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RADAR // 1.16.03 By the SAVANT Staff On Our Radar • Holding Pattern • Fell Off the Screen THE
ANNOTATED MANTOOTH That being said: THE ANNOTATED MANTOOTH is hilarious. It's slap your knee, piss you pants, read aloud to other people in the room funny. It's funny in that barrage of jokes, funny without even trying to be funny way that most comics try to be funny, only they fail. THE ANNOTATED MANTOOTH does not fail. Rex Mantooth (Kung Fu Gorilla, for those of you counting) is a sex machine, a secret agent, a ninja and a big-ass gorilla. With his lady friend Honey Hamptonwick he saves the world over and over again from a myriad of threats-giant robots, crazed talk show host, zombified Nobel Prize winners ect. Fraction writes lightning fast stories with a handful of gags tossed into every page. He blends big, dumb slapstick with subtle wordplay and clever bits of dialogue. His humor is odd and off kilter and often as not relies on excessive amounts of profanity heaped atop even more cussin' and swearin', which is to say, it's right up my alley. Artist Andy Kuhn provides the visuals, which aren't too shabby either. His style is quirky to the extreme, some freakish combination of Mike Mignola and Jim Mahfood. It works. But what would THE ANNOTATED MANTOOTH be without annotations? The collection (originally printed in DOUBLE TAKE along with Joe Casey's Codeflesh) of stories are printed on the right side of the book, while page left is reserved for the original script and director's commentary-style ramblings from Fraction which are occasionally funnier than the book itself. Fraction explains the writing process of the stories, relates failed experiments that were cut and occasionally makes notes from some future world where Rex Mantooth has become the international phenomenon that made Fraction himself a crazed multi-zillionaire. I also get the sneaking (unconfirmed, totally speculative) suspicion that Fraction wanted the script and some of the annotations included to point out sections where Kuhn, who does a nice job, deviates wildly from the script. On one page, for instance, Fraction writes a gag about a zombie water car, which would ostensibly be a car made from zombies powered by water. Yet Kuhn draws a regular car driving across the surface of water being driven by a zombie which, even in the context of water cars and zombies and Kung Fu Gorillas makes one pause and scratch one's own personal head. Occasionally Fraction's annotations say something like, "Wow, this page is different from the script, huh?" Trouble in zombie-filled paradise? My one and only complaint about THE ANNOTATED MANTOOTH is the price-thirteen bucks for 3 thirteen page stories. The extras take up a lot of the slack, the annotations and Fractions goofy text pages, but thirteen samolians is still a lot of cabbage for thirty nine comics pages. If it wasn't so damn funny, I'd be irritated. Matt Fraction kicks ass. Rex Mantooth kicks ass. Pick up THE ANNOTATED MANTOOTH and perhaps you, too, can kick ass. (Bryan Miller) * * * MATTER MATTER is A5, photocopied and has the elements of a woman's face on it's pale blue cover. There's the eyebrows, eyes, the outline of a nose and a wide, beaming mouth. It's an odd image, welcoming and a little intimidating by turns. Which, oddly, neatly sums up MATTER itself. Indie navel gazing is not something which I find remotely endearing and at first glance that's exactly what MATTER does. When the first line of a comic is Went to the gig on my own after all.' The Morrissey siren always starts going off in my mind. There's boundless capacity for navel gazing misery in this country and if I want to do that I'll look at my own thanks very much. However, MATTER does something else which is a lot more interesting. This is a slice of life, presented in six panel grids that only relate to one another through the text most of the time. There's very little dialogue and not a great deal of incident, as the main character goes to a gig, gets chatted up, has sex with someone he shouldn't have and gets lost going home. Sounds like all those nights I was supposed to have as a student. However, what makes MATTER work is the fact that we don't have all the answers. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that the main character has done something very wrong involving his friend Bob. His perceptions orbit around conversations with Bob, a possible sighting of the man himself and the evil looks Bob's friends are giving him. At the same time, Kathy, the woman who chats him up is reinvented as a tattoo which becomes the streets he's lost on and that smile. It floats it's way through the story, a hint of the Cheshire cat in suburbia. And that's all you get. A one night long window into the life of a young man with a good memory, a friend called Bob and a woman called Kathy who he probably shouldn't be with. There's not very much closure and you leave knowing little more than when you arrived. However, the atmosphere is stunningly realized, depicting a normal life with the sort of subtlety that Raymond Carver achieves. Intelligent, diverting and bleakly funny this is willfully lo-fi comics and all the better for it. (Alasdair Stuart) *
* * Writing about comics is easy. Good, there's my hatemail quotient for the next year sorted. Writing about comics WELL is really difficult. Doing it for ten years is next to impossible. Say hello to TRIPWIRE, an English based comic and music magazine that ran in various forms between 1992 and 2002. Relaunching later this year, this book draws a line under the first decade of the magazine and collects it's best moments, plus a lot of new material. A lot of new material actually, especially some excellent one page pinups from the likes of Tim Sale, Darwyn Cooke, Frank Miller and Steve Lieber. These neatly punctuate the book, ensuring that you're never beaten over the head with interviews and actually have time to breath between each text piece. Because make no mistake, there's a lot of book here. X10 runs to 158 pages, and crams a lot of content into that space. Particularly worthwhile is Cutting Words, a collection of soundbites from various interviews the magazine has conducted. Frank Quitely telling us that Flex Mentallo is 'more important