Geoff Grogan’s gamechanging giant comic picturebook Fandancer was originally titled Mystique, and readers not as property-conscious as his legal advisors will recognize this as the completion of a couplet with “the feminine.”

The book starts with a breathtaking battle-scene set in some alternate reality where the core of Kirbyan conflict was held by amazon champions instead of barbarian contenders. This gives way to a surreal racial memory of a solitary Eve in struggle with a rapacious devil-male, aswirl with treacherous pond-reflection Narcissus imagery and floating anatomical schematics; not a creation myth but a destruction one, as the state of nature defined by the mother is compromised forever even as history as we know it lurches into motion.

Grogan composes his visuals and narrative in layers of idea and orbits of imagery; the lapse-dissolve of overlain scenes and symbols has a dreamlike authority and lush formal command, and thoughts collide and release new perspectives and ancient understandings. The beautifully pastelled initial sequences give way to a mindbending conceptual mashup of photocollage and remixed panels and text from old romance, sorcery and mythology comics, a kind of 2001 “ultimate trip” through a delirium of amorous anxiety and female imagery exploitative, reverent, and many milestones in-between.

Like Buddhist awakening or VR revelation this opens back out into a graphic hyperreality of supersacred spandex warrior-woman and profane Baal-helmeted anti-dad colliding, an op-art/fashion-spread spray of evil-eye-warding circle motifs crowding the layouts like the embryos of a new masterless future.

Grogan’s most well-known medium, broadly dynamic yet obsessively constructed reconstitution of images from unrelated but chromatically fitting (and sometimes thematically coincidental) collage fragments, is a kind of devotion, and Fandancer is a visual incantation, a feverish moving Lascaux cave-painting and a trancelike conjuring of a sensed but long forgotten creator and completion. In Grogan’s concentric, shifting narrative it’s not made easy to know what’s going on, and through the veils of blinding desire and imposed disguise it’s not easy for the essential woman to be knowable — at least to the eons of male artists and observers who mold her in their view. But somewhere at the center of Fandancer, through the maze of history’s ripples and the obstacles of straight stories misshapen and scattered, in Grogan’s searching vision the heroine breaks free.

[http://www.lookoutmonsters.com/fandancer.html]

An uncommon stack of one-shots and first issues to take chances on has swollen my comics budget these last few weeks; let’s see how many left me feeling that food and rent were overrated anyway…

There’s lots of lone-vigilante comics kicked off by some personal tragedy or amorphous toughguy animus; I’ve never seen one where the founding trauma is disillusionment with the way the world works and the vow of vengeance is taken against the status quo rather than some cardboard criminal class.

That’s the novel core of Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev’s utterly refreshing “Scarlet,” about a Pacific Northwest slacker girl turned urban revolutionary. It’s not the Pacific Northwest of carnival WTO protests nor the Big Idea drama of a Brian Wood’s “DMZ”; Bendis’ choice of the micro-personal everywoman/nobody of noir for what will become a political thriller promises to give the most readers an emotional stake in the character, and already is making the manifesto aspects of the dialogue and plots ring entirely true (and way beyond any comic you could compare it to).

Bendis is giving a voice to the unaligned majority who know it’s all going wrong but would rather gain a country than pick a side; at the same time he makes *you* decide whether his protagonist’s elegant definitions of what ails us address the essence of the problem or just answer it with more unworkable one-liners. The everyday backdrop and true-to-life expression rank with the best of post-Pekar indie monologue ’n’ margin comics, and Maleev is a revelation on every page, from his bleak yet lyrical photojournalistic main style to the stretches he takes on the collaged narrative detours, from snapshot to webpage to sheer geometric abstraction. Most of Bendis’ franchised superhero stuff hasn’t been my thing, but this creator-owned book is thoroughly *his* thing, and I’ve never seen that go wrong.

The motif of lost and fluttering pages, lifted up from bureaucratic mountains and unknowable layers of catalogued secrets, flying through the air and into the gutters like yesterday’s headlines or the leaves of burned books, is a central image of Kathryn & Stuart Immonen’s “Moving Pictures” GN, and Kathryn’s quietly ingenious narrative shuffles and spins between moments in time as sad turning points and terrible choices settle into place.

