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REVIEWS // 10.24.02 Batman • Electric Girl • Everything Can Be Beaten • Halo and Sprocket BATMAN
#608 I love hype. Especially comics hype, because they always, you know, deliver the goods. DC desperately wants you to buy this. They want you to buy this so bad they're exercising good judgement for once and scrapping that idiotic cross-over shit ("The Joker has a bomb in his brain! Will Gotham survive? Find out in this month's Batman, Birds of Prey, Nightwing, and Swank!") and just treating this as a comic independent of all the continuity baggage that ruins the Batman franchise on a month to month basis. They want you to buy this so bad they brought Jim Lee out of his armed wilderness compound and made him draw it. They want you to buy this so bad they're actually PROMOTING it. This comic had a lot going against it for me in that a) it was hyped like a mofo, b) I haven't been keen on what Jeph Loeb Batman I've read, and c) Batman's a character who's a lot better in theory than he is in practice. But I have to say that I enjoyed this. The captions weren't all that retarded purple prose talking about "the Beast within" or whatever that stupid shit you-know-who likes to spout, the story was paced very nicely, and Jim Lee is…Well, he's Jim Lee. Jim Lee is kind of like Quentin Tarantino in that he got huge and spawned a legion of second-rate imitators, which led most people to resent him so much that they refused to distinguish between Lee and the Jim Lee-biters. But the dude puts asses in seats, as was proven by this week's announcement that this issue was sold out BEFORE ANY CONSUMERS ACTUALLY BOUGHT A COPY. His Batman is all motion, as he beats the crap out of dudes with the kind of kinetic jump cuts you'd see in something like THE BOURNE IDENTITY. Nothing looks static, which is kind of interesting considering the brooding introspective Batman I've seen in the few comics I've read. Let's just call him Kung Fu Batman (You KNEW I was going there, didn't you?). My only complaint is Lee's Killer Croc, who looks like a cross between Venom and the Morlock Caliban, which really isn't…. Oh fuck. I've become a fanboy again. Let's just call it a thumbs-up and never mention it again. (Jeff Chon) ELECTRIC
GIRL #10 I've been spending a lot of time in the 'all ages' end of the pool this week and there's a lot of interesting stuff to offer. This latest issue of Brennan's superb ELECTRIC GIRL is another perfect example of universally friendly comic books that don't patronise, aren't simple but do entertain. The premise is both simple and lunatic: a gremlin called Oogleeoog gives an infant girl power over electricity and along with her heroically ugly dog Blammo, he accompanies her on her daily attempts to lead a normal life. If you fled at the word gremlin I wouldn't blame you. There's infinite potential here for the series to become dull, trite or predictable but in Brennan's hand it does none of these. Instead, like Virginia herself it continually couches the supernatural in very realistic, very mundane terms. Virginia is a girl first and an electric girl second, and the book never lets us forget this. This is basically an extended, slightly supernatural look at adolescence and it's rare in being both intelligent and often very funny. This issue is no exception, although it takes a slightly different approach to the more recent ones. Here, the entire issue is a flashback to Virginia's early childhood and the events of one particular Halloween. Complete with a genuine light sword (Made from a ski pole and some old Christmas lights) she finds herself forced to confront something which is either an evil witch, or an elaborate prank on Oogleoog's part. This kind of juxtaposition is what Brennan excels at, and this issue is no exception. Virginia's family is tempestuous without ever being stereotypical and her relationship with her cousin, resentful of having Virginia dumped on her for the night, is particularly well drawn. These are believable people who talk like we do, they just happen to do it in speech bubbles. There's also a real air of tension to this issue, with the situation seeming genuinely frightening for much of the issue's duration. This is Brennan's other trademark, the ability to make his readers worry about his characters without ever making it clear that they should or not. In this way, ELECTRIC GIRL elicits a very real emotional response, all too rare in the comic industry. All in all, ELECTRIC GIRL is a perfect companion to HALO AND SPROCKET (reviewed below, don't miss it!). Both have open, friendly art styles and both are designed to be as accessible as possible. However, the biggest thing they have in common is that they're extremely good comics. Highly recommended. (Alasdair Stuart) EVERYTHING
