RADAR // 2.20.03

By the SAVANT Staff

ON OUR RADAR:

THE CLOCKMAKER #1
Jim Krueger, Matt Smith, Zach Howard, Michael Halbleig, Brett Weldele, John D.Roberts and Guy Davis
Image Comics
US $2.95

There are, to my mind, far too few moments of sheer spectacle in comics. The tail end of the 'widescreen' obsession in the early '90s has left us with endless fatuous action sequences and lots of pretty splash pages to look at but very little spectacle. You know what I mean, that moment that just makes you stop and catch your breath as something impossible, immense and heartbreakingly beautiful or terrifying is shown to you. The shot of the ruined propeller in THE ABYSS, the opening trackback in THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER or any one of a dozen other moments.

CLOCKMAKER has spectacle, in fact it has it by the bucketload.

The story follows an Austrian family who have been given a sacred trust. We open, literally, on the run as the most recent family members are pursued around a huge industrial facility and apparently killed by something horrifying. It's a quick scene, over almost before you know it but sets up the important points. From there, in short order we're introduced to the series protagonist, the other members of the family and Gunther, a very large, extremely monosyllabic man with a clock on his apron.

There's a feel of early HELLBOY, not only in the slightly blocky art but the not entirely serious 'pulpy' tone. Not to belittle the horror here, but there's a sense of high adventure to all this that is rarely seen anywhere outside HELLBOY or NEVERMEN. It's a credit to Krueger's script that he can maintain this almost playful tone and still have the opening sequence be so visceral.

Then, there's the spectacle.

The two splash pages that close this issue are stunning. The Bohn family's birthright turns out to be an indescribably vast grandfather clock, housed inside a mountain. It's so big you can barely comprehend it, with most of the clock (And the waterfalls that power it. Yes, waterFALLS) fitting on two immense splash pages. It's one of those moments of pure visceral joy that turn up so little, the realization that what you're seeing is too vast to exist but it's just plain cool.

With Krueger's script and Smith, Howard, Halbleib and Weldele's fantastic, Mignola-esque art, CLOCKMAKER is very nearly a perfect package. It's even innovative, an A4 comic folded like a newspaper to really drive the scale home. Smart, almost elegant in places it's a unique package which, like stablemates DOMINION and FIREBREATHER may well end up being buried under Image's generic superhero line. Like both those other books, it doesn't deserve that, although it's life is made harder by the very format that distinguishes it. The price you pay for spectacle is twelve pages of story, nothing more. It's incident heavy and stunning to look at but very, very short.

So that's the payoff. For your $2.95, you get some stunning visuals, a fascinating central idea and what looks to be some classic pulp adventure. It's great stuff but the bottom line is, there is half the comic here than there would be anywhere else. It's up to you to decide whether it's worth it. I, personally, think it is.

(Alasdair Stuart)

* * *

MY UNCLE JEFF
Damon Hurd/Pedro Camello
Origin Comics
US $3.95

I am one cheap son of a bitch.

When Steve Buscemi bemoans the necessity of tipping for all occasions in Reservoir Dogs, I wondered if Tarantino had taped the same conversation I've had with every one of my friends in every poorly serviced restaurant in Chicago. My roommate refers to me as George Costanza. I fought with my girlfriend for an hour when she made me tip the pizza guy three bucks for delivering during a blizzard-it's a hazard of the job, I told her.

Yep, I'm one stingy bastard.

So I almost didn't pick up Damon Hurd's wonderful slice-of-life comic MY UNCLE JEFF. I've never read anything by Hurd, and four bucks for twenty-eight pages isn't cheap. That's an order of chicken friend rice, assuming I walk the half-mile to the Chinese restaurant myself and insist that they hold the egg roll. (I told you. Cheap.)

After reading it, all I can say is, fuck the chicken fried rice.

MY UNCLE JEFF is exceptional, without a doubt the best comic I've read all year. Autobiographical comics can so easily deteriorate into whining and self-pity, and even the best of them (Seth and Joe Matt being my personal favorites) often indulge in a little navel gazing. Certainly Hurd has a dark enough family history to justify a little bitching and moaning. He details his mother's side of the family with a double-page genealogy
that reads like something out of a bad melodrama. His father's family, though good-natured, begin the story locked in a dispute over what to do with their senile grandfather.

But Hurd skips all the easy drama and pathos in favor of the quiet, sometimes lonely story of Jeff, his favorite uncle. Jeff looks exactly as Dennis Hopper's character in Easy Rider would have appeared if he'd lived another 20 years. He wears his hair long and his moustache in a handlebar. He's missing several key teeth and prefers to stroll about
in jeans and old T-shirts. He lives in Florida, alone and far away from his family, getting by on his own terms and refusing to participate in the daily grind.

Over the course of one trip home, Hurd meets up with his uncle Jeff after ten years apart. They drink a beer and they talk. And that's all.

Hurd's simple story is so wonderfully understated, so elegant that it feels as though a hundred pages of emotion are squeezed into a thirty page book. We learn about Jeff's life in the military, his mischievous youth and disastrous attempt at love. Even so, Jeff remains a fairly quiet character and little is stated about him directly, yet clearly his character is so much deeper than anyone appreciates.

In short, Hurd's portrayal of his favorite uncle is painful and loving.

Excellent art from Pedro Camello moves the story along briskly. The layouts are but extremely effective, and Camello captures the essence of a scene perfectly with a gesture of a facial expression. His style looks deceptively conventional-closer to J. Scott Campbell than an indie artist like Chester Brown-but the heavy shadows and straightforward storytelling are perfect for the brooding but moving tale of an uncelebrated everyman.

If most comics were half this good, I'd probably starve to death trying to read them all.

(Bryan Miller)

* * *

Y: THE LAST MAN #7
Written by Brian Vaughn
Drawn by Pia Guerra
US $2.95
Published by DC Comics

OK, everyone likes "Y," that's pretty much a given. And I like the book a lot myself, I do, but my main problem with "Y" is that the titular character is such a good guy. Out of the seven issues thus far, he hasn't been shown to have any real flaws or much of a personality beyond magic, his girlfriend and pop culture, so it's kind of hard to sympathize with him.

And the pop culture references are cool, but sometimes they border along the lines of seeming like it's just Vaughn showing off what he knows and likes. They work most of the time, but sometimes they just come across as forced-like the "Fame" bit in this issue.

The art is strikingly similar to Steve Dillon's work, which of course makes you think of PREACHER, which isn't a bad thing for the book to be associated with. Guerra is able to distinguish her faces more than Dillon, however, which is nice. And the level of detail she puts into some of her panels works really well. The storytelling is crisp and clean and it's obvious she and Vaughn are on the same wavelength.

In terms of the story, Yorrick, 355 and Dr. Mann had to jump off the train they were riding last issue, and Yorrick ends up in a town where there's still electricity and ample food, but he's been discovered by the women of the town, who themselves are trying to cover up a secret. Meanwhile, Yorrick's sister Hero continues to track down the rumored man who she believes to be her brother.

The setup of the town Yorrick's in is interesting-there aren't any kids around, and the town leader, Lydia, says they've had plenty of experience making do without any men around for some time, indicating they've been without men since before whatever it was that happened that wiped them all out.

And there's some kind of importance placed on Sonia, the woman who found Yorrick, and they're obviously hiding some big secret. I don't really know where Vaughn's going with this, but the series is still new and that's what's nice about this particular storyarc is that it's diverting from the main story in a way and delivering up what's turning into an interesting mystery.

The book's strengths still heavily outweigh its weaknesses and I continue to look forward to what really is one of the best new comics of the last year.

(Wilson Moss)