Centered on the unlikely and dangerous romance between a museum curator working to hide France’s art treasures during WWII and a Nazi officer charged with obtaining them, the book alternates between the genteel veneer of their interrogation sessions, the tense liaisons which play out just as much like a hostile inquiry as these people who might have shared a passion in the days of genuine civilization struggle to understand each other’s attractions in wartime, and the fraying relationships of co-workers and loved ones as the woman, Ila, stays behind to safeguard the artworks (and fitfully attempt some harboring of fugitives) and her colleagues and best friend head literally for the hills or back home to Canada, respectively.

As drawn by the infinitely versatile Stuart, these characters and their world are scenes of superlative motion and expression but pictures approaching stasis — alternating between a Bauhaus-y brevity that recalls everything from Tintin to Spiegelman on the main narrative, and an engraved detail for monumental paintings and photos that preside over the action as reminders of the characters’ passions and pasts, these are moments inexorably sliding into history; the players walk through relics and masterworks that feel like a tomb at the eye of war’s storm, and are moving toward long-ago decisions and fates we can’t predict but already can’t change.

Kathryn writes some of the most three-dimensional characters and inventive storylines in comics, capable of deep insight and endless surprise, whether that instinct and attentiveness are being applied to the breakneck patter and spontaneous pacing of a Big Two event like the dazzling recent “Heralds” at Marvel, or the anxious wit, slicing cross-examination and creeping, patient dread of this compelling GN.

As the book progresses, the noose tightens on the refugees in the museum’s catacombs, “undesirables” in the town, and Ila’s conflicted heart, and we leave on notes of masterfully underplayed melancholy and unease. Comics have made some eternal works of their own detailing the heroism of those not meant to survive the Holocaust; “Moving Pictures” explores the guilt of those who were always likely to. Both Ila and the officer speak often of the “job” they’re sworn to do, and we all cling to routine and an old sense of purpose; this book navigates the elusive line between trying to keep a covenant with normalcy and just committing to bloody business as usual.

For someone raised in the two-party system of Marvel and DC, getting excited about the Gold Key or Charlton heroes was always a superhuman feat, but if the first re-rebooted issue of “Doctor Solar: Man of the Atom” is any sign, then Dark Horse and its creators have moved these books to the center of what matters. A science-fluent writer like Jim Shooter can update the technology-run-rampant origin in ways which resonate with current ambitions and fears (we’ve gone from nuclear-pile accident to particle-collider accident) rather than just numbing us with jargon or putting old slime in new vials, and Shooter hits the perfect key between modern theoretical-physics pop’s sense of wonder and period atom-age pulp’s paranoia.

This book honors both what we know now and what we felt when such freak deities of science first started populating our public imagination, and the old school is represented by some literal sci-fi pulp characters released into our reality through a very novel device Shooter has introduced for the bleed between matter and mind as quantum theorists perceive it. In the title character he gives us a plausible view of a Dr. Manhattan with a conscience, coolly analytical yet matter-of-factly ethical in a way that sinks roots into silver-age decency with zero corn. Artist/colorist Dennis Calero’s elegant chiaroscuro and frosty palette are perfect for the credible yet alien atmospheres and mythic melodrama. The textbook/dossier package design by Lia Ribacchi is uncommonly gripping and dignified too, yet another factor making this book a basic element of comics history and showing the state of the art.

On the other end of Doctor Solar’s cool spectrum is the screaming grindhouse of Scott Morse’s “Strange Science Fantasy,” drawn like a series of storyboards for a Roger Corman road epic and written entirely in captions resembling the callouts of a very long trailer. Playing out the fever dream of a post-historic cult of drag-race warriors and saviors, the first issue speeds by in a second but imprints your brain with hours of clever detail. This book is speeding right for the cliff of comics’ horizon and then gripping the air like a champ.

Returning to the sci-fi verite of the Millar-Hitch run on Fantastic Four with Hitch himself on art and Millar’s late-run successor Joe Ahearne scripting, FF Annual #32 reprises and advances that era’s exploration of superhero-team comics as domestic drama, where the domicile happens to be a high-tech bunker with open utility lines to several flavors of the beyond. Bravura widescreen action panoramas and molecularly intimate characterization, with a particularly well-handled portrait of Johnny Storm’s eternal but slightly regretful youth.

That was 52 pages of paradise; “Shadowland” is more like a pamphlet from purgatory, and there’s four left to go (though not for me). A pro-forma franchise to keep one corner of the MU’s “darkness” going for any who miss it during the companywide “Heroic Age” lightening of mood, “Shadowland” is clearly a sleepwalk for its gifted, vocally superhero-hating writer Andy Diggle, and I’m content to be woken up when it’s over.

