• 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.

• Detective Comics #854 (lcs)– J.H. Williams III, Cully Hammer and Greg Rucka.  Should be a sweet book.
• Green Lantern Vol 4 #42 (lcs)– When does Doug Mahnke start doing the art?  I’ve only been on board with GL for a few months now and I’m already tired of the run-up to Blackest Night.
• Astonishing X-Men Vol 3 #30 (lcs)– I was flipping through Morrison’s New X-Men the other day and was liked some of what Phil Jimenez did on that book so I think he’ll be a good fit for Ellis’s story.  I’m sorry to see Bianchi off the title because I really liked how he designed the pages but Astonishing X-Men had the potential to be another Planetary if Bianchi stayed on the title for all of the issues.
• Patsy Walker Hellcat TP (dcbs)– On some site somewhere, someone described the final issue of this minis-series as “Grant Morrison writing Love and Rockets” or at least words to those effects, calling upon the names of Morrison and Los Bros Hernandez.  And that crazy reviewer meant that as a critique against the book, that the blending of Morrison and Jaime, Gilbert or maybe even Mario was a bad thing that should be avoided.  It didn’t work because I knew when I read those insane babblings that I needed to have this book.  And here it is.  Note:  For those of you in the Chicago area this weekend, Challengers Comics + Conversation is hosting a signing with writer Kathryn Immonen on Saturday.  Go to this and have a good time.
• Thor Visionaries Walter Simonson Vol 3 TP (future purchase)–  The insanity of Walter Simonson’s first year’s worth of Thor wrapped up in V2 and this volume features the cleanup of Ragnarok and Surtur.  I remember that these stories don’t contain the raw energy of the first two volumes of Simonson’s stuff.
• Disney Pixars Incredibles Family Matters #3 (lcs)–I wasn’t that crazy about the first issue of this series but the second was pretty good.
• Low Moon TP (dcbs)– Anything by Jason is a definite buy in my book.  He’s one of those cartoonists that I really don’t know what to say about him other than “he’s good.”

In Phonogram: The Singles Club, Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie set up a tricky little challenge for themselves; how do you portray music and dancing in a static comic book page?  Somehow, this lack of sound and movement in their first story Phonogram: Rue Brittania wasn’t a big issue because David Kohl’s journey in that book was more about the idea of music than about music itself.  His journey there was much more symbolic, even traditional, quest andBrittania was his Grail.  For this new story, Gillen and McKelvie have set up three easy rules for their characters: 1) No boy singers  2) You must dance and 3) No magic.  Those three rules should be a clue that The Singles Club is going to be a different story than Rue Brittania.

The stories in The Singles Club take place in a single night but each issue centers on a different character.  While the spotlight in the first two issues have been on new characters, issue #3 gives us two familiar characters from the first series, David Kohl and Emily Aster, the “hero” and “accomplice” from Rue Brittania.  Neither of them are very nice but David seems to have grown up or, at the least, mellowed out a bit from the first series.  Emily, however, appears to be just the same– a self centered witch (both literally and figuratively) who is only on the lookout for what she thinks is a good time.  Usually that means hurting someone and she sets her sight in this issue on our DJ Seth, who she’s had “idealogical differences” with in the past.  Those differences are that Emily thought his girlfriend should have slept with her and Seth didn’t.  That’s just how Emily is.  Or is it?

In The Singles Club, the past exists as ghosts more than as memories.  For a night with “no magic,” some strange voodoo is happening that’s bringing back past lovers and past selves.  The past is haunting this club and making the people in the club confront people who aren’t and can’t be there.   In Emily’s case, she has a discussion with herself; or at least a discussion with Clair, the person she used to be before Emily cast he into some repressed limbo. Looking in a mirror, proper and stylish Emily sees Claire, with her sunken-in eyes, her auburn brown hair and the scars running up and down her arm.  This is the person Emily was and, just maybe, it’ll be the person she’ll be again some day after a moment of weakness.  Through the mirror, Claire tells Emily, “One day, I’m going to come back.  And you won’t be able to stop me.” We’re never really done with the past, are we?

Emily Aster and Claire are both brought to life through Jamie McKelvie’s.  Whether it’s a sardonic smile, a reaching tilt of the head or the way she brushes a lock of hair out of her eyes, McKelvie’s Emily shows off her brashness and confidence as she is so obviously above everyone else there.  The contempt in her eyes just burns.  And as her confidence is shaken at Claire’s promise of her eventual return, you can see Emily lose her confidence through a slight slumping of her shoulders and a softness in her eyes that weren’t present before.  And as quickly as she lost it, you watch her recompose herself and lash out at the closest available target. McKelvie knows Emily and knows how she smiles and laughs and how she lashes out at whoever happens to be in front of her.

On top of McKelvie’s artwork, Matthew Wilson’s coloring defines this world as much as the black, white and gray artwork defined Rue Brittania.  Wilson’s colors make me want to dance along with David, Emily and Kid With Knife.  The electric pink hue that lays over most of this issue creates a fantastic energy around the characters.  How do you portray dancing and movement in a comic?  Combine art and coloring to produce the energy and excitement that should exist when music is playing and you can’t help but move to it.

A lot can happen in one night and Gillen and McKelvie’s The Singles Club is proving that.  We’ve seen unknown loves, lost loves and now we’ve seen Emily’s lost self.  If there’s “no magic” at the club on this night, where are all of these ghosts coming from?  Maybe it’s all in the way that a piece of music or a song will take you back to that one moment in time or that one emotion that you felt that’s tied into someone special. Gillen and McKelvie are creating comics that are like those songs, touching the open emotional nerves that cut straight through to the heart of the reader.  We’ve all loved and lost, all tried to hide who we were or who we really are.  We all have those ghosts that creep into our heads and hearts and refuse to let go.

Phonogram: The Singles Club #3
“We Share Our Mother’s Health”
Written by: Keiron Gillen
Drawn & lettered by: Jamie McKelvie
Colored by: Matthew Wilson