CAN BE BEATEN An odd little book by Jhonen Vasquez ("Scolex") and Brad Canby ("Scrambley"), EVERYTHING CAN BE BEATEN is a picture book told in prose form. Which, technically, doesn't make it a comic, but I'll bet John Pierce's soul that it's better than most of the comics you've read this month. Sized like a little children's book, slightly bigger than a Chick tract, EVERYTHING CAN BE BEATEN is a charming little fairy tale with the sickest/cutest art, and the most uproariously funny prose you'll read in a long time. It's so amazingly great that when I bought it, the proprietress of the comic store looked at me and said, "Shame on you!" And this is from a woman who sells hentai compilation tapes and GET KRAVEN, so you know it's just gotta be the bestest of all time. OK. I know some of you really love cats, so stop reading right now. I'm serious. You really don't want to know what happens. Ohhhh-kaaaay, you asked it…. It's about an adorable little sociopath named "It," who spends his life in a hellish room sledgehammering kittens to death as they fall out of a little chute. This raised a lot of interesting questions for me: Is this all he does all day? Are there other rooms like his? If there are, do kittens fall out of those chutes too, or do other chutes have stuff like puppies, and hamsters, and Elven Bill Jemases? Maybe this is Kitten Hell, where evil cats go to repent for their sins and "It" is serving some sort of divine function. Who knows? This is a densely layered story and we could go all night on this topic. Anyway, "It" finds a door, out of the room and walks through it, ending up in a land of happy dancing elves and happy clouds. Kind of like the stuff my little seven-year-old cousin drew the last time I saw him. "It" becomes sad, as he starts to realize that this is not his hellish nightmare world of blood and gore and starts to cry. It's when a happy cloud floats by that he realizes (in a roundabout way) that life is what you make it, and that the way to true happiness is inside of you, not some giant sledgehammer flecked with the blood of a thousand kittens. So you see, comics can teach young children valuable lessons. And thank God too. Knowing that comics like this exist makes life so much easier to live. (Jeff Chon) HALO
AND SPROCKET #3 When I was younger, my Dad coined the term 'silly grin movie'. Those were the films where I'd come back, grinning all over my face and filled to the brim with the coolest bits. These were the films that made me fly, and I still get them, just not often enough. Likewise with comics. HALO AND SPROCKET however, is a silly grin comic. I'm aware I've discussed this book before but it's configured in such a way that that really doesn't matter. The basic premise is simple; a human, an angel and a robot live together and things happen at them. With a set of main characters like this, plot pretty much generates itself and here, as in previous issues, Callen lets that happen. The result is a comic which doesn't read like a comic, with naturalistic dialogue and more laugh out loud moments than the last two comedies I saw. The three stories presented here are a perfect snapshot of the series as a whole, following Halo and Sprocket as they cheerfully spend time failing to understand the world around them. In the hands of a lesser creator, this would be an excuse for the sort of comedy pratfalls that fill every second sitcom but Callen does something infinitely cleverer. Halo and Sprocket are genuinely interested in what's going on around them, they just don't quite 'get it'. This is beautifully demonstrated in 'The Little Things', the middle story which sees Halo trying to understand human's fascination with small versions of bigger objects. It's little more than a conversation between the characters but it manages what far too few Disney movies do; creating an air of genuine innocence around it's main characters. This is also shown 'About Face', the opening story which deals with Sprocket trying to express emotion. However, instead of the usual STAR TREK-style emoting, he and Halo take a far more hands on approach. Don't have eyebrows? Try duct tape. Need to make a point? Borrow your angel room-mate's flaming sword of vengeance. This cheerful ignorance is best shown in 'The Telemarketer', the final story. Effectively a single panel repeated, it's the story of one luckless telemarketer and what happens when he rings the flat. Here, Callen shifts into full-blown comedy, creating a story which is hysterically funny without ever resorting to cheap shots and still makes points about it's characters. HALO AND SPROCKET is a book that everyone should be reading. Any issue can be a reader's first, it's well drawn, intelligent and most of all very funny. This is a gem. Don't miss out on it. (Alasdair Stuart)
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