The other day my girlfriend came back from a flea market with two Doctor Stranges from 1975 (Issues 12 and 13). Even in the often autopilot mid-’70s this series was always a notable oddity (though so much of one that I never found these issues at the time). Not just because of the swirling, surreal art of Gene Colan, congenitally incapable of phoning it in no matter how tight the deadline or towering the in-box. And not just because one of the looniest of mainstream writers, Steve Englehart, had (I’d managed to forget) been put in charge of this book in addition to his chores getting Captain America to quit over Watergate, holding weddings between Avengers who’d attained goddesshead and ones who’d died a few issues ago, etc.

It has something to do with an adventure, culminating in Doctor Strange #12 and 13, in which the hero returns to his physical body from a hyperdimensional plane after the personified spirit of the universe has a nightmare in which Earth is destroyed and the Doctor has to get this being to dream it back up, upon which a concluding caption informs us that our hero needs to “sit there a very long time…coming down.” (Literally, yes, I guess, though this is a few pages after an essay from Englehart announces the good news that the title is being upgraded from bimonthly to monthly status, offering his opinion that, “despite all the hue and cry over mind expansion” when the book was last cancelled in the late ’60s, “there just weren’t enough spacey people reading comics” then, whereas now “there are so many spacers around that this book is a hit” — a hit of what, he does not say, though I think it must’ve found its way into the Comics Code censors’ coffee before they reviewed this issue.)

Wittingly and otherwise, even mainstream comics were littered with psychedelic imagery and symbolist stories by the time these came out, but here Englehart achieved a level of abstraction I hadn’t realized had happened so early. The “Eternity” character/antagonist is essentially a self-aware universe, an automatic Word of God that grows threatened when the beings he wrought (and wrote) have so many ideas of their own that they can question him, thus shaking his own sense of reality and supremacy. This is adventure pulp on a raw semiotic level that wouldn’t become commonplace ’til the metaphysical epics of Alan Moore 25 years later — and though it is, within the space of a handful of issues in a forgotten run of spinner-rack ephemera, the basic concept and plot of Grant Morrison’s landmark Final Crisis, it is just as notable for the ways it remains confined to the conventions of its period as the way it anticipates the innovations to come.

Suitably for such a self-reflexive story, the narration really stands out — that era is now infamous for its expository dialogue and often-redundant captions, and even Englehart’s eccentric and poetic phrasing has its share of that telling-you what-it’s-telling-you factor. Contemporary comics writers have found their way around this by shifting an internal monologue between characters (the trademark of Frank Miller) to give perspective on the action and lend immediacy to the narrative; the best of the current classicists like Dan Slott in Mighty Avengers go back to the third-person omniscient but give it a sense of the words emanating from the very texture and tone of the incidents portrayed rather than any outside observer (and it’s no coincidence that Slott’s first arc on that book involved various mystics being trapped within or taken over by a sentient magic tome).

Mere descriptions and “meanwhile”s and “suddenly”s, it is popular these days to say, “take you out of the story,” and that’s never to be desired. However, it should be remembered that comics writers of Englehart’s era were obliged to *step into* the story, by both professional process and contemporary culture. Marvel’s books were famously done plot first, art second, and script last, so a certain travelogue-narrator function was thrust upon the writers. And at least since the Batman TV show, producers of popular culture were at pains to disassociate themselves from the “establishment”’s authoritarian voice — even in entertainment — and let their youthful audience know they were in on the joke of mass-market fantasy, by addressing that audience directly, fourth wall be damned.

Comics from Watchmen onward could “comment on themselves” like any avant garde artwork, but the early-’60s to late-’70s was the heyday of comics *talking about* themselves. Underrated scripters like Jack Kirby would tell you things in the captions that you couldn’t see in the pictures (like his rage-aholic antihero Orion’s emotional state and psychological conflicts), and sly Swiftians like Steve Gerber had the skill to write narration that not only satirized what was going on inside the panels but could curve back around to satirize itself (and its writer and readers). Archie Goodwin’s prose was so precise and economical that the issue scarcely arose. A whole new comics language would have to evolve. Englehart and Gerber became fluent in it; Goodwin’s and Kirby’s careers did not stretch into the current era. But it’s still impressive to see which creators saw so much of the writing on the wall.

