s Bayou, Lee is a little black girl growing up in 1931 Charon, Mississippi.  Even almost 70 years after the Civil War, people’s feelings and attituded haven’t changed and the old ugliness still existed.  Black boys are still killed for whistling at white women and black men are still hung mostly for not being white.  The ugliness even exists among the white children like Lee’s friend Lily.  At the beginning of Bayou, their friendship looks like it may actually be about more than skin color but when Lily’s locket gets lost in the bayou, it’s too easy for Lily and her mother to accuse Lee of theft.  And who’s going to be believed in the south in 1931: a white girl or a black girl?  After Lily goes missing, Lee’s father is quickly judged to be the killer.  The story begins as a tale of social and racial injustice but after her father’s imprisoned, Lee goes on a quest to find Lily and prove her and her father’s innocence.  Going to the bayou to look for clues, Lee falls in and effectively stumbles through the looking glass to find her own Wonderland.

That Lee has to enter an imaginary world to find justice is exhilarating and frightening.  Like Wizard of Oz or Alice In Wonderland, Lee’s bayou is a magical place, filled with giants, wonderful creatures and unseen dangers.  It’s a world of imagination, maybe even the way that she sees reality around her without the firm and solid anchor of her father.  The bayou is filled with the magic similar to yellow brick roads and mad hatters and their tea parties.  But unlike Dorothy who ends up in Oz by chance, Lee has to go to the bayou because it’s where her justice begins.  She cannot find what she is looking for without first visiting another world, an imaginary world at that.

Love’s story reminds us of the searing ignorance that exists both in our present and our past.  If that hatred didn’t still exist in some people today, his story would be a wonderful curiosity and just be a nice fairy tale about a girl and her journey into another world.  Of course if that was all his story was, there would have been no reason to tell it because it’s already been told by Frank L. Baum and Lewis Carroll.  The ignorance that Love is depicting is not just centered on 1931 and earlier.  We still live with it at our work, at our play and maybe even in our home.  It is still out there and Love, through the false but easy accusations hurled at Lee and her father, shows us that it still exists.  It may be based on more than just color of our skin but is still there when it comes to gender, race, religion or even something as silly as favorite sports teams.  The unexplainable prejudice is still present and Love’s story reminds us that it is still there even if it is less overt now than it was in 1931.

For a fairy tale to really succeed though, it needs to take us far away from an oppressive reality.  The magical parts of fairy tales are countered by Depression era farming or having to live as a servant of a evil step-mother and step sisters.  At the beginning of the book, Lee discovers the portal through the bayou but it is only after Lily disappears and her father is jailed that Lee defiantly jumps into the portal, determined to find out what awaits her on the other side.  On the other side of the bayou is Bayou, a giant of a man who fishes her out of the water. A gentle soul, Bayou safely guides Lee through his world, protecting her when he can from other giants, sheriffs with dog heads, and white hooded locals who are just looking for a reason to string Bayou up.  The magical realm that Lee discovers unfortunately is not all that different from her own.

Bayou Volume One
Written and Drawn by: Jeremy Love
Colored by: Patrick Morgan

Bayou can be read on the web at Zudacomics.com.
Bayou Volume 1 is available on Amazon.com.

 

 Standard Podcast [65:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Scott and Ty are back with another episode.  The discussion begins with 1988’s Comic Book Confidential, a documentary looking at the evolution of comics.  From there, they branch off and talk about the future of comic distribution and creation, arguing how comics are and aren’t like manga.

Comic Book Confidential is available on DVD from Amazon or as a digital download from iTunes.

Click here to download the episode.