Monsters by Barry Windsor-Smith

A dark and disturbing graphic masterpiece

I’m a lifelong reader of comic books, and Barry Windsor-Smith is one of my favorite artists—easily top 3 if not number one (Will Eisner and Jack Kirby would be high on my list as well, just to show you what league BWS is in). Not to sell him short, Windsor-Smith is also a writer of comics, and, unlike many in the superhero line, he often inks, colors, and sometimes even letters his own pages. Early in his career, Windsor-Smith developed an idiosyncratic style, highly detailed, lyrical, and romantic in nature, resembling what comics might look like if drawn by the Pre-Raphaelite painters. His best-known work is probably his Weapon X story from 1990 to 1991, which, when combined into graphic novel form, comprises the definitive Wolverine origin story. Having started his career with Marvel in 1969, Windsor-Smith has been a comics professional as long as I’ve been alive, and at 75 he is still going strong. He recently produced what might be his magnum opus. His graphic novel Monsters, a 365-page black-and-white hardcover, was published in 2022 by Fantagraphics Books. Monsters won the Eisner Awards that year for Best Graphic Novel, Best Writer/Artist, and even Best Letterer (Windsor-Smith himself).

In the 1960s, a young man named Bobby Bailey walks into an army recruitment office, hoping to enlist. Because of his lack of education and the fact that he lost an eye when he was younger, the recruiting officer, Elias McFarland, won’t take him for the regular army. He does, however, recommend Bobby for a secret government program that might be able to use him. This project, dubbed Prometheus, turns out to be a twisted Captain America-esque experiment, originally conceived by the Nazis, of using genetic engineering to create some kind of superhuman soldier. McFarland soon regrets having signed Bobby up to be a guinea pig for Prometheus. Tortured by guilt, he decides to investigate what became of Bobby. As Bobby’s past and present are gradually revealed, Windsor-Smith flashes back to Bobby’s childhood and beyond to his father’s encounter with Nazis in World War II. Those events from the past set in motion a tragic story, decades in the making, involving a complex web of connections between the Bailey and McFarland families, an Ohio police officer, and a Nazi scientist.

Monsters is a deeply dark and disturbing work. It has some science fiction elements that comics readers will be familiar with, but it is a highly literary novel in its character development and psychological themes. Because of its prodigious length, expert plotting, and ready-made storyboards, this novel reads like a feature film just waiting to be made. Given the subject matter, it would probably be an indie arthouse horror film from studio A24, directed by somebody like Robert Eggers or Nicolas Winding Refn. This is not a story for the faint of heart, as it includes scenes of torture, child and spousal abuse, murder, and rape, but these scenes are brief and integral to the story, not gratuitous.

The writing is ambitious, and the art is impeccable. Visually and narratively, Monsters calls to mind Will Eisner’s graphic novels of the 1970s and ‘80s, such as his A Contract with God trilogy. The lengthy page count allows Windsor-Smith to take his time telling the story. Conversations between the characters run their course as they would in real life, without feeling crammed into a limited number of panels. Who else in comics today devotes that kind of time and effort to character development? Maybe once or twice a decade, much like Eisner, a comics auteur comes along that shows us the apex of what the comic art form can be. Right now, Windsor-Smith is that artist. In terms of literary merit, Monsters can hold its own against most works of contemporary fiction, and among graphic novels, Monsters is a masterpiece.

A page from Monsters (from the publisher’s website)

Weapon X: The Return Omnibus by Frank Tieri, et al.

They’ll let anyone into this club

Weapon X: The Return Omnibus is a mammoth hardcover tome compiling about 50 issues worth of Marvel Comics. This includes the entire 28-issue Weapon X series that began in 2002, as well as several related issues of Marvel’s Wolverine and Deadpool titles. Most of these issues were written by Frank Tieri; the artists vary. In the Marvel Universe, Weapon X is the name of a Canadian government program that experiments on mutants to transform them into ultimate killing machines. This is how Wolverine got the adamantium grafted onto his skeleton. In Weapon X: The Return, that clandestine project resurges under a new director who enlists many mutants into the program by offering them enhanced powers. Wolverine, however, wants no part of the new Weapon X and works to shut it down.

The original Weapon X story appeared in 1991 issues of Marvel Comics Presents. This Wolverine origin story, written and drawn by Barry Windsor-Smith, is one of Marvel’s masterpieces. As a sequel to that saga, Weapon X: The Return doesn’t measure up to the classic upon which it is built. At first, Wolverine was the only Weapon X experiment that we knew about. Over time, however, it was revealed that Sabretooth and several others were also products of the Weapon X program, and with Wolverine they comprised a CIA covert ops team. That made for a pretty good storyline also. Over time, however, Marvel writers couldn’t resist adding more heroes and villains to the Weapon X fold. In doing so, Weapon X devolved from an exclusive team of elite killers to a club that will pretty much let anyone in, no matter how obscure of a superhero they may be. Here in Weapon X: The Return, for instance, three of the main characters are Marrow, Chamber, and Aurora, who I’m not sure even qualify as C-team Marvel heroes. As a result, the name Weapon X doesn’t mean what it used to. It’s now just another alternative SHIELD for antiheroes, like so many others that Marvel has introduced in the last few decades.