than the bible for comic readers' is a standout, as does Mike Hanson of DARK HORSE predicting the manga explosion we're in the process of seeing. Features such as this and ten question interviews with the likes of Paul Grist do a good job of setting out the magazine's stall. However, the star of the show here has to be STATE OF THE INDUSTRY, one of the pieces specially commissioned for the book. It's a round table interview in which Joe Quesada, Paul Levitz, Jim Valentino, Jason Kingsley of Rebellion and Mike Richardson answer the same questions about the state of the industry. Anyone interested in the business side of things should give this a look, with Richardson especially making some fascinating points which seem to inform some of Dark Horse's recent decision, including their fixation on movie licenses. It's a big piece, but one worth looking through as all involved give answers that are varied and almost devoid of drum beating. Content heavy and well designed, X10 is a pretty book which sees TRIPWIRE at the top of it's game. If you're interested in comic journalism, it's well worth a look. (Alasdair Stuart) * * * HOLDING
PATTERN: Once upon a time, Marvel used to publish original graphic novels. I can't help but remember this fact as I read the first issue of the unlikely serial comic UNSTABLE MOLECULES because the story is ideally suited to market in one shot. Convincing people to pick up a monthly serial in four parts to read this story is a more difficult challenge. That said, Sturm's fictional biography of the "real life" inspiration for original Marvel Age heroes The Fantastic Four has produced an enjoyable first issue. Sturm has taken the character qualities that readers will identify with the heroes and placed them into appropriate period context and characters. Sue Storm is a stay-at-home woman who tends house, raises her younger brother, and hosts women's circle events in her home. She reads PEYTON PLACE and, apparently, a comic book called Vapor Girl. Her younger brother Johnny is a repressed high schooler who is bullied by classmates and has a sexual fixation on the aforementioned Vapor Girl (which gets into territory usually covered by Grant Morrison) that is surpassed only by his fixation on fast cars. Reed Richards, Sue's absent and absent-minded boyfriend-fiancé, is hard at work on a private project that gets interrupted by government needs during the cold war. His longtime friend Ben Grimm is teaching boxing at a small New York gym. It's a tough call who the book is intended for, but I suspect Sturm is following what my English teachers always called the golden rule of writing: write, first and foremost, for yourself. Invariably, it will produce more engaging work than if you're writing what you think others want to read, and then your audience can find you. Where Sturm is going with all this is anyone's guess at this point. This issue only sets up the characters and apparently positions them for what Sturm refers to in his postscript and endnotes (and his fictional endnote sources are really wonderful) as "great risks" taken by the characters during the Cold War that would inspire Lee and Kirby to use them as templates for their legendary Fantastic Four characters. I hope the audience for this book finds it though, because it looks like it'll be a fun exercise, at the very worst. But I worry that the format of it may work against it in finding that audience. (Dave Potter) * * * KILLBOX
#1 I'm a news junkie. Always have been always will be. The worst thing that ever happened to my sleep patterns was the addition of BBC News 24 to the house. I mean, they don't just do the news, they do PRESS CONFERENCES. It's like the news, only better. So, I'm a news junkie. And I think it's because of that that I find KILLBOX an uncomfortable read. That and the fact that KILLBOX appears, based on this first issue, to be set during the seemingly imminent war with Iraq. Now, were I to get involved in a political discussion about that war and it's justifications, we'd eat bandwidth faster than a sumo at a noodle bar so suffice to say, it makes me uncomfortable. It's a complicated situation, at least in part created by the very people who now seek to resolve it, and the thought of placing adventure fiction in such a complex situation makes me more than a little uneasy. As an aside, I resent as a reader being beaten over the head with what appears to be the creative team's political beliefs. When I pick up a comic, I want to be entertained and challenged, not preached at and the line: 'If America does not go to war…war will go to America.' Placed by itself on the first page is just that, preaching. That aside, the basic idea is familiar. A single Marine tank crew, isolated from their unit and quite possibly behind enemy lines struggle desperately to stay alive and get home. It's familiar ground, but Denham handles it with some real visual flair especially in the opening pages. Focussing in on the lone tank trundling through barren desert terrain, it's visual shorthand for the entire series. These guys are VERY lost, and Denham does a good job of balancing the terror and absurdity of their situation. He also builds in some interesting character moments, and uses the space to great effect. There's a fantastic splash of a helicopter taking off and another which introduces one of the characters and tells the reader everything we need to know, all in one image. It's economical storytelling and sets KILLBOX out from the crowd. Unfortunately, it's the only thing about KILLBOX that's economical. Make no mistake, this is a black and white, 32 page pamphlet. There's no cardstock cover, slightly below standard paper stock and yet for some reason, it's five bucks. This is a book killing price, and I'm astonished that Antarctic would see fit to launch a series at this sort of price level. It stings all the more on this side of the pond, where Diamond have recently LOWERED the prices retailers pay which in turn we've been able to pass onto the customers. KILLBOX isn't worth your time. It's well paced and drawn but the political connotations of the script and the ridiculous price would have scared me off if I'd been buying it rather than reading it in my store. (Alasdair Stuart)
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