This one’s really “In the Queue,” since it concerns how unsorry I am that I laid out what I usually pay for comics in any week or two for a whole year of Marvel Digital. I get to click through a whole bunch of issues I had to sacrifice to the Recession the first time around, and there’s a good bit of exclusive content. Well, exclusive debuts; most of it shows up in print later, but so far mostly in anthologies with other stuff you likely don’t want, so in the long run it’s probably cheaper to be able to pick and choose online.

Highlights have included a three-page Skrull-infiltration story in, of all things, a Christmas special, written by Wizard alum Ryan Penagos (with artist Juan Doe) and packed with the kind of A-list, E.C. Comics-style tension and political-thriller paranoia you seldom see in the actual Tales From the Crypt franchise these days. Adding to the sick alternative e-greeting catalogue was another seasonal special, a Halloween-launched Werewolf-meets-Frankenstein story written and drawn by indie sensation Dean Haspiel and featuring iconic old-movie colors that looked great on a new glowing screen by Eisner-contender Joe Infurnari in his Marvel debut.

That proving-ground factor has been fruitful frequently, as with star colorist Richard Isanove’s first full art job on a badass, good-humored American Eagle tale by Jason Aaron. On the digital fringe the laws of hit and cult are upended, which is why this site has been an environment in which once-extinct comic species can thrive, like the uproarious Fin Fang Four shorts by Scott Gray and Roger Langridge, which follow domesticated ’50s sci-fi monsters from the Atlas Comics stable in their attempts to hold down sh*t jobs in regular society. From the other end of Marvel’s space-time continuum comes a fascinating and finely-wrought serial by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey and Lou Kang starring Arno Stark, the complete-bastard descendant of Tony who moonlights as “Iron Man 2020″ in an absurd world of corporate states and free-for-all personal militarism.

Befitting the frontier of genre variety is a smart Kid Colt series drawn by Rick Burchett and written by Tom DeFalco. And DeFalco’s a smart choice since one of the best-written (if least-known) comics of the 2000s was his one-shot re-mythologizing of Central Asian cowboy Ghengis Khan for Moonstone, and he’s got a classic ear for how the bitter idyll of the American West has evolved from John Wayne and John Ford to Eastwood and Deadwood. Marvel Digital is now the dual home (with the bimonthly print giant Amazing Spider-Man Family collection) of DeFalco’s enduring Spider-Girl strip, called “Spectacular Spider-Girl” in this iteration. The first online issue launched last week, with bravura Kirby-mural compositions by artists Ron Frenz & Sal Buscema, and the most outlandish status quo yet from DeFalco’s imagination. The daughter of Spider-Man and Mary Jane is coping with an unwanted surprise sibling, her possible clone, while domestic turmoil is mirrored with turbulent gangwars and a strange love-hate setup in the headquarters of chivalrous mass-murderer The Black Tarantula when the grown-up grim ‘n’ gritty heroine Arana moves back in with him. In the down-to-earth yet never-predictable DeFalcoverse, everyone’s a little weird but that doesn’t stop us from needing each other, and if you didn’t know you needed Spider-Girl’s series, now is as good a time as any to find out.