The story is rather repetitive. It seems like everyone’s always hunting Sabretooth. Then he shows up, kills somebody, and disappears, so everyone’s hunting him again. The director of Weapon X and his second-in-command continually wrestle for control of the program, and it bounces back and forth between them like a tennis ball. The last five issues of the book are from a miniseries called Weapon X: Days of Future Now, which is one of those possible future stories that turns into a What If alternate reality where you have the pleasure of seeing many hallowed Marvel heroes get killed. As a time travel story, however, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and it’s a rather inconclusive way of ending this 50-odd issue story arc.

The art is a mix of good and bad. No creator credits appear amid the comics themselves, only a one page list of artists at the front of the book, so it’s hard to even recall who drew what. Personally, I’m not a big fan of Marvel’s twenty-first century style. I think the influence of manga, along with digital coloring, has resulted in a lot of stylized figures that look like plastic dolls. No matter how gory or risqué the story, more often than not the art just looks like a children’s book. I remember when Neal Adams drew Sauron back in X-Men #60, he looked like a horrifying creature. In these newer comics, however, Sauron looks like a Saturday morning cartoon designed for a toy tie-in. In terms of both story and art, Weapon X: The Return Omnibus is a big book loaded with mediocre work. You can almost hear Barry Windsor-Smith rolling his eyes in disgust.
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Hard Boiled by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow, et al.

Dystopian perversion and gore rendered in loving detail

Hard Boiled, a graphic novel written by Frank Miller and drawn by Geof Darrow, was first published by Dark Horse Comics as a three-issue series in 1990. It was published as a trade paperback in 1993 and as a hardcover edition in 2017. It is this latter edition that I read. I have read that the 2017 release featured new coloring by comics colorist Dave Stewart. Some readers complained that the new colors altered the original work, but this is the only version I’ve read, so I can’t compare it to the original. The whole time that I was reading the book, however, I couldn’t help thinking how much Stewart’s striking coloring enhanced and intensified the artwork.

When Hard Boiled was first published, Miller was already famous for his gritty work on Marvel’s Daredevil and his Dark Knight graphic novels for DC. Dark Horse comics was a relatively young company at the time, but had already established a reputation for publishing daring work. As was characteristic of much of Miller’s work from this era, Hard Boiled is ultraviolent. In fact, it’s likely one of the most violent and gory comics ever published, and that’s saying a lot. The story takes place in a dystopian future reminiscent of Blade Runner. The main character is either a tax collector or insurance investigator (he’s not really sure himself), who will stop at nothing to hunt down and punish those he feels have broken the law, often putting himself in the way of bodily harm in the process. Hard Boiled is 128 pages long, and much of that is without dialogue. This is not really one of Miller’s more original or complex narratives. It bears some similarities to the film Robocop 2, which Miller wrote.

The real revelation here is Darrow’s art, which was like nothing else seen in American comics. With Stewart’s coloring, which calls to mind the colors of a Moebius comic, Hard Boiled resembles the European comics one finds in Heavy Metal magazine. Darrow’s distinct talent is to render every panel in hyper detail. When a car explodes, you see every nut and bolt that springs from the carnage, and the destruction of human bodies is rendered with the same exhaustive intricacy. This attention to minute detail extends to the backgrounds, in which Darrow renders the urban America of the future as a filthy landscape of wrecked cars, corporate logos, and perverse sex acts. Imagine if Where’s Waldo were porn, and you kind of get the idea.

One would have to be a little sick to draw these images, but I guess one would also have to be a little sick to enjoy them, which I did. Though the subject matter is dark and gruesome, Darrow sneaks a wry sense of humor into each disgusting panel. This really is a visual masterwork. Shortly after Hard Boiled’s original publication, Miller went in exactly the opposite direction with his Sin City series. Though the violent, film noir style of storytelling is similar, the art of Sin City, drawn by Miller himself, is stark black and white with an intentional lack of detail and brutal absence of nuance. In my opinion, Sin City was the greater contribution to comics. The stories are more complex and inventive than Hard Boiled, and the lengthier narratives allow for more character development of an interesting ensemble cast. Nevertheless, Hard Boiled is certainly a unique and intense experience. I’m not sure “enjoy” would be the right word for something this perverse, but this graphic novel will appeal to most Miller fans.
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History of the Marvel Universe by Mark Waid, et al.