Going even farther back in time, the latest mini to bear the name “Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four” buy Christos Gage and Mario Alberti is an unqualified delight, set (so far, though it may time-hop) in the mid-’60s Marvel world of campus fervor and geopolitical slapstick, as a still-in-school Peter Parker and an early FF get stuck in the middle of an international incident between Doctor Doom and other invited and uninvited delegates to an international conference at the college. The topical humor of the Lee & Kirby days, and an unprecedented wit of dialogue and plotting from the ever-refreshing Gage, with interesting post-Gene Ha art from Alberti, make this a book worth traveling back to every time.

More simply regressive was the new “Thor, the Mighty Avenger,” a remix of the character’s origin which seems to try for period charm but ends up reading like the kind of knockoff that would be produced if Marvel had been acquired by Tower Comics in the late ’60s and Thor had been thrown to some of its lesser talents. Sad, because this book is done by two of comics’ greater talents; the poppy yet textured, post-Azaceta art by Chris Samnee is top fight, and writer Roger Langridge is, elsewhere, one of the most gifted humorists in comics. But even Asgardians have their off centuries. There might be some reality-bending twist in store for however long this book runs, as in “Age of the Sentry,” but I didn’t care about that one either.

For our two parting shots, in a great robbers ’n’ cops serendipity of scheduling, Darwyn Cooke’s gorgeous oversized “Parker: The Man With the Getaway Face” special is a succinct and stylish primer on why “Mad Men”-era misbehavior still seems so attractive, and Joe Casey and Chris Burnham’s shooteriffic “Officer Downe” one-shot is a hilarious guts-and-glory farce that shows what happens when the long hunger for moral consistency leaves us nothing to eat but hot lead.

Spent Saturday at the annual East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention (ECBACC), a Philly con focused on black creators and narratives. Great personal-scale atmosphere (big enough to generate excitement, small enough to actually spend time with fans ’n’ idols), basement-empire enthusiasm from the indie-comics creators and vendors, sense of serious business and honest artistry from the high-expertise, low-ego panelists, and range of reasons for many ages to be there (I took a lot of notes from helpful pros and saw more kids at the con in one day than I see in comic shops in a year).

Three of the self-published comics especially stood out. Glibly invoking a Gødland grounded more in Jim Starlin than Jack Kirby is the closest I can come to preparing you for Genecy, the saga of techno-barbarians and cosmic deities from InVision Comics, but it’s its own strange strain of theoretical-physics folklore. A pre-Superman Eddy Barrows brings blockbuster visuals, colorists Tim Ogul and Oren Kramek tell an emotional epic with their well-paced cosmic fires and eerie offworld nocturnes, and Gerald Cooper’s script is full of well-considered variations on space-opera state-of-the-art — an almighty spirit who’s really an unwilling refugee and kind of self-aware radio echo trapped on our side of the ragnarok-like big bang that put an end to his kind; a warrior who easily fights off the skeletons who come to life off the floor of an abandoned temple but then almost succumbs to soldiers who spring to three dimensions from figures marked into the wall, on the implication that the former were base physical matter but the latter, as essentially creatures of language, are masters of strategy. There are a few B-movie malapropisms along the way, but they flow forward on the supernova of exuberance; the transmission isn’t entirely filled in yet, but Cooper is translating the captions and dialogue of the spheres.

InVision: http://www.facebook.com/people/InVision-Comics/100000520003375

RavenHammer Comics’ The Harlem Shadow had me at “Action-Soul-Mystery,” a pointed pastiche of the old Spirit-section tagline, but held me with a stylish and atmospheric noir drama about the mythic crimefighting that was going on uptown from all the masked adventurers who made it into the segregated headlines. Artist Rodolfo Buscaglia channels a skillful continuum of period-appropriate golden-age page-composition and canon-worthy Frank Miller-era aesthetic techniques, and writer Brian Williams hits the best keys of both heroic righteousness and pulp humor. This book stems from Lucius Hammer, the anchor series of a well-thought-out black-hero universe that Williams and artist Christian Colbert are developing as a kind of century-wide counterpart to the solidly postmodern setup and cast of Milestone Media.