The latest band I’ve waited all my life for showed up the other night at New York’s trendspot the Living Room. The Tall Pines are lost-world classic rock, dealt from the bottom of the thrift-store LP pile and wormholed here straight from 1971. With sonic incense from Katia Floreska’s keyboards, bubble-crunch and art-twang from guitarist Christmas Davis, and the rhythm section of bassist Jesse Krakow and drummer Denny McDermott holding a soul seance behind the hot-and-cold-running backwoods croon and whitegirl-gospel wail of Connie Lynn Petruk, the Tall Pines are the kind of retro-velatory band that keeps me hangin’ on. The Jackson 5 produced by Lee Hazlewood, Josie and the Pussycats revived by the White Stripes, do your own reference-besotted pomo rock-crit Mad Lib. Shabby-chic saviors jacked straight into the jingles of the spheres, the Pines are the ben-day, dayglo band I sent away for from the yellowed back-page offer in the comic-book of my dreams. But the Pines aren’t really a relic, of course; they’re keepers of a hipster flame that’s fed with every flare of defiant upbeat youth, and is having another eruption in our cartoon-networked, Target-furnished, yes-we-can late decade right in time for bands like this. Yet as with all the best pop made in USA (okay, and Canada — Petruk’s from there, and every artistic millennium needs a utopian border-crossing), this band is its own invention, no matter how well they know the soundtrack to a heyday of hemispheric optimism when the entertainment was well-made and the hopefulness was built to last.

*****************

It wasn’t just fate that took me to the Tall Pines, or at least not directly, since they were opening for another favorite on the psychic crumb-trail that leads musical misfits to find each other across a crowded mainstream, Eddie Skuller. I can only rave so loud about Eddie in the press since I also write his promo (there isn’t any such side-dealing going on with the Pines, though their next disk does come out 72 hours before my birthday, but no pressure, guys). Suffice it to say that Skuller’s gig was another form of debut resurrection, since he’s singing a tribute album to an icon who never existed, the phantasmal boxcar blues singer Morphine Berry. Both Eddie and I are sufficiently distant from it since this disk and its bonus discourse have been in the can for almost two years. Another cue for the thrill of rediscovery, since Skuller and the band attacked the stuff with a ferocious freshness. A few opening lyric-flubs from Eddie and a brief learning-curve of guitar-harmonica coordination from co-writer and six-string deity James Mastro, but then a sludgy symphony of tight improv genius from the latter, solid industrial essence from double drummers Jay Dee Daugherty & Vinny DeNunzio, and powerful reinterpretations from an inventive and intuitive Skuller — ethereal between-song vocal remixes, nice extended harmony run-outs, and flinty minimal readings of the instant hits. Once-in-a-lifetime extras like a duet with Petruk and a choppy, Delta-punk “I Want Money” sweetened and spiked the toxic Jersey-harbor tidal wave of sound.

It’s running on forever here and here:

Tall Pines: www.myspace.com/thetallpines

Eddie Skuller: http://skuller.com

Picked up the new MOME anthology spotlighting Lilli Carre at the nearest college-town comic-shop’s 50-cent back-issue sale along with about 25 John Byrne Namors from the early-’90s; I’m sure those who remember my comparing Carre’s whimsical elegies to Final Crisis will be thankful I didn’t take home the Sub-Mariners in the same batch as her graphic novel The Lagoon. Anyway, 32 pages and a timeless transport are filled up by Carre’s sublime “The Carnival,” and if there’s a better short story this year it’ll have to be a mutha, though Carre may come up with it herself.

This one’s almost the verso of The Lagoon in Carre’s modern-day sampler of homespun-looking, psychologically complex genre-paintings of workaday modern life. The Lagoon occurred almost entirely at night; this one spends a lot of time in broad daylight, or at least in the flickering illumination of the title festival. The GN was consequently picked out in a midnight woodcut black-and-white, while “The Carnival” comfortably fills out a creamy palette that suggests some Renaissance coloring book. Many of Carre’s characters live in the quiet tragedy of turns not taken, but this story replaces melancholy with wistfulness; the single mom and bachelor car-salesman who drift past each other in “The Carnival” don’t try too hard or feel too sorry for themselves, though they’re only a little less conscious than we are that something has been missed.