Epic fictional chronology from Big Bang to distant future

Billions of years in the future, the universe is coming to an end. The only eyes present to see this momentous event belong to two of the most powerful beings to ever exist: Galactus, consumer of worlds, and Franklin Richards, creator of worlds and son of Reed and Susan Richards of the Fantastic Four. Before the universe collapses, Richards, the younger of the two, asks Galactus to tell him the story of this universe from the beginning, and the elder cosmic entity obliges him.

Such is the premise of History of the Marvel Universe, a six-issue limited series published in 2019 that has since been collected in a beautiful full-color large-format Treasury Edition. The story that Galactus relates begins with the Big Bang (while acknowledging that other universes did exist before this event). He then proceeds to summarize the entire fictional output of Marvel Comics in chronological narrative order, placing all the retconned back stories in their proper sequence. Starting with the first cosmic beings to populate the chaos of primordial space, the saga then proceeds through the formation of Earth, the ancient world, medieval times, the Wild West, World War II, the 1960s explosion of superheroes, and onto the future of Marvel 2099 and centuries beyond. Waid’s overview provides a fun look at the cosmic characters, multiple worlds, and alien races of Marvel, but, not surprisingly, most of the action takes place right here on Earth.

The artwork consists entirely of collage-like splash pages, intricately designed and beautifully drawn by Javier Rodríguez and Álvaro Lopez in a style that combines the pen-and-ink charm of the Silver Age with the digital coloring of today’s technology. A typical page may show a dozen characters, with a text box explaining each one’s relevance to the particular time period, event, or crossover. The ensemble cast goes far beyond the pantheon of hallowed heroes to include all manner of obscure B-list and C-list heroes and villains, though it doesn’t include every kitschy passing fad that Marvel embraced in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Paging through this lovely retrospective, the Marvel fan can not only admire the genius of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and company, but also chuckle or scoff at some of the stranger and sillier plot lines that Marvel has published over the years.

What really makes this book excellent, however, are the “Annotations” for each issue, gathered in the back of the book. These are essentially illustrated footnotes consisting of paragraphs explaining important events in the Marvel Universe accompanied by reprinted panels from past comics, both old and recent. Each annotation helpfully cites the titles and numbers of specific relevant issues. Armed with such a reference, the Marvel fanatic could look up most of these old issues at the Marvel Unlimited website, allowing the curious reader to retain his or her bearings while diving into the confusing timeline midstream. This is really an invaluable companion volume to Marvel’s entire line, and more importantly it’s just a lot of fun to read. I stopped buying comics regularly in the 1990s, but this volume has gotten me up to speed on all the bizarre crossovers, spin-off characters, and visits from the multiverse that Marvel has dreamed up since then.

History of the Marvel Universe is a fine idea superbly executed. It’s one of the few celebratory volumes put out by Marvel in recent years that could be considered a must-have for the diehard fan.
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The Infinity Gauntlet by Jim Starlin, et al.

Granddaddy of Marvel megacrossovers

Although I read plenty of Marvel comics in the 1980s and ‘90s, somehow I missed The Infinity Gauntlet when it first came out in 1991. Marvel began doing line-wide megacrossovers in 1984 with Secret Wars, followed soon by Secret Wars II. The Infinity Gauntlet, a six-issue limited series published in 1991, was the next giant event in the Marvel Universe. The series has been reprinted in paperback and hardcover editions since 1992. The recent Infinity War movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe have renewed interest in The Infinity Gauntlet, but those who know Marvel only from the movies will find little in common between the comic and film versions of this story other than the presence of Thanos and the Infinity Stones.

The Infinity Gauntlet was written by Jim Starlin, who specialized in Marvel’s “cosmic” heroes. It’s hard to imagine another Marvel writer of the era who could conceive of a story of this universe-spanning scope. When the miniseries opens, Thanos already has the gauntlet and the stones. He is in love with the entity known as Death, but she spurns his advances. Seeking to impress her, he makes half the life in the universe disappear. This all happens in the first issue. The rest of the series consists of the Marvel heroes gathering forces to battle Thanos in space. Unlike the movies, there’s no time travel involved here. The superheroes hope to overpower or trick Thanos, get the gauntlet, and undo what he has wrought.

Not every Marvel hero is present in The Infinity Gauntlet, but all the major players make an appearance, as well as representatives from most of the hero groups: The Avengers, X-Men, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc. (The Fantastic Four were among the vanished.) Some of the guest appearances are brief and gratuitous, but overall Starlin does a good job of working hundreds of characters into the story. Artists George Pérez and Ron Lim excel at drawing the multiple-character splash pages. The art, innovative in layout but still rendered in the pre-digital style, is quite attractive and exciting.