Williams’ introductory story of Lucius Hammer, the presumed son of John Henry, creates a definitive superman figure who is literally semi-immortal within the story but metaphorically keeps young by incarnating each stage of America’s aspirational story about itself, from tall tales to wartime to the heyday of national and costumed superpower to the reality-surfing videogame present. Artist and character-designer Colbert is a major new talent, bringing this all to life with page-leaping energy and cinematic composition sense, in a good-natured yet muscular animation style that takes a place in its own pantheon of the best comics’ substance and charm, from C.C. Beck’s Captain Marvel to Bruce Timm and beyond. Williams’ imagination in plotting and ear for natural character interaction are compelling as shown in individual scenes, and will suit this book even better when he gets down to telling a single story (as he does with The Harlem Shadow’s well-paced origin) rather than summarizing a century as seen in Lucius Hammer’s compact first issue. The caliber is so high that I didn’t even notice at first *how* compact – there are 10 pages of story in each book, and at five bucks a copy there’s one characteristic of classic publishing that should be emulated along with its archetypes. But at any length these guys have already got the secret to leaving me wanting more.

RavenHammer: http://www.slbdesign.com/rh/

ECBACC: http://ecbacc.com/wordpress/

It’s time for another team-up of current-events crisis and old-fashioned action-acrobatics with Issue 2 of The Plaid Avenger. The thrift-store-coutured title paladin is a part-time college lecturer and full-time self-styled secret agent, fulfilling writer and real-life Virginia Tech teacher John Boyer’s mission of geographic and geopolitical literacy.

High-minded and powered on highballs, the weird Rat Packish hipster cuts his own class to roam the globe turning knowledge into power as he confronts eco-criminals and rogue potentates like some transporter-scrambled mash-up of Dean Martin and Nick Fury.

Written with gentle mischief by Boyer and drawn by skilled cartoonist and lush colorist Klaus Shmidheiser, the comic’s edutainment goes down easy, on issues that are far from simple. All with an anarchic attitude and do-it-yourself ethic that can appeal to learners everywhere — this book has its own system of production values and a narrative logic defined as it goes along; it’s like an alt.universe do-over of underground comix by galled profs on drink rather than righteous kids on dope.

The passion — in this case, about Burma’s stunted society and the superhero-less real world’s apparent helplessness to live up to the freedom-fighters’ example — sneaks up on you powerfully through the well-deployed snark. Overall, The Plaid Avenger succeeds in its mission to make learning a pleasure and show that the truth only hurts if you’ve got it coming to you.

[www.plaidavenger.com]

[A multimedia addendum to the Eternal Descent review]

Without having to google too strenuously I spotted some freely downloadable Eternal Descent tunes from mp3.com. Three files were available for download but all seven files were playable directly in the browser. Not all the tunes are as hard as one might expect from the heavy metal themes in the comic. The music is quite dramatic and well-crafted, it absolutely sounds like a soundtrack to a comic.

Here’s “Ascension” for a quick listen, and if you’re a rock fan at all I encourage you to visit mp3.com to hear the rest.

Ascension

Taking matters into your own hands is a time-honored tradition of comicbook protagonists, and seizing the means of production has been in reach of comic creators since the days of the undergrounds and all the more so with the explosion of the internet’s do-it-yourself fame. Of course no movement is built by anyone doing it *just* themselves, much less the often collaborative artform of comics, and the Kickstarter website presents an intriguing new prospect for drawing supporters to aspiring creators’ cause. I got word of it in connection with American Terrorist, the upcoming sociological thriller from A Wave Blue World (the indie imprint that produced the way-above-average, somewhat-under-the-radar reality-show deconstruction Adrenaline last year). The site organizes online donations into a unified front and shares the wealth with varying incentives, including having incidental characters named after you or having a line you wrote worked into the story for certain levels of financial support. I’m not sure if you can get a special hostage discount rate or pay extra to have your likeness not get injured in a crossfire, but this may say something about how far I ever went in customer service. I have as much life experience as anyone, though, in knowing what I like, and judging from the way this creative team and other collaborators converted current issues to gripping drama in Adrenaline (and in advance excerpts I’ve seen of American Terrorist), anything levied to bring this exciting GN to the comic shops is money well redistributed. Click here to help make sure the revolution will be published:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tylerchintanner/american-terrorist-the-graphic-novel

Cover, erm, shot

The genetically-engineered assassin “Chase Variant” is named after a marketing category but is actually a flesh-blood-and-then-some sentient being struggling against industry clichés and commercial imperatives, her weird Darwinian battles with other made-to-order mutants taking arbitrary twists as two unseen enthusiasts direct her life itself in an RPG cardgame.

