“F*** you, Tarzan.” COMICS! Sometimes ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore!

In which I aimlessly amble around Howard Victor Chaykin’s recent series ‘Midnight of the Soul’ and see what strikes my fancy. No, really, even more than usual, I just sort of prattle on rather aimlessly and hope some kind of coherent point emerges. It probably won’t, but as I haven’t written it yet we’ll have to find out together. Take my hand, fellow stranger in paradise! Take my hand... MIDNIGHT OF THE SOUL by Chaykin, Arbutov and Bruzenak Anyway, this...

MIDNIGHT OF THE SOUL #1-5 Written by Howard Victor Chaykin Art by Howard Victor Chaykin Coloured by Jesus Aburtov Lettered by Ken Bruzenak Image Comics, $3.50 each (2016)

On one level ‘Midnight of the Soul’ is exactly the kind of comic everyone thinks Howard Victor Chaykin makes, but on another level it isn’t, and the abrasion between what you expect to read and what you actually read creates some smart sparks. I think. The success of Chaykin’s smuggling run in 'Midnight of the Soul' is aided no end by the fact he draws it and so, inevitably, it looks just like a Howard Victor Chaykin comic. This is the bit that misleads because the surface is flawlessly “Chaykin”. Obviously. What did you want, Dave McKean? The guy’s in his sixties, he’s not likely to be suddenly incorporating mixed media and sculpture into his work. Not when “Diagnosis: Murder” is on and there’s kosher Franks in the pan! Thus, the art is as Late Chaykin as Late Chaykin gets. And, yes, it breaks my heart too, but it is getting late in the Seasons of The Chaykin. But dry your eyes, o feral child, because he’s still with us, and he’s still delivering his pugnaciously suave art. Sure, some eyes will still be perturbed by the clip art that doesn’t quite gel and flinch at the odd lapse in positioning. I’m a Chaykin maniac but I’m not blind to his transgressions; there’s one panel of Patricia in a doorway that doesn’t work – at all, and he’s stuck himself with a motorbike image that doesn’t always suit the angle of his composition, and that precise image of a woman was in Satellite Sam, and that cop’s all out of whack with that barrier and, and, and, you know, we could carp all day, but what matters is that for the most part, most of it works. As your eye sweeps over it, as you read it, it works. If you sit and look at each panel, eh, not so much. But who’d do that? Whaddya think comics are? Art? Comics are for reading first and looking at second. 'Midnight of the Soul' is a VERY GOOD! read.

MIDNIGHT OF THE SOUL by Chaykin, Arbutov and Bruzenak

The occasional glaring visual infelicity aside, Chaykin definitely gets in a major artistic victory by resurrecting a sense of of New York as 'twas. While Arbutov’s colours remain a little too garishly lacquer-ish for my sedate tastes, they contribute enormously to this effect as well. The interiors of the dance halls and gin-joints are particularly noteworthy and Arbutov lays down some seriously hot pinks and cool greens. So, y’know, yay. The ‘50s being the Golden Age of The Billboard, omitting to mention the phantasmagoria of styles and fonts Bruzenak scatters as gloriously and as evocatively as the notes Gershwin throws over the opening of ‘Manhattan’(1979) would be a serious dereliction of duty. Bruzenak also subtly colour codes his speech bubbles so you know who is speaking even when they are “offscreen”. The big thing about Big Ken Bruzenak is that he never stands still (artistically, that is), and his stylistic evolution continues here with a pretty darn exciting and innovative mock 3-D lettering effect, used sparingly and effectively. Conjuring a particular time and  a particular place from the past into the present via paper and ink is a very Chaykin preoccupation. The man’s rightly proud that locations in the original ‘Black Kiss’ are so redolent of ‘80s Los Angeles that readers’ noses start convulsing for coke in sympathy. In ‘Midnight of The Soul’ Chaykin (and Arbutov and Bruzenak) work a similar feat for ‘50s New York, though here it’s your stomach that rumbles for coffee and a doughnut, rather than your nose for Class ‘A’s.