The fun thing about The Infinity Gauntlet is that Starlin really delves into the cosmic aspects of the Marvel Universe. Sure, the Silver Surfer plays a major part, but Starlin features a lot of god-like entities that only diehard fans of The Avengers comics are likely to recognize. With such powerful beings at play, the events depicted are truly cataclysmic, and the art lives up to the challenge. The downside is that some of these cosmic characters can get silly (like Thanos’s brother Starfox, for example). Also odd is the inordinately large role played by Adam Warlock, who even in his prime was never more than C-list Marvel hero. The poorly defined scope of his practically omnipotent powers makes for an anticlimactically ambiguous ending.

I read the 2018 “Deluxe Edition” which has some extra stuff in the back—promotional snippets from Marvel Age, reproductions of pencil and ink art, additional cover designs—but none of those bells and whistles really matter. The original six issues are what’s worth reading, regardless of which printing you get your hands on. Although The Infinity Gauntlet saga isn’t quite the masterpiece Marvel makes it out to be, any fan of Marvel comics will find it an enjoyable episode in Marvel history.
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Dropsie Avenue by Will Eisner

The life and death of a neighborhood
Originally published in 1995, Dropsie Avenue is the third graphic novel in Will Eisner’s Contract with God trilogy, following A Contract with God (1978) and A Life Force (1988). All three works take place in a fictional neighborhood named Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx. A Contract with God and A Life Force were both set during the Great Depression and based somewhat on Eisner’s own memories of his childhood in a Bronx tenement building. In this third graphic novel in the series, however, Eisner creates a narrative with a much broader and more ambitious scope. Dropsie Avenue is essentially the life story of the neighborhood itself.

Eisner begins his narrative in 1870, when the Bronx was largely farmland inhabited by Dutch immigrants. Once the English start moving in, there goes the neighborhood! Then just a few years later, the English find themselves saying the same thing about the Irish. Long-term residents depart in disgust as they see their property values drop, and conflict arises as each new wave of immigrants moves into the neighborhood, from the Italians to the Jews to the Hispanics and the African Americans. At first the Whites don’t want to live next to the Blacks, and the Catholics don’t want to live next to the Jews, but over time some learn to tolerate, respect, and even like one another. At each step in the process, opportunistic real estate developers change the face of the neighborhood, from agricultural fields to single-dwelling houses to tenement buildings. As the income level of the inhabitants progressively drops, racial violence, organized crime, drug use, and urban blight steadily rise. Some residents still hold out hope for the neighborhood, however, and make efforts to preserve and strengthen the Dropsie Avenue community.

Since Eisner spans over a century of history in about 170 pages, a lot of characters drift in an out over the course of the narrative. In some cases, Eisner can concisely chart the trajectory of a character’s life and fortunes in a single page of six to nine panels. Over time, however, the reader begins to notice certain prominent families who pop up generation after generation, and several recurring characters make their way to the forefront of the plot, such as the Jewish lawyer Abie Gold, the ragpicker turned landlord Izzy Cash, the Italian political boss Polo Palermo, and Ruby Brown, the daughter of the first black family to move into the neighborhood. Eisner expertly intertwines the storylines of a large ensemble cast, illustrating the drama of everyday lives with the elegance and eloquence of a classic naturalist novelist. After weaving such a rich narrative tapestry, however, the story’s only unfortunate flaw is an ending that is a little too convenient and too abrupt.

The art in Dropsie Avenue is superb, even better than the two prior graphic novels in the series. Even though Eisner did excellent work back in the 1940s, here a half century later he demonstrates that he is one of those rare artists that progressively improves with age until the very end of their careers. The page layouts are incredibly innovative, with the lives of the expressive characters meshing seamlessly with gorgeous drawings of urban architecture as detailed as architectural renderings. Eisner’s one weakness, artistically, is his depiction of the various ethnic groups that populate the story. Although he’s come a long way from Ebony White in the days of The Spirit, some of the Italians, Jews, and African Americans still have the feel of stereotypical caricatures (a common problem for a lot of comics artists). Overall, however, there is no denying that Dropsie Avenue is a landmark work of graphic literature capping off an absolutely phenomenal trilogy that is one of the most monumental achievements in the comics art form.
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A Life Force by Will Eisner

Even better than A Contract with God
Will Eisner is one of the most acclaimed and influential creators in the history of comics. His 1978 graphic novel A Contract with God is credited with popularizing the term “graphic novel” and pioneering the art form of the literary graphic novel as we know it today. In that landmark work, Eisner presented a series of stories set during the Great Depression in a predominantly Jewish tenement building on fictional Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx. Though not a sequel per se, Eisner went on to revisit this setting and similar subject matter in his graphic novel A Life Force, published in 1988. A Life Force is considered the second book in a Contract with God trilogy, with the third book, entitled Dropsie Avenue, published in 1995.