The Image Comics debut, Chase Variant One Shot (Is All I Need), is the kind of hyper-narrative that could easily come apart — or not come apart enough, like writer Rich Johnston’s airlessly in-jokey Watchmensch last year. But avoiding specific referentiality and setting up a clever conceptual framework, Johnston frees himself to tell a ripping yarn with riveting unpredictable action and inspired runs of free-associative absurdity.

Greatest superhero Bagwells

Chase has a surefire killer instinct, a handy personal arsenal, four arms and several backup vital organs for emergencies (in a wry nod to critical decorum from the heart of extreme-fiction excess, Chase has somehow only been outfitted with two boobs, though there’s material for at least four).

Her survival struggle at the frontier of evolution as the horizons of humanity recede, in an arms race where she and her fellow monstrosities are both the conscripts and the commodity, is a state-of-the-art skim of paranoid cyber-fi that never feels derivative (though with Chase’s Kaliesque look and special-op occupation I do welcome the sense of getting as close as we’re ever likely to to seeing a kickass solo series for Grant Morrison’s The Bride).

Tenuta brings the paint

Like any resident of a meaningless universe, Chase harbors fourth-wall-weakening suspicions about the fabric of her reality but suppresses them to stay alive. Well-known comics columnist Johnston’s script expertly balances mastery of and commentary on the medium, and the post-Corben painting and sharp animation/illustration art on the two stories by Saverio Tenuta and Bagwell, respectively, is perfectly poised between graphic sheen and stylistic personality.

A one-shot that deserves many more, Chase Variant is a thrilling look inside the fantasies fanboys find so important, and the reality we all try so perilously to hold on to.

[Saturday Night Saloon Series, 11/14/09 (remaining showings 12/12 and 1/9), Brooklyn, USA]

I’m seeing the Vampire Cowboys theatre company’s live movie-serials every other installment, and neither one of us wants to be the first to say shut up:

Dustin Chinn’s sentai pastiche “Let’s Ninja Science Ranger Team Get!” started over-the-top and is heading back up the sides for another plummet, with playground ultraviolence and potboiler overstatement in the capable hands of its frenzied ensemble overall and the post-stooges psychic mayhem of Jon Hoche, Temar Underwood and Paco Tolson in particular.

Crystal Skillman’s IT situation-farce “Hack” has continued to ramify like an unattended NORAD screensaver that’s been accidentally modeling Defcon 1. The storyline is a labyrinth down which characters keep wandering into random genres connected at some distant, divine remove to whatever-the-hell crisis they’re ostensibly averting (or causing and supposedly controlling) — a great metaphor for mass-media’s constant distractions from a semblance of purpose. Best among the roll-call is the newest character since I skipped an episode, the “It’s a Good Life”-style 10-year-old hacker who fixates on pantomiming Hannah Montana in-between bouts of real-life recreational mastery-of-the-universe. Everyone’s sliding into their avatar identities and wishing they’re someone they’re not, who’s nonetheless realer than they are — a splendid source of episodic tension with no existential season finale in sight.

As its overemphasized title telegraphs, Brent Cox’s “Jack O’Hanrahan and the Troubulation of Doom” remains a pure poetry-slam of vague anxiety and cogent malapropism — “An old war buddy whose death was almost tragic”; “The professor they call…The Professor” — too many to mention, but there’s two more to go. On the other hand, shortsightedly pronounced dead here last time, Mac Rogers’ exorcism soap-opera “Mother Sacramento” and James Comtois’ time-travel battlefield melodrama “Entrenched” convinced me of the value of holding on to that cliff; “Sacramento”’s sophisticated setup has swerved into some salutary hysteria and “Entrenched” has reprocessed its slow-build storytelling into genuinely creepy apprehension.

Anchored by an almost episode-length soliloquy from a transcendentally manic Hope Cartelli whose blind-drunk but temporarily cold-turkey character thinks she’s hallucinating the whole scenario, Jeff Lewonczyk’s labcoat-ripper “Lady Cryptozoologist: Season 2” delivered an entire segment-full of sexual Darwinism and Freudian vaudeville; not so much a comedy of errors as of doggedly intentional mis-happenstance, and what else is natural selection for?

I think I’ll miss December so the finales can come as much a surprise to me as to our heroes. There’s always enough mystery if you know where not to look.

[www.vampirecowboys.com/events.htm]