THE HARDY BOYS #1
Written by Scott Lobdell and Drawn by Lea Hernandez
Published by Papercutz/NBM Publishing

This past summer in San Diego when I first saw that this series of classic mystery novels was migrating to comics, I was very excited by the news. As a young reader, I helped build my skills and love for literature with a steady diet of the adventures of Frank and Joe Hardy. Since then, I’ve tried to pass off that love to the next generation, throwing Nancy Drew books into the mix as well. Few efforts are as rewarding as getting a kid to read. And now that there are going to be HARDY BOYS and NANCY DREW graphic novels, hopefully getting kids to read will be one step easier.

That isn’t to say that this is a perfect effort right out of the gate. The basic building blocks are here, and they’re solid; we’re introduced to the brothers, get a handle on their relationship, meet their friends, get a peek at their relationships with girls, and learn that their strongest character traits are intelligence and loyalty. Considering that scribe Scott Lobdell has never been someone whose work I’ve enjoyed, his straightforward set-up worked really well for me. But on the flip side, he opens up the book with a clumsy and downright out of place rip against animal rights activists. And it’s so stupid and out of place that you can’t ignore it. There are literally dozens of other ways that they boys could have been shown adventuring to start the title, and this was just poor judgment on Lobdell’s part.

Balancing that out, however, is some terrific artwork from Ameri-manga whiz Hernandez. An industry vet with books like RUMBLE GIRLS, CATHEDRAL CHILD, and KILLER PRINCESSES in her vitae, she seems, on the surface, to be an unlikely choice for a HARDY BOYS book. Reading this, however, she’s an inspired pick. Papercutz, seeing how manga dominates the sales charts, especially in the bookstore market, chose an artist who would help their graphic novels blend in and find a happy home on the shelves.

An odder decision was in releasing the HARDY BOYS material as pamphlets first, before publishing a trade, and releasing NANCY DREW solely as graphic novels. I’m guessing that Papercutz wanted to try and develop a comics shop presence with the floppies, but with a title with the name recognition of THE HARDY BOYS it hardly seems necessary to go that route.

Issue one sets in motion a plot that finds the boys’ best friend, Chet Morton, being pursued by a government agency that accuses him of stealing an artifact called “The Ocean Of Assyria.” Obviously, the issue leaves the reader on a cliffhanger, so I can’t tell you whether or not the mystery and plot resolve with any satisfaction, but I can tell you that, blundered opening sequence aside, I still had plenty of enthusiasm for seeing these characters leap into the four color world and wanted to read more. Hopefully, the bumps will smooth out a bit along the way. Grade: B

SIBAM?

It’s been a long time since someone took a crack at bringing the brothers to life on screen. The Hardys will always work best on television, I think, because they have such an enormous youth appeal, and their types of mysteries are best resolved in 44 minutes. Television also allows for long-term character development and movement. Indeed, thinking about it, it sort of seems shocking that the WB hasn’t snatched up the rights and gotten it on the air, doesn’t it?

HERE ON GILLIGAN’S ISLE…

DORK TOWER #29
Written and Drawn by John Kovalic
Published by Dork Storm Press

DORK TOWER 29 is more than just an amusing and entertaining comic book. Much more. When this series first began a few years ago, its primary focus was on using its characters to poke a lot of fun at geek culture, even as you knew that Kovalic himself had to be a geek of the highest order. That made it easy for the reader to laugh along with the book and not feel like the victim of the humor. There were occasional elements in the book that added to the characters and who they were, and subplots even began to spring up and begin to gain life of their own. But it is with this issue that the series’ growth has found a new level, and DORK TOWER has shifted to being a character driven book with the occasional moment of geek satire. Indeed, the satire is far more organic now, as it flows from who the characters are and not from the situations that Kovalic creates. I tip my hat to Kovalic for finding his way and turning a book that was already a steady delight into something just a bit more. Grade: A

TALES FROM FISH CAMP
Written by Danielle Henderson
Published by Ait/PlanetLar

AiT publisher Larry Young strikes again. Defying expectations earlier this year by returning to publishing pamphlets (the excellent DEMO), he does it again by publishing this short prose memoir by Henderson, an interesting and talented new writer.

FISH CAMP hit me in a spot that few works really do anymore. Years ago, when I began working on writing works of creative non-fiction (rather than fiction) I became fascinated by works of “immersion journalism.” Books like SALVATION ON SAND MOUNTAIN captured my imagination, and I had new ideas popping out of my head like mad. At the time, there was a women’s professional baseball league operating in the southwest, and I contacted the league to start trying to make arrangements to spend a season with the Phoenix team for the purposes of my own immersion book. Unfortunately the league wound up folding, and I’ve yet to have another idea that struck me quite as hard as that one did. Dammit.

Anyway, Henderson’s immersion work is a dandy, as she finds herself in the completely unfamiliar territory of working at a fishing operation in northern Alaska. What she finds is a culture and locale unlike anywhere else in the world, and she does a terrific job of bringing it to life in her text, somehow making spending time working in what she describes as near-horror sound enticing. She also does a nice job bringing to life the unusual cast of characters that she spent time with there as well. It’s so interesting that you can easily see a sitcom brewing as you read through it.

My one complaint is that the stories move along almost too briskly and the book concludes a bit before the reader is ready for it too. For all the time she spent there, I felt myself wondering where the rest of her adventure was, like I was missing fifty pages from my copy of the book. Still, what’s here works, and was a lovely surprise. I hope Larry continues to make unusual moves like this one. Grade: A-

IT’S ONLY A GAME
Written and Drawn by Charles M. Schulz and Jim Sasseville
Published by About Comics

Raise your hand if you thought that PEANUTS was the only syndicated comic strip that Charles Schulz ever produced.