Though not as well-known as A Contract with God, in many ways A Life Force surpasses its predecessor. While that first book was technically a collection of short stories, A Life Force is truly a novel, one complete work of literature that develops over the course of roughly 140 beautifully illustrated pages. It features an ensemble cast of characters whose lives are interwoven throughout. Jacob Shtarkah is a Jewish carpenter who struggles not only to find enough work to survive but also to find some meaning to his existence. Elton Shaftsbury II is a former industrial aristocrat whose fortune is destroyed by the Stock Market Crash of 1929, forcing him to move into a Bronx tenement and restart his career at the bottom rung of the social ladder. He falls in love with Rebecca, Jacob’s daughter, despite the fact that her mother forbids her to marry a gentile. The tapestry of supporting characters includes rabbis, mobsters, union organizers, immigrants, refugees, neighborhood kids, communists, the homeless, and the mentally ill, all of which add color, complexity, and historical authenticity to the narrative.

Throughout the story, Eisner intersperses newspaper clippings from the era, which help to provide historical context to the social and political landscape of the Depression. These nonfiction interludes call to mind the collage technique employed by author John Dos Passos in his U.S.A. trilogy on American society in the 1930s. In fact, A Life Force bears a strong affinity to many of the great socially conscious novels of labor and class from the early 20th century, such as the writings of Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, or Frank Norris. Rather than a contemporary account of the conditions of that era, Eisner writes from the perspective of hindsight, looking back on the world of his childhood. This novel, however, is not merely an exercise in romantic nostalgia or semiautobiographical reminiscence, as was sometimes the case with A Contract with God. In A Life Force one senses Eisner earnestly and intently striving to craft a literary epic that sheds light and insight on the Depression—his Grapes of Wrath, if you will. He goes far beyond the mere telling of individual stories to draw philosophical speculation into mankind’s universal drive for survival. What is this life force that keeps humanity struggling and slaving, like the cockroach, for some quixotic semblance of immortality?

Even the art in A Life Force is a step above the excellent work in A Contract with God. Here the page layouts are even more innovative, the characters more expressive, and the cityscapes more intricately detailed yet timelessly impressionistic. All three works in the trilogy were originally printed in a sepia-toned ink that subtly evokes both the antiquity of memory and the squalor of Dropsie Ave. Expertly written and drawn, A Life Force is a masterful work of graphic storytelling and a beautiful work of art.
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A Contract with God by Will Eisner

Pioneering literature in words and pictures
Will Eisner is widely regarded as the greatest artist in the history of American comics. Of course, that honor can be debated, but there are probably only one or two other candidates who could claim such a title. Eisner garnered early acclaim in the 1940s for his groundbreaking work on the crimefighter comic The Spirit. Three decades later, however, he launched a career renaissance by pioneering the art form of the literary graphic novel. Eisner, by his own admission, did not invent the graphic novel. That was done by artists of the early twentieth century such as Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward, who produced wordless novels composed entirely of woodcut illustrations. Eisner, however, spawned the art form of the graphic novel as we know it today—comics as a form of literature—and the work which started it all was A Contract with God, published in 1978.

Technically, this book is not a novel but a collection of short stories. The four related narratives all center around a tenement building, located at 55 Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx, and the lives of its inhabitants, who are mostly Jews of the poor and working classes. The stories take place in the 1930s and are based upon Eisner’s own memories of growing up during the Great Depression. In form and tone, A Contract with God sometimes calls to mind Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, particularly in its often frank and disturbing depictions of sexuality. Eisner’s melding of scripted prose, dramatic dialogue, and sequential art is thoroughly modern and innovative in technique, but his narratives often harken back to older forms of storytelling such as melodrama, opera, and good old-fashioned Borscht Belt humor.

The book’s opening story, “A Contract with God,” is an intensely serious piece about a man’s relationship with his deity. Frimme Hersh, an immigrant from Russia, has made a personal pact with God to live an honest and righteous life in exchange for familial contentment and the promise of future just rewards. When his beloved daughter dies, however, Hersh questions the validity of this pact, rages at his maker, and changes the course of his life. This powerful and moving tale, rendered in rain-soaked and dark-shadowed visuals, is the entry most evocative of the soul-searching works of Masereel and Ward. In the second story, “The Street Singer,” Eisner recalls a class of men who survived by spontaneously serenading the courtyards of tenement buildings in exchange for tips. This is a shorter and more lighthearted tale, yet it still deals with crippling Depression-era poverty, alcoholism, marital infidelity, and domestic violence. All the more jarring, therefore, when the story effectively ends with a punchline. Next up, “The Super,” focuses on the superintendent of the tenement, who, as the representative of the slumlord, is viewed as a villain by the building’s residents. The plot of this story features a Lolita-esque sexual encounter, which Eisner relates with a brutal frankness that would likely inspire controversy if published today.

