From the longbox: Jonah Hex issue 50

It's a tricky tightrope to mix dark, heavy story with bright, cartoony art in comics. Series like The 'Nam and Queen and Country - about Vietnam and British espionage, respectively - are still debated in fanboy circles as to whether the art complimented the story or was a speedbump to its enjoyment. And Queen and Country personally took me a little effort before I came to appreciate the various pencillers and the almost Disneyesque art approach the book took even as it told stories of spies and the ruins of their personal lives.
In the same vein, I can see some people having trouble with the art of Darwyn Cooke in Jonah Hex #50 (DC Comics, Dec. 2009, $3.99). Cooke, whose work looks like a cross between Ditko and Harvey Comics, is best known for his retro projects like New Frontier (which retells the DC universe story in the 1950s) and his mid 2000s relaunch of the classic Spirit character, also for DC. Cooke's art has a decidedly Silver Age feel, with clean lines, little shading and eyes a little bigger than life. All of which makes it an interesting choice for the 50th issue of the latest Hex series. The Old West bounty hunter antihero - known for his horribly scarred face and always wearing remnants of a Confederate uniform - dates back to the early 1970s. The 21st century relaunch of the book by DC, written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, is notable for its constant bleakness and refusal to give Hex any redeeming qualities. He's a humorless, remorseless killing machine. In issue 50, we see the story of Hex and Tallulah, a female bounty hunter who similarly is facially scarred (she also has an eye patch), with whom he had a child. And in the course of the story, we see several dozen killings, one dog kicking, a baby cut out of a pregnant woman - Tallulah - and a final image of an infant-sized coffin. Fun for the whole family. If your family watches Leaving Las Vegas together.
A saving grace of the book is the levity in amidst all the darkness. The single panel of Hex with a lit cannon pointed at an occupied outhouse like some kind of weird Roadrunner cartoon bit, an arched "are you kidding me?" eyebrow of a prostitute Hex gives to a grizzled prospector type for information. All those moments come in the first half of the book, the second being about the collapse of the domestic idyll Tallulah had tried to create and then Hex's search for their infant kid and the climactic gunning down of a huge collection of fugitives for whom he was searching.
Another saving grace is the fact Hex is always fascinating to watch, just like any skilled tradesman. His trade in this case being riding and shooting and chasing down people roughly as bad as him (though history is written by the winners). While there's no easy simplistic "good guys winning" motif here, the book would quickly become unreadable if not for the audience's realization that. as horrible as life is in this largely lawless universe where the good men and women who make up the background characters routinely suffer and die miserably, at least the villains regularly get the comeuppance. I need to get some trades of the Gray/Palmiotti run. I imagine they will become well thumbed.

From the longbox: Star Brand

The best comic book characters - the ones carrying with them classic Greek tragedy levels of suffering - don't want to be comic book characters. Batman would have been much happier and more content if his parents had lived. The Hulk and the Thing don't want to be superstrong-yet-misshapen freaks. Spiderman's great power comes with great responsibility that's always messing up his life. Being a superhero in the real world would probably suck.
Which brings us to the tragedy that is Star Brand. The 19-issue series, which ran from 1986-1989 in Marvel Comics' New Universe imprint, was created by writer Jim Shooter and artist John Romita Jr. It told the story of Ken Connell, a Pittsburgh-area guy in his 20s who works for an auto detail shop, rides his dirtbike on weekends, and one day was handed the Star Brand - essentially this unlimited power to do anything - fly, invulnerability, strength, bring back the dead, etc. etc.
Star Brand started with an interesting concept as it blended some real world situations (people like the Libyan government start trying to track down Connell to use his power) with a weird mystery (who was the old guy who just handed this d-bag unlimited power and then tried to get it back?) with always-strong Romita Jr. art. Add to that the fact that Connell turned out to be not all that noble a guy, as he screwed around on his girlfriend and turned out to be sort of a self-pitying loser.
Unfortunately, the wheels came off the cart pretty quickly on this one as a succession of writers caused and artists vast unevenness.
And even when Star Brand went for broke, with Connell accidentally destroying the city of Pittsburgh and killing a million or so people, it made the mistake of going overboard and too far into the comic book world (with mutated creatures coming out of the pit that was Pitt) instead of maybe evaluating more what would the world be like with a true Superman. Writer/artist John Byrne came aboard for the last third of the series and was given the unenviable task of trying to wrap it all up. And issue 19 in fact did tie everything together and semi-solve all the questions, but in a rushed way.
Interesting side note: in the Legends miniseries for DC that Byrne did around the same time, Byrne had a Star Brand-like character caught by Green Lantern who accidentally zapped his own foot off, probably a thinly veiled jab at Shooter, who was well known in the comics world for being the tight manager Marvel needed at the time (getting books out on time, bringing in people like Frank Miller) who also happened to have no people skills and alienated vast numbers of writers and artists.