MIDNIGHT OF THE SOUL by Chaykin, Arbutov and Bruzenak

Not that the New York of ‘Midnight of the Soul’ is drug free. Au contraire, mon frère! On past evidence Chaykin’s not one of those selective amnesiacs who thinks the past was a magical Eden, to which the present is a disgraceful relative. If anything he’s prone to wallowing in the seamier side of things, and we’re not just talking about stockings there. And so it goes that Joel Breakstone’s search for his errant wife brings him up against a rash of rascals, a pair of gun slinging gunsels (in the correct sense of "catamites"), a saucy whip-smart dancer, a corrupt cop, and a boss man with a ginger flattop. This is after all, the ‘Midnight of The Soul’, so a certain sense of threat and moral conflict come with the territory. I mean, I could be wrong, but I believe the title alludes to ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’ (AKA ‘Noche obscura del alma’). That’s not because I am an expert on the poetry of St. John of the Cross (1542-1591), but because ‘Midnight of the Soul’ has a familiar structure, one which accords with the ‘time of testing’ the poem assures us we must all go through before reaching a state of Grace. Something to look forward to there, kids. That’s some high falutin’ stuff, poncho! Don’t worry, it just means ‘Midnight of the Soul’ is a lot like, oh, ‘After Hours’ (1985). Basically in these things you get some dude (or maybe a lady these days) out of his depth flailing about a thoroughly threatening city, encountering threats embodying his inner failings, while his intended goal remains persistently out of reach until his ordeal has suitably shriven him for the final confrontation. After which he’s a lot more at peace than he was when he started. And so it is for our slightly schmucky and typically Chaykin-esque looking lead, Joel Breakstone.

MIDNIGHT OF THE SOUL by Chaykin, Arbutov and Bruzenak

Joel’s a failed writer but a successful drunk who slouches despondently in the garage of a house he sold to his Brother-in-Law to clear debts accrued, pecking out unwanted alt-History tales of a World where Germany won WW2. If Joel punched himself every time he ate a bagel he couldn't be more obviously a self-hating Jew. He doesn’t hate himself because he's a Jew though, he hates himself for some unpleasantness which occurred during the liberation of a Concentration Camp in WW2. Something, as Joseph Heller famously had it, happened. Coming to terms with that memory is Joel's key to Grace, but to do it he'll have to navigate his 'Midnight of the Soul'. Meanwhile, just to underline his emasculation, his wife is out bringing home the bread working as a night-court stenographer. Except she isn't, as Joel finds out while pathetically creeping the house for booze. Turns out she's turning tricks. The lit match of his self-righteous indignation plops straight into the accumulated reservoir of self-hatred, and the resulting explosion of dumb machismo is sufficient to propel the cuckolded schmuck out into the city in search of vengeance. New York, however, has other ideas. 'Midnight of the Soul' is a picaresque adventure comic in which a man finds out a lot of the things he thought he knew about himself aren't true, and that the truth might hurt but not as much as living a lie does. Also: violence, jazz, profanity, blow jobs, snappy patter, racism, jokes and a man dressed as a baby in an Irish bar. 'Midnight of the Soul' has something for everyone! Except humourless drips.