As good as these stories are, the final piece, “Cookalein,” is the book’s true masterpiece. A cookalein is a lower-class country resort where the vacationers would do their own cooking. As the summer destination for many of the Dropsie Avenue families, the cookalein becomes a dramatic social setting where married people cheat on their spouses, young singles shop for mates, parents pimp their daughters, and many a young man has his first sexual experience in the arms of a “cougar.” Eisner masterfully juggles multiple storylines in a tour de force of storytelling, both verbal and visual. If by the time you get to this final story there is any doubt that Eisner’s graphic novel was true literature, “Cookalein” puts such doubts to rest. Even if you are a hardcore literati who has never read comics before, A Contract with God will convert you into a comics fan.

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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

A letdown, given the hype

 When it was published in 2006, Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home received rave reviews from critics, with many major media outlets placing it on their annual ten-best lists. I am a lifelong comics fan and a firm believer in the graphic novel as literature. That said, the confessional memoir is one category of graphic storytelling that has never appealed to me much. Such books tend to be exercises in excessive self-indulgent navel-gazing. Although Fun Home is skillfully written and drawn, it has done little to improve my opinion of the genre.

In Fun Home, Bechdel explores her relationship with her father. She begins by detailing his obsessive devotion to the interior decoration of the family’s home, which also serves as a funeral parlor. In addition to being a mortician, Mr. Bechdel is an English teacher, and a love of literature is one quality that father and daughter share. Mr. Bechdel has restored the family’s historic home with laborious care, creating an environment like something from a Victorian novel, yet the house’s ornate, picturesque facade masks the dysfunctional dynamics of the family who dwells within. The father is a distant, cold man who keeps secrets from his children. Shortly before his death, the adult Alison, a lesbian, discovers that her father was gay and had affairs with a number of men, some of whom she knew. When her father is struck by a truck and killed, the author asserts­—not entirely convincingly—that his death was a suicide.

The art, printed in black and blue ink, is capably done, but as a graphic storyteller, Bechdel doesn’t rank among the greats. The figures are a little too simplistic, and the deadpan facial expressions can’t quite pull off the emotion the story requires, but Bechdel’s knack for detailed background scenery is admirable and does much to draw the reader into the narrative. I think it’s safe to say, however, that the prose is the main attraction here, not the illustration.

Fun Home has been the target of censorship in the form of bannings from libraries and schools. Any assertion that the book is pornography is unfounded; it is a bona fide work of art and literature. However, just because it deals with controversial subject matter doesn’t make it a landmark in the history of the graphic novel. The story just isn’t that compelling. Bechdel’s coming-of-age as a lesbian may be inspirational to some, and there are some touching moments when she and her father connect, but they are few and far between. One might argue that the only thing particularly interesting about this memoir is that the two main characters are gay. Beyond that, it’s just another story about a bad dad who cheats. To overcompensate for this, Bechdel draws parallels between her family’s story and great works of literature, including Marcel’s Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Homer’s Odyssey. That may explain why it was such a critics’ darling, but it comes across as a pretentious dressing up of a mildly interesting personal narrative in high-brow literary trappings. As Bechdel admits at one point in the book, “Maybe I’m trying to render my senseless personal loss meaningful by linking it, however posthumously, to a more coherent narrative.” Bingo. Fun Home is not bad, but one expects more from a book that has had so many golden laurels heaped upon it.
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Will Eisner Reader: Seven Graphic Stories by a Comics Master by Will Eisner

A sampler platter of comics greatness
If you asked a roomful of comics enthusiasts who’s the greatest comics artist of all time, after some argument chances are the consensus would be Will Eisner. Back in the 1940s, his newspaper adventure series The Spirit shattered just about every preexisting convention of the young art form and blazed new trails in artistic innovation. Even into his senior years he was a trendsetter. His books of the 1970s were instrumental in the development of the graphic novel as we know it today. These days most of Eisner’s non-Spirit work is available from W. W. Norton and Company, including the Will Eisner Reader, first published in 1991. This 80-page paperback collects seven stories gathered from issues 6-8 of the periodical Will Eisner’s Quarterly, originally published in 1985 and 1986. Though not every story is excellent, overall this volume is a good showcase of Eisner’s later work, offering a surprising variety of styles and subject matter.