Carre is a master of the story-within-a-story, finding new ways to cut away from yet into the main events and themes of her work each time — “Woodsman Pete” digressed into melancholy fables of mortality masquerading as campfire distraction; The Lagoon lays bare its unfulfilled, unprepared dad’s imagined isolation in a put-upon yet self-inflating bedtime story he improvises for his kid. Here the male lead is given an on-the-fly visualization by his almost-date to take him away from his nausea on a Ferris wheel; as a single parent she must be used to talking down overexcited boys. His mind ends up wandering farther than she realizes, but without giving away where it gets to or the other fringes of fantasy that Carre’s charming and poignant perspectives waft in past, suffice it to say that this time the story goes beyond sad imaginings of a parallel inner life no one else sees, to a real world of simple wonder for which you could maybe train the corner of your eye.

[www.lillicarre.com; www.fantagraphics.com]

It’s been an embarrassment of riches — or loot — recently with the abundance of original, quality comics in the classic Crime genre. So abundant that there’s a number of them I’m going to leave out, and so influential that they’re seeping into even the central superhero genre like blood under a late-night office door — but new blood, and that’s what’s so thrilling.

Pop culture has always had its share of real-people heroes in cop shows and P.I. pulps, but we’re always more than happy to keep the filter of fiction over what their everyday counterparts confront. Still, the short leap from superheroes to the frontline of the Law can be a wide chasm between the sunlight of wish fulfillment and the shadows of evil that real humans are much more capable of.

In Brett Lewis and John Paul Leon’s “Winter Men” finale the radiant-deity superman produced by obsolete Soviet science is the cruel joke while the stoic dirtbag protagonist and his Russian-mob fellow-travelers, dragging their disappointments and bitter contradictions from era to era and continent to continent, are the ones equipped to recognize and survive reality. In Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips’ “Incognito,” the classified existence of government-controlled superbeings is the intense, Darwinian reality that ordinary people seem to be sleepwalking in denial of.

Those are two essential examples of crime fiction with glimpses of costumes and godlike figures at the corners; the most interesting psychological profile of regular humans who don’t go beyond their limits but think they can operate outside of the known world (or are forcibly expelled from it) is found in Mark Waid and Paul Azaceta’s “Potter’s Field,” most recently seen in the one-shot “Stone Cold.” Concerning an enigmatic investigator self-codenamed John Doe who’s obsessed with unidentified bodies and who they might have been, it’s a journey through the history that doomed people never get to tell or that society’s predators never want you to hear. It all pivots on a strange figure who’s intent on his own secrecy yet crusades for other knowledge to be revealed. Amidst some of the tightest, most surprising plotting and shiningly sarcastic dialogue and characterization Waid or anyone else has come up with, it’s an intriguing comment on the noir-ish underbelly of a new gleaming century in which we each want supreme privacy and mass exposure, the latest irreconcilable clash of America’s impulses toward freedom and isolation.

“Noir” is in the very title of Marvel’s latest advances into crime fiction, appended thus far to X Men (hyphen intentionally omitted), Spider-Man, Daredevil and Wolverine (with Punisher on the way). These series set the title characters back into a realistic 1920s/’30s period (with some sci-fi-ish hints nevertheless true to how that era wanted to see itself, like working airships coming to and from the Empire State Building). The books shine new light on the concepts’ essence and smartly question some of their premises. “Spider-Man Noir” (by writers David Hine & Fabrice Sapolsky and artist Carmine Di Giandomenico) turns Peter Parker into a vengeful Depression orphan with no guilt to temper him and a cheesy/spooky mystic-artifact power-source that draws on old respect and sensationalization of the cultural unknown; “X Men Noir” (by Fred Van Lente & Dennis Calero) gutsily keeps all its cast non-powered while accentuating their personality traits and keeping them set off from a society some people can just never fit comfortably with.

Ironically, as Marvel’s most surefire sellers the stars of the first two releases, X-Men and Spidey, are also the ones it was most surprising to see work in this context; they are each exuberant, high-relief (if often soap-operatic) properties that easily could have sunken into this genre’s shadows ignobly. But the risk as well as the brand-recognition paid off; which is why, though Alexander Irvine & Tomm Coker’s “Daredevil Noir” is excellent so far, I’d like to see another risk taken. DD, Punisher and Wolverine are denizens of an exterior or interior noirishness that makes the choice of them for this line a no-brainer, and so far “Wolverine Noir” is merely state-of-the-art, not revolutionary like the rest. From the start I’ve wanted to see a Harlem Renaissance Luke Cage, and now stuff along those lines has been slipping out on the internet. The mostly-segregated casts so far are period-accurate, but it’s time for the Noir line to think outside the block. Or ride beyond the docks. I can keep this up all day, ya mugs, so make it snappy.