MIDNIGHT OF THE SOUL by Chaykin, Arbutov and Bruzenak

Joel's a luckless boob for the most part, but he is ultimately lucky because he gets to inhabit one of Chaykin's more vital narratives. From the first loaded word (“Parallels”) there’s a sense of Howard Victor Chaykin pushing through the pages of the narrative at the reader. The explicit fictional narrative of the book seems shaken every now and then by subsurface ructions, barely repelled authorial outbursts, which threaten to make it lose its footing.  Which it never quite does, but it comes close. There’s a lack of commitment to the pulp fiction on show, as though Howard Victor Chaykin is intermittently is gripped by the urge to be doing something else. And I think he probably is. In a sense 'Midnight of the Soul' works as a big kiss-off to a bunch of tropes you suspect Chaykin feels he’s outgrown. Joel enters a midnight world of Chaykin standards, but always at an odd angle, always a few beats behind thee action, always playing catch-up, as though trying to find his way into the story proper. A story which seems to be occurring in parallel(!) to his search. This story, the story Joel circles for the bulk of the book, is the “usual” Chaykin, the Chaykin we expect; all bad behaviour, colourful characters, sassy patter and blunt force violence. For much of the book Joel never quite connects with this pulp strand, instead he keeps bouncing off it into a more sedate but no less colourful screwball romantic comedy. Both strands hinge on a portrait of New York anchored by visual verisimilitude and the odd nod to reality (is that Joe Gould reciting 'The Face on The Bar-room Floor'? In #3?) but both run parallel(!) to each other; until the final pages, anyway. And it's on these final pages that Chaykin seemingly states his current genre preference. But is it “Goodbye” or just “Au Revoir” to the genre staples that made his name and brought him fame? Alas, despite what I tell ladies in bars, I don't know Howard Victor Chaykin personally, so we'll all just have to wait and see together...

NEXT TIME: Take a guess, punchy. That's right - COMICS!!!

“...Even LIMP, That Bat's Too Much For ME.” COMICS! Sometimes It's The Cat Which is The Unnameable.

This time out: a lady werewolf, the slightly lighter side of Lovecraft and a drunk cuckold finds the vengeance trail's gone cold. Midnight of the Soul by Chaykin, Arbutov & Bruzenak

What's not to love about that, am I right or am I right?

Anyway, this... SHE WOLF #1 All by Rich Tommaso Image Comics, Inc., $3.99 (2016) She Wolf created by Rich Tommaso She Wolf © 2016 Rich Tommaso

The slightly creepy theme (from my more than slightly creepy self) this week kicks off with Rich Tommaso's teenage werewolf comic. Pretty straightforward stuff you'd think, teenage werewolf comics; but you'd be wrong. Maybe. I mean she might be a werewolf, she might not, and if she is, well, she might have been bitten by one, or maybe a shape changing spell went wrong. Or she just doesn't like dogs and, uh, wait her boyfriend was a ...no, wait now she's fighting her priest but...maybe not. This hallucinatory narrative uncertainty is intentional, I would guess given that Tomasso's comic is a visually resplendent wonder indeed. You don't get the skill to draw something as phenomenally vital as this unless you know what you're doing. Of course, whether you want to let the reader in on what you are doing is another thing altogether.

She Wolf by Rich Tommaso

Now as we have all noted on numerous occasions, I am terrible when it comes to colour in comics but even I can see that colours here are some kind of spectacular you'd do well not to miss. At first I thought the colour coding of scenes was the key (red for dreams, blue for night, various for daytime reality) but everything starts to get blurry, and reality and fantasy are all mucked about, and you soon don't know which end is up. Which, you might hazard should you be able to rememebr that far back, is what being a teenager is like. (The way I remember it is this: being a teenager is A!W!F!U!L!). Tomasso certainly draws his heroine as a true to teenhood gawky flail of elbows and knees, like a young Laura Dern; in gangly contrast to the smooth swoosh of movement personifying the animal identity. Then there's the great scene where the Principal is reassuring our heroine, but she can also see a black and red doppleganger Principal whose every word drips mistrust and belligerence. Yeah, adults say they want to help you but they LIE because they HATE you! Man, it's a great scene. But then there are a few of those here. More great scenes in one comic than most series manage in toto. Tomasso's cartoony style may bely the horror, particularly in a viscerally unsettling dream sequence, but this lends everything a kind of comedic undercurrent. Or maybe it's a comedy with a horrific undercurrent. I don't know, but what I do know is I'm sticking with this one because Rich Tomasso's SHE WOLF is VERY GOOD! AAAAARrrrrrrrrrrrroooOOOOOOOOOAAAAOOoooooHHHH! WEIRD DETECTIVE #1 (of 5) Art by Guiu Vilanova Written by Fred Van Lente Coloured by Mauricio Wallace & Josan Gonzalez Lettered by Nate Piekos of Blambot ® Dark Horse Comics Inc., $3.99 (2016) Weird Detective ™ created by Fred Van Lente & Guiu Vilanova Weird Detective ™ indebted to the work of H P Lovecraft Text and illustrations of Weird Detective ™ © 2016 Fred Van Lente & Guiu Vilanova