Eisner was one of the first comic artists to break out of the confining rigor of rectangular panels. By this point in his career the grid is almost nonexistent. Each page is a beautifully composed whole, subdivided by scenes which seamlessly flow into one another. Eisner masterfully employs whatever visual devices are necessary to tell the story. He never rested on his laurels but always strove to come up with the best graphic solution to express the narrative, even if that meant continually reinventing the wheel. Though The Spirit had a profound influence on all the masked crusaders that followed, once that famous series ran its course Eisner made a deliberate effort to move away from the superhero genre and tell stories of real people, thus influencing a whole new movement of comics verité. His characters even look like real people—often ugly, frumpy, and clumsy. Many of his stories deliver a moral message in the mystic manner of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone tales, and his work is often laced with humor that’s straight out of a Catskills resort. Given that Eisner was a senior citizen when he produced these stories, there is at times an antiquated feeling to the writing, but even when the story fails to amaze you can always marvel at the magnificent art.

The opening entry, “A Sunset in Sunshine City,” is the kind of ensemble-cast soap opera the Hernandez Bros. might have done for Love and Rockets. “The Telephone” is eight pages of creatively rendered slapstick suitable for an old Mad Magazine. “Detective Story” is exactly what the title implies, but with a supernatural twist. “The Long Hit” is a gangster tale with a sense of humor. “Winning” is a lighthearted piece about an underdog running a marathon. The weakest entry in the book is “The Appeal,” a sort of sequel to Franz Kafka’s The Trial. The final story, entitled “Humans,” is an incredibly moving statement on humanity captured in seven pithy pages, with some of the most beautiful art ever to spring from Eisner’s pen. It’s another fine example of how this artist was continually challenging and reinventing himself.

Honestly, if you like comics—any comics—it’s hard to go wrong with Eisner. The stories in this book are bite-sized, so if one doesn’t thrill you it’s only a few pages until you move onto the next offering. Fans of Eisner will enjoy the variety and the always exceptional art. For those new to Eisner’s non-Spirit work, this collection will provide a good introduction to his later work, allowing you to test the waters before tackling one of his heavier graphic novels like A Contract with God.

A panel from “Humans” by Will Eisner

Stories in this collection

A Sunset in Sunshine City 

The Telephone 

Detective Story 

The Long Hit 

Winning

The Appeal 

Humans 

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Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller

The cinematic comic book that launched comic book cinema
Originally published in 1986 as a four-issue comic book miniseries, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was written and drawn by Frank Miller, with inks by Klaus Janson and colors by Lynn Varley. Almost immediately, the four issues were collected into a trade paperback. Nearly 30 years later, it’s still one of the all-time greatest graphic novels in superhero comics. As the story opens, Batman has not been seen in Gotham for the past decade. Now 55, Bruce Wayne sees the rising tide of violent crime that’s sweeping his city’s streets as an invitation to come out of retirement. This ain’t your daddy’s Batman, however. Though this is a DC comic, Miller was primarily known for his work at Marvel Comics, and he definitely brought the Marvel sensibility to his Batman work for DC. Rather than a nimble detective matching wits with clue-dropping lunatics, Miller’s caped crusader is a hulking, brutal vigilante who fights violence with violence.

Judging by today’s comics and the movies that spring from them, it’s hard to imagine there was ever a time when superheroes weren’t trying to kill their adversaries. Back in the late ‘80s, however, Marvel and DC were just emerging from the confines of the Comics Code Authority and testing the waters of sex and violence. This graphic novel was like a big fat belly flop into the latter category. It’s much more than just a mindless slugfest, however. Watchmen is often hailed for its philosophical vision of superheroes in the real world, but Miller presents a more realistic and cynical view of how mankind might react if giants walked among us.

The art was also pretty ground breaking for its time, but in hindsight it’s not Miller’s best work. Most pages are cluttered with too many tiny panels. Batman is usually depicted as a blocky chunk of muscle while the bit players are often rendered with the wispy sketchiness of a Jules Feiffer caricature. Overall the art here is like a prepubescent stage in the development of the mature, in-your-face style of his Sin City books. One look at the neon-punk couture of the street gang known as The Mutants leaves little doubt that this book was a product of the 1980s. Regardless of the dated fashions, it’s a brilliant document of that decade’s Cold War paranoia. At times Miller gets a little heavy-handed, like depicting Reagan in a star-covered blazer, but he vividly calls to mind a time when a Russian-induced armageddon seemed an imminent possibility.