Half-eaten Apollo Bar, going once, going twice ...

A-hem. My birthday is coming up next week. JUST in time for the auctioning of props from 'Lost.' From the press release from the auctioneer:

Profiles in History, the world's largest auctioneer of Hollywood memorabilia, in partnership with ABC Studios, will be auctioning the props, costumes and set pieces from the hit ABC television series, LOST August 21-22 live from Barker Hanger in Santa Monica, CA. WORLDWIDE bidding begins at 1pm PDT both days. Bids can be placed in person, via mail, phone, fax or live on the Internet by visiting www.profilesinhistory.com or www.liveauctioneers.com.

Included in this auction will be the Swan Station Computer, which is an Apple-II Plus system running an Apple-III monitor, with a Disk II floppy drive, each featuring DHARMA logo.

Here is the complete catalog description of the computer:

This configuration is an Apple-II Plus system running an Apple-III monitor, with a Disk II floppy drive, each featuring DHARMA logo. This prop computer was used at the Swan station and by Desmond, Locke and other cast members to enter "The Numbers" every 108 minutes. It is the destruction of the Swan station computer that prevented "The Numbers" from being entered, leading Desmond to trigger the fail safe mechanism, causing the Swan station to implode. (Of trivial interest is a 1980s film, entitled "The Self," employed in some psychology classes today, which features an Apple-III computer monitor that is used to test the effect of positive personalities. Incidentally, the numbers 4, 8, 16, and 23 appear frequently in these tests.) The monitor currently exhibits the DHARMA Tempest station logo, indicating its subsequent use in the Season Four episode, "The Other Woman."

For more information and to download the free LOST: The Official Show Auction catalog, please visit www.profilesinhistory.com/lost-the-auction.html


Highlights include Hurley's Camaro, a DHARMA van and Jeep, a large section of Oceanic Flight 815 wreckage, Dogen's hour glass from the Temple, Sawyer's improvised reading glasses from Season One, polar bear collar with DHARMA Hydra station insignia, Pearl station printer with "System Failure" printout, Swan station turntable, Man in Black's ancient dagger, two crates with six Virgin Mary statues, Ben's orders to commute Juliet's execution, dial mechanism and mirror array from the Lighthouse, a row of Oceanic Airlines plane seats, Desmond's fail-safe key with "Joe Inman" dog tag, Jin's wedding ring, Swan station Hatch door, Eko's signature staff with Bible scripture carvings, Daniel Faraday's journal with extensive handwritten notes from his time travel experiments, nuclear bomb core detonated in Season Five finale, Hurley's winning Mega Lotto Jackpot ticket, and Sawyer's letter to the man who murdered his parents.

From the longbox; Namor the Sub-mariner

Moreso than Neil Young, Canadian John Byrne (technically a British-born immigrant and now naturalized American) made me who I am today.
At the peak of my comic-reading life, in the 1980s, Byrne's involvement was all I needed to pick up a book. From the clean lines of pencils to his writing, I was a sucker for his run on Fantastic Four and his work on Alpha Flight. And I thought his revamp of Superman in 1986, toning down the power level, was exactly what that character needed.
So digging through comics brought back from Dayton, I was intrigued to find issues 15-29 of Namor the Sub-Mariner with art and story (for most of the run) by Byrne. ($1 cover, until $1.25 with issue 23).
Byrne started the series, which recast Namor as a corporate titan whose company, Oracle, was never quite clearly defined but had something to do with environmental protection. And Namor, like Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne and Danny Rand, joined a line of superheroes who walked around in business suits until they had to go on some mission and would turn the reins of the company over to someone else.
On the plus side, Byrne's art was as solid as ever during the 1991-'92 run of the seris that I own. And his love of Marvel is evident by the cameros galore - Capt. America, Dr. Strange, Iron Fist, the Super Skrull, the Punisher, Savage Land, Ka-Zar and Shanna, and WOlverine. There are some charming bits in the run, like the two pages of Phoebe Marrs celebrating the death of her brother (another corporate titan type involved in some corporate chicanery against Oracle or some such).
And the story brought back Iron Fist, who had been killed off a couple years earlier.
I still have a sort of love for Byrne's purple prose. (Like when he tells Cap in issue 15 "It is not permission I seek, old friend. i am called back to Atlantis on a mission most urgent. I am here to tell you i am going and the petty laws of surface humans are not sufficient to restrain me." Or this narration in issue 20: Within the space of a single heartbeat, Namorita's lithe form was gone, vanished into the darkness of the angry waters.)
Really the series dropped off a cliff with issue 27 and artist Jae Lee and with Byrne only doing the story but scripting left to others. The tone changed heavily, the art wasn't nearly as appealing and the writing somehow became even more overwraught and ungainly. That proved to be a good quitting time.