Lots of hands went up, I bet.

GAME was Schulz’s other effort, even though it lasted a little over a year. Working with Sasseville, GAME was a single-panel gag strip that covered the wide world of sports and games in the indomitable Schulz style. The gags appeared on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, or collected as one on Sundays. They tackled the humor is everything from golf to chess to various card games. Indeed, one thing you learn in this volume was that Schulz loved playing bridge, and every Friday panel had a bridge theme running through it.

Sasseville worked for and assisted Schulz in artistically producing the strip from the start. Already familiar with Schulz’s style from drawing the comic book adventures of the PEANUTS kids, he provided finishes on Schulz’s fully drawn GAME efforts, and in many cases, he took a very rough sketch from Schulz and drew out the full cartoon in Schulz’s style. Benefiting the reader, he contributes some “DVD” commentary along the way in this book, discussing his friendly working relationship with Schulz and the ups and downs of working on the strip. He also, with great respect, discusses what it was like not having his name on the strip, even though he was working very hard on making it the best he could be.

The results of their collaboration are wildly inconsistent, which surprised me. Some strips are really inspired and witty, demonstrating two cartoonists working at the height of their powers and firing on all cylinders. Yet some of them are just blatantly awful, and you wonder how they got past an editor. That, I think, is a testament to either Schulz’s name or the dreaded deadline doom that constantly lingered over Schulz and Sasseville as they produced the strip. And for full-disclosure, I’ve never played bridge, and every single one of those panels went straight over my head. Still, this book is, at heart, a testament to some fine work by two terrific cartoonists, and an excellent historical addition to the Schulz canon. Grade: A-

THE LAST HEROES
Written by Steven Grant and Drawn by Gil Kane
Published by iBooks

Speaking of worthy historical additions to the canons of great artists…

LAST HEROES collects Grant and Kane’s final (and previously unfinished and unpublished) word on the world of superheroes, which was originally published as EDGE back in the early 90s. EDGE’S publisher imploded before the final issue could be printed, and a combination of factors, including Kane’s tragic end at the hands of cancer, left the resolution to the book unknown until a decade later. But much like the Schulz book, the reader and comics fan is better off for having the book in his hand to celebrate the work of a giant.

Following in the steps of the “bring superheroes into the real world” movement at the time, Grant’s story takes a wicked poke at the entire idea of it. LAST HEROES shows a world where the heroes look gaudy, the public looks on with stupid admiration, and no one can be trusted to reach for a greater good.

In the wake of the baseball steroids scandal, the Ron Artest/fan fight, and Michael Jackson’s continual legal battles, this should sound really, really familiar.

Indeed, the super powers that the “heroes” and “villains” in this book have are almost beside the point, even as one character battles to remove the powers of the others. The world of what makes a “hero” heroic is so gray that there isn’t a side here you can fully root for, because untapped potential is exploding from all the characters and they’ve each turned their backs on it.

Kane’s art looks fantastic, especially with the high-quality printing that the book has been given. His figures and faces were always some of the most dynamic to ever grace a comic, and there’s nothing different about his work on THE LAST HEROES. What the printing also does here is allow the colors to be bolder and stronger than Kane ever got on the old newsprint paper that the majority of his work was printed on, and seeing this stuff, you realized what a damned shame that really is.

Grant provides two strong text pieces that bookend the volume, describing his friendship with the legendary Kane and offering insight into what they were trying to accomplish with the story and characters. Having gotten to know Steven a bit over the last few years, I always delight in hearing him discuss the stuff that happens “behind the curtain,” as he’s a gifted natural storyteller who can make going to the grocery to buy milk sound interesting. I’m pleased that he’s finally gotten such an important career highlight published in a deserving format. Grade: A

ANDY SINGER: NO EXIT
Written and Drawn by Andy Singer
Published by NBM Publishing

This entry in NBM’S “ATTITUDE” series spotlights alt-cartoonist Singer and his darkly iconoclastic look at modern society and life. Although occasionally inspired, such as with a panel about a mother and child called “Early Encounters With Bureaucracy,” the book runs into frequent problems with Singer’s lack of subtlety and his gift for preaching to the choir.

I’m a pretty heavy liberal, but too many times in the book I found myself shaking my head and wondering why Singer hadn’t taken a less obvious route with a gag, because he was working too heavy-handed to penetrate a mind that could be opened with a quieter cut. For instance, a panel where he draws a baseball game wherein the players are wearing their salaries as their uniform number; not only has it been done, it’s an too obvious a target. At moments like that, I was disappointed that Singer (who obviously has some talent) wasn’t working harder and thinking deeper.

I like the idea of NBM finding these cartoonists and bringing their work to a broader audience, as too many talents with something to say toil in relative obscurity. Unfortunately, this one was just a bit disappointing. Grade: C

Quiz time: I’ll see you in seven days with:
A) A booger hanging out of my nose
B) A potpourri of cool new books
C) More gray hairs than I have today
D) No pants on
E) Both “B” and “E”

I told you there’d be a quiz.

SEE NEXT MONDAY’S MAIL SHOOT FOR THE WINNER OF THE SIBAM MASSIVE COMICS GIVEAWAY!

E-mail me from the link provided. Review materials may be sent to: Marc Mason, P.O. Box 26732, Tempe, AZ, 85285. You can also find me at The Comics Waiting Room and Happy Nonsense.

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