The Dark Knight Returns reads more like a movie storyboard than it does a typical comic book. With the finesse of a skilled film editor, Miller interweaves several competing narratives. A television is always on in the background, alternating between newscasters, talking heads, and pundits who provide political subtext and ethical discourse. More than any other American comics creator, Miller is responsible for the explosion of comic book action movies over the last quarter century. The comic books he created were so much like the movies we all wanted to see, the moviemakers were forced to follow his lead. 300 and Sin City are obvious examples, but rarely does a superhero film appear that doesn’t lift ideas from him in some way. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy owes a great debt to Miller’s work. The Dark Knight Returns started it all. Though Miller has garnered his fair share of critical acclaim, he’s just as likely to be accused of being sadistic, misogynistic, or perpetually adolescent. Heck, if it’s Keats and Shelley you want, try Neil Gaiman. But if you like hard-boiled pulp fiction, visceral action, and epic thrills, Miller’s your man, and The Dark Knight Returns is the place to start.

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Hard Looks: Adapted Stories by Andrew Vachss

A sampling of dark crime fiction from a great comics series
I often envy my father’s and grandfather’s generations for growing up in the golden age of the pulp fiction magazines. In those days every newsstand was loaded with inexpensive popular fiction of every conceivable genre, setting, and level of quality. In more recent times almost all of the pulp magazines have become extinct, and the niche they occupied has largely been filled by comic books. Ever since the “Silver Age” of the 1950s, however, superheroes have dominated the comics, shoving all other genres from the racks. In the early 1990s, back when I used to haunt the comic shops, one publisher that attempted to rectify this matter was Dark Horse Comics. They published a line of quality titles in the areas of movie adaptations, science fiction, horror, mystery, and crime. One series that fell under the latter category was Hard Looks, which ran from 1992 to 1993 and consisted of graphic interpretations of short stories by crime writer Andrew Vachss. In 1994, Dark Horse published a Hard Looks trade paperback, with a second edition in 2002. This collection includes 17 stories by Vachss. Eleven of them are comic adaptations; the other six are text stories accompanied by spot illustrations.

I read a couple Vachss books twenty-some years ago and was never very impressed with him as a novelist. His short stories are better, and lend themselves extremely well to graphic adaptation. What I like best about Vachss is simply his commitment to the comics medium. Hard Looks is only one of several comics projects he’s undertaken. Why don’t more genre fiction writers follow his example? The stories in Hard Looks are gritty tales of urban crime. The images—provided by artists Geof Darrow, Gary Gianni, Dave Gibbons, and others—often have the dark and stark flavor of film noir. Yet for the most part, this is not the sort of glorified, romanticized violence one finds in Frank Miller’s Sin City. Vachss has worked as an attorney, a social worker, a prison director, and a child advocate, and incorporates experiences from these occupations into his stories. His tales are populated by teenage gangsters, dirty cops, shifty lawyers, child molesters, rapists, and serial killers. Occasionally he drifts farther afield. “Half Breed” ventures into fantasy and horror territory, “Warlord” is set in the world of 1950s street gangs, and “Lynch Law” is a racially charged tale set in the American South in 1959. The rest take place in a brutal criminal underbelly of contemporary America that’s all the more shocking because it’s based on reality.

Not every story is a masterpiece, but overall they are quite good. Among the best are “Drive By,” in which a teenager tries to prove his worth to a gangster by attacking a rival gang; “Treatment,” which deals with the psychological rehabilitation of a sex offender; “Step on a Crack,” about two childhood friends who drift apart to opposite sides of the law; and “Hostage,” in which a police negotiator tries to coax an unstable gunman to release his captive. They’re all written in an unflinchingly realistic style and often end with a surprising twist.

The Hard Looks series ran for ten issues. This is not a complete compendium, but rather a “greatest hits” collection. Dark Horse recently published a second collection entitled Harder Looks, which appears to be available only in e-book format. What they should really do is publish a complete collection of all ten issues in one inexpensive, newsprint omnibus edition, similar to the Marvel Essentials series. Hard Looks was a great experiment in comic literature, and deserves to be resurrected and made available to a whole new audience. Until that happens, however, this volume will do just fine.

Stories in this collection

Drive By (art by Gary Gianni)

Replay (art by Bruce Jones)

Half Breed (text; illustrations by Geof Darrow)

Born Bad (art by Doug D’Antiquis)

Lynch Law (art by Warren Pleece)

Head Case (text; illustrations by Geof Darrow) 

A Flash of White (art by David Lloyd)

Cripple (art by George Pratt)

Statute of Limitations (text; illustrations by Tim Bradstreet) 

Treatment (art by Chris Moeller)

Tag (text only) 

Step on a Crack (text; illustrations by Warren Pleece) 

Hostage (art by Gary Gianni)

Dumping Ground (art by Dave Gibbons)

Date Rape (text; illustrations by Tony Fitzpatrick) 

Warlord (art by Paul Guinan and Tony Adkins)

Man to Man (art by Jack Pollack)

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