Standing in stark contrast to Alan Moore & Jacen Burrows reverent and stately paced dark hymn to the majesty of HP Lovecraft, here we have Van Lente & Vilanova's somewhat more modern take. Mash-ups are still modern right? Because what WEIRD DETECTIVE ™ is is HP Lovecraft smushed up with the detective genre, hence the title. It's a lot of fun, whether it's more fun than PROVIDENCE I don't know, because anyone who measures fun is someone who isn't having any. Personally I had fun with both, just different kinds. WEIRD DETECTIVE is plump with cliches, but that's because the detective genre is filled with cliches rather than due to any lack on Van Lente's part. Van Lente in fact proves pretty smart at playing with the conventions and part of this smartness is displayed in his clever sense of humour. The scene where Greene watches TV detectives to get tips on behaviour almost buckles under all the referencing (Lovecraft, Rockford Files, Martian Manhunter, etc) but is instead impressive in both its levels of humour and intelligence. This undercurrent of drollery prevents things becoming too rote or too unpleasant. Because some of the book is pretty gross, there's the standout death by toilet but there are quieter horrors at play too. And all the horrors are derived from the Lovecraftian mythos and blatantly so. You won't be scratching your spade-like chin with this one trying to figure out the links, because the links come fast and blatant as Owen Smith's strings.

Weird Detective by Vilanova, Van Lente, Wallace & Gonzales, Piekos

I liked Vilanova's art, although it takes a dip near the middle of the book but swiftly recovers. His real world is realistic and his creatures are unpleasantly convincing. Let's face it, it takes no little talent to make unsettling some of Lovecraft's creations, which essentially resemble an overcooked carrot, some ping pong balls and a brace of drinking straws. The action is nicely done with a particularly good fall from a high place but Vilanova also keeps the quieter scenes interesting, such as the parts where our weird detective communicates with his cat through slight twitches of his facial muscles. Although any conversation with a surly cat is by definition interesting, I guess. WEIRD DETECTIVE is clever, funny, gross and GOOD!

MIDNIGHT OF THE SOUL #2 (of 4) Art by Howard Victor Chaykin Written by Howard Victor Chaykin Coloured by Jesus Arbutov Lettered by Ken Bruzenak Image Comics, Inc., $3.50 (2016) Midnight of the Soul created by Howard Victor Chaykin Midnight of the Soul © Howard Victor Chaykin

Lycanthropy and Lovecraft are creepy but the creepiest of all must be my fawning over the work of Howard Victor Chaykin. Occasionally some luckless naif will have the temerity to question why I like the work of Howard Victor Chaykin quite as much as I do. He, they often persist, always makes the same comic. This, and here is where their lucklessness comes in, spurs me to anecdotal reminiscence thusly: It was the 1990s and far too many people were taking Paul Weller seriously. One day I had a visitor who upon entering traversed the floor with the healthy, male clutter of batch (crispy tissues, ragged jazz mags, suffocated ashtrays, the glutinous residue of alcoholic frolics, etc etc) to the bookshelves.

Midnight of the Soul by Chaykin, Arbutov & Bruzenak

Despite the variety and fine taste on show said visitor was evidently puzzled, breaking their silence with, “You have an awful lot of Elmore Leonard here.” I conceded the truth in this observation, yet couched within my tone was my evident uncertainty as to why precisely that might be so remarkable. “But doesn't he just write the same book all the time?” came the withering parry. “Yes”, I said “but it's a good one.” Then I started searching for a vein. (Not really.) VERY GOOD!

Remember: Stay on the road. Keep clear of the – COMICS!!!

“I Myself Played A Zobo Kazoo.” COMICS! Sometimes Comedy Lurks In The Unlikeliest of Places!

