The Secret of the Wednesday’s Haul

If art can be a look into the heart and soul of its creators, I don’t know what you’d find inside Joe Casey and Andy Suriano’s brains.  Probably a lot of Jack Kirby comics.

Sometimes I wonder about Jack Kirby, particularly his output during the 1970s.  Sometime take a look at Forever People, Kirby’s attempt to create a cosmic comic featuring hippy and beatnik but powerful teenagers.  Done when he was over 50 years old, Forever People at times reads as if it’s written by a man who never really grew up but, at other times, it reads like Kirby’s trying to be the older father still trying to connect with the kids and trying to be hip by using their slang.  It just doesn’t sound right sometimes.

Why am I talking about Jack Kirby?  Because Joe Casey appears to be wanting to rewrite the whole oeuvre of The King.  Godland, drawn by Tom Scioli, starts out as Stan and Jack’s Fantastic Four if Steve Gerber were writing it.  Casey’s latest Image series Charlatan Ball starts out looking like Mister Miracle done on acid, featuring a lousy stage magician replacing the world’s best escape artist and a giant talking rabbit replacing the dwarfish Oberon.  With Charlatan Ball, Joe Casey writes from the gut, putting anything and everything on the page.  Charlatan Ball is as much a look into Casey and Suriano’s imagination as it is “about” anything.  If asked what the book is about, I’d go back to the lousy stage magician and giant talking rabbit line.  But if I was asked what is the book really about at its core, the answer would end up being something completely different.

About halfway into this issue, Casey and Suriano break into the comic themselves.  Well, they don’t so much break in as Suriano draws a panel showing him madly drawing the issue wondering out loud, “are we going too far?” to which Casey responds basically “we’re not going far enough” and then proceeds to try and school Suriano and the audience in the ways of Brendan McCarthy and Rogan Gosh.  Now I’ve got Rogan Gosh in my collection somewhere after picking up a copy of it on eBay a couple of years ago.  Why is it important here?  No idea but seeing the one-panel commentary track inserted directly in the middle of the story is a telling twist of what the book is about that borders on and maybe crosses into self indulgence.

Why do Casey and Suriano show up in the book other than to possibly say what the reader is thinking?  Suriano’s “I dunno, man… it’s already getting weird” countered by Casey’s “Weird?…” amounts to the creators putting their reader in their place.  In a tripped out book the panel doesn’t seem terribly out of place but it does seem like an attempt to cut off anyone who may not like where the book is going.  Should a creator really do that right in the middle of the narrative?  I also wonder if scenes like this will continue to play out in other issues of the book since nothing like that happened in issue #1.

After the two main characters, Charlatan Ball is full of capitalistic magical worlds, Kirbyesque sellers of “aquacombine pipes” that probably go along with the Magical Carpet Dope noted in the issues title, a talking giant rabbit who doesn’t want to go back to being a magicians prop, dancing Oompah Loompahish genies, and battles between giant forces of good and evil.  From that description, you probably already know if Charlatan Ball is for you or not.  So, back to the question at hand; what is Charlatan Ball about?  It’s about the unfettered imagination of Joe Casey and Andy Suriano at play with no restraint. 

Charlatan Ball #2
“Episode 2: Magik Carpet Dope”
Written by: Joe Casey
Drawn by: Andy Suriano
Colored by: Marc Letzmann
Lettered by: Rus Wooton
Digital assists by: Ben Kalina