Most of the books discussed here have debuted or returned this year, but some are building legacies as sturdy as the predecessors they pay tribute to. On hiatus for “Incognito” is the same creative team’s “Criminal,” justly titled as the current flagship of the genre though deceptively named too, as it explores the wrong turns of a rotating cast whose harsh, mythic metropolis seems to make it impossible for them to do the right thing, thus leaving criminality a sadly relative concept. Jason Aaron & R.M. Guera’s “Scalped” is well-established as one of the most literate and layered comics ever done, anatomizing the 500-year fallout of the heist that made America in a Native casino town where characters on every side of the racial divide struggle with a venal, violent heritage and with how to forgive anyone for it (most of all themselves).

Peter David & J.K. Woodward’s “Fallen Angel” travels through all the trappings of crime fiction — scenically squalid locale; corrupt, two-faced officials; desperate characters with unlikely and unfit saviors — but adds the depth and complications of involving literal lost souls, evil spirits, and the rest of the Judeo-Christian cosmology, in downbeat contemporary drag within a perilous New Orleans-like city that suggests some reverse, urban Garden of Eden. In a crop of Crime comics, it may be the first Sin comic, and it has an originality and intense imaginativeness that sits well in a genre by itself.

All the writers of these books have the poetic perspective and mercilessly laconic lens that such material requires in equal measures; the art creates scrupulously observed yet perfectly unreal landscapes for the luminously melancholy tales.

Di Giandomenico’s seems lit by the soured sepia-tone of cheap incandescence on yellowed paper; Coker’s seems like a grainy film fading with memory before your eyes and throwing the shadows forward; Woodward’s looks like the distorted, foggy phantoms you think you see in the night; Guera’s the glaring terrors when the lights come on too fast; Leon’s, Phillips’ and Azaceta’s seem chiseled from stony emotions and spattered in bloodbaths of ink; and Calero’s flashes and looms as if acetylene-torched out of the edifice of night itself.

So take a look at what’s happening on this side of the comics neighborhood. You can’t keep away from it, kid, and maybe it’s where you belong.

There’s something to be said for pictures without words, and yesterday I went to see the pure article in a show of paintings by Valeri Larko. I first saw her stuff when she was doing anti-monuments of industrial sites — refineries, weird domes and silos of sinister toxic purpose and strange, solitary beauty — that were like perverse Great Pyramids of our modern kingdom. Later she did closer-focus junkyard scenes which, zeroed in to the random patterns of neglect and the colorful processes of decay, looked like open-air versions of an incidental Pollack painting. Most recently she’s been pursuing a kind of concrete genre painting, venturing not far from her New York neighborhood to find austere corners and intricate panoramas — scrawled-on gray walls, the worlds under train-tracks — that other painters overlook. There’s a yummy squalor to a work like “Graffiti, Zerega Ave, Bronx,” its dayglo spraycan stains like sewage painted in cake-writer; a scene like “Elevated Subway, Long Island City” reconstitutes the abstract grids of a Fernand Leger in its clatter of competing girders, lampposts, track-slats and their shadows. These pictures bear glimpsing witness to the landscape everyone knows but speeds up to avoid noticing. You never see a human body or face in Larko’s lens, and there’s the off-canvas theme that the noxious nature of what’s being memorialized could be killing its messenger. Yet the implication of a human presence to understand and animate — maybe redeem? — what’s being seen is the main point. In that way these paintings are, in the most crucial sense, lifegiving, and everyone could stand to look.

[artist site: www.valerilarko.com

current exhibition (through 6/21/09): www.hunterdonartmuseum.org]