Yeah, uh,  sorry. Didn't mean to be gone quite so long. Got distracted by the real world. Big Mistake. What an awful place the real world is. Simply dreadful. So, yeah, not a good year thus far for any of us, huh? Hey, I know what we need, some sweet, sweet COMICS!!! (DISCLAIMER: Contains words of praise for Alan Moore.) Midnight of the Soul by Chaykin, Arbutov & Bruzenak

Anyway, this... MIDNIGHT OF THE SOUL #1 Art by Howard Victor Chaykin Written by Howard Victor Chaykin Coloured by Jesus Arbutov Lettered by Ken Bruzenak Image Comics, Inc., $3.50 (2016) Midnight of the Soul created by Howard Victor Chaykin

So, yeah, at long damn last Howard Victor Chaykin's MIDNIGHT OF THE SOUL strikes at your eyes like a comic book cobra! My son (“Gil”) wasn't even born when the coiner of the phrase “moral cripples” started talking this one up. You can't rush awesome though, so here we are. Fifteen hairline depleting years later, here we are. This time out Howard Victor Chaykin's dreamy doppelganger is one Joel Breakstone who as ever looks good, looks fine, maybe a little too good, a tad too fine for someone in Joel Breakstone's position. That being one of a man wallowing in a self medicated haze of booze following an as yet unrevealed incident while liberating the WW2 Death Camps.

We'll obviously be coming back to the Death Camps of WW2. Largely because Joel Breakstone keeps going back to the Death Camps of WW2. Because, as Joseph Heller might have it “something happened” in the Death Camps of WW2. Not just the stuff we all know went on in the Death Camps of WW2 but something particular to Joel Breakstone. Because Joel Breakstone helped liberate one and what occurred in The Death Camps of WW2 is the gift that keeps giving. But then don't judge the book too quickly, because there is such a thing as an unreliable narrator and a pretty good candidate for such a post would be a man whose spent five years coping with PTSD by self medicating himself with alcohol and refusing to leave his house. That's Joel Breakstone, not me. On the very first page turn Chaykin seamlessly entwines the past and the present via the images of chimneys and he keeps this high standard of storytelling up for the duration. He seems more than present, he seems engaged, and because Howard Victor Chaykin is engaged the words on the page matter and no word matters more than the first word here “Parallels.”

Midnight of the Soul by Chaykin, Arbutov & Bruzenak

Art-wise it's looking good, it' s looking cleaner and smarter than a Howard Victor Chaykin joint has for a while. The big test of Chaykin art in 2016 is how is going with the cheeks'n'chins? I checked with my eyes and the cheeks and chins in MotS seem altogether more controlled than they have for awhile. Chaykin's reigning in his prognathous tendencies and no one is stylin' Jō Shishido cheeks,so that's good. His figure work's sweet, with a killer panel of Breakstone kicking his TV in. And that TV, like everything around it, seems period authentic so I guess he's as reliable as ever in that respect. There's still a little ghost-float where the images don't quite cohere ideally, but Jesus Arbutov's shadows attempt a corrective tethering. And Ken Bruzenak, lovely, lovely Ken Bruzenak continues his ridiculously innovative attempts to visually represent the purely audible; by now his constructions of visual onomatopoeia are as integral to the art as a whole as any pictures Chaykin lays down. It's a finely honed machine, is what I'm saying.

MIDNIGHT OF THE SOUL is as ridiculously virile, as cheekily provocative, as visually intelligent and as resolutely “Chaykin” as anyone could wish. VERY GOOD!

THE TWILIGHT ZONE: THE SHADOW #3 Art by Dave Acosta Written by David Avallone Coloured by Omi Remalante Lettered by Taylor Esposito Cover by Francesco Francavilla Dynamite Entertainment, $3.99 (2016) The Twilight Zone created by Rod Serling The Shadow created by Walter B Gibson

Here's a thing, my LCS just automatically sends me every comic about The Shadow. I'm not entirely sure why that is, but it is. Maybe they think I am so old I remember the pulps or something. Anyway, this isn't what I was expecting at all. I was hoping The Shadow would be maybe fixing Burgess Meredith's glasses, or leaning past William Shatner and firing his twin .45s through the plane window and blowing that thing to fuck and back, or maybe saving the world by saying, “For the Love of God, it's a cookbook, you blithering fools.” Nope, it's some kind of meta affair whereby Shads has entered The Twilight Zone and every issue he is plonked into some situation where The Shadow is a fictional construct (i.e. kind of our reality; last issue he was an Orson Welles doppler, this issue he's “Maxwell Grant”, and thus deucedely confused) and learns a lesson which brings him that bit closer back to the humanity he had been in the process of losing.

The Twilight Zone: The Shadow by Acosta, Avallone, Remalante & Esposito

It's a clever little set up and while David Avallone might have bitten off a little more than he can chew and the spindly art by Dave Acosta is more game than it is successful, it's neat enough stuff. The kind of thing Neil Gaiman makes such bloody heavy weather out of , but Avallone & Acosta keep it all light with just the right amount of humour and some inventive set pieces. What could be more Twilight Zone-y than The Shadow being attacked by giant typewriter keys spelling J-U-S-T-I-C-E? Not much, I trust you'll agree. GOOD! PROVIDENCE #9 Art by Jacen Burrows Written by Alan Moore Coloured by Juan Rodriguez Lettered by Kurt Hathaway Cover by Jacen Burrows Avatar Press Inc, $4.99 (2016) Providence created by Alan Moore & Jacen Burrows Inspired by and indebted to the works of Howard Philips Lovecraft

In which everyone's favourite ginger haired Jewish homosexual nebbish glides blithely nearer a Stygian fate swarming with noisome and gibbering cyclopean terrors whose preternatural forms possess angles in defiance of all mortal conceptions of GEOMETRY!!! It took a bit of getting into to be honest, this one. Burrows' art was a bit of an impediment to immersion until I figured it out. It's purposefully bland. Being, I think, the visual equivalent of Lovecraft's dense and willfully archaic texts, which softly lull you into a kind of waking stupor, allowing the horrors to encroach subtly but decisively even as your eyes glaze over. Thus leaving you ripe for the final unveiling of...no, no, it cannot be named! At first I thought the series could be improved by having, say, Cam Kennedy or Richard Corben draw over the, uh, unutterable aspects. But then they'd really stand out, which isn't what they're after, I think. Even the, uh, eldritch elements have to be visually contiguous so that our protagonist’s rationalising of the thoroughly irrational has some credence.

Providence by Burrows, Moore, Rodriguez & Hathaway

Sure PROVIDENCE took some effort to read, but it repaid that work. Heck, I even started rereading Lovecraft hissownself, and I haven't touched the stuff since I was 15. Lovecraft that is, not the glue. Yes, I'm still merrily huffing into my forties. No, but, anyway re-reading Lovecraft? Hoo boy is he racist! It's right on the page as well. I missed that when I was fifteen, so either I was a bit thick or I was very racist myself, because seriously HP Lovecraft? Big racist. Just lays it right out there. Turns out he was the kind of racist who was anti-Semitic too. Lovely. Funny thing is though he was the kind of anti-Semite who marries a Jewish woman, because racists never make sense. (That's because racism doesn't make sense.) Anyway that marriage was less than successful (I know! SURPRISE!), but it does lend HP Lovecraft's jolly time with our Jewish friend herein a undercurrent of humour. Because there's a lot of humour in PROVIDENCE, some of it quite dark but some of it just plain funny. I mean, HP Lovecraft on these pages is a hilarious creation, seemingly inhabiting the century just prior to the one everyone else is living in. His erudite vocabulary set to task on the most mundane of conversational niceties is a proper hoot. He was actually a bit like that as well, so they say. Odd cove all round that HP Lovecraft. Say, did I mention the racism?

With PROVIDENCE Alan Moore brings a depth, intelligence and care to his writing which makes most everything surrounding it in the mainstream comics world seem as unto hurried mush, and Jacen Burrows acquits himself well r.e. his apparent brief to keep it real. The book repays the work you put in, basically. That dumpy looking washer woman staring balefully from the tower in this issue? It's not the first time she's appeared in the series. But to what end. To what...END!!! VERY GOOD!

That is not dead which still reads – COMICS!!!