[Trav S.D., “Tall Tales (and Counterfeit Codices)”, Dixon Place, NYC, 2/22/10]

He had me at “smithy,” one of several words so archaic there was no need for a free-associative filibuster of misspeech to turn them into automatic laugh lines. But Trav S.D. held me on every word like the medicine-show spellbinder he played in a brisk first set of flimflam from the front porch of an America so bygone even those who lived through it weren’t there.

Trav took us through tales of carnival freaks, two-fisted lawmen and the shellgame of the New York public school system, tripping on point over every term, conjugated into a multiverse of illuminating malapropism. Thinking spherically and snowballing sideshow nonsense with modern-day senselessness (in one memorable bit the traveling trickster tries to secure a grade-school artist’s residency for his flea-bitten trained monkeys and dog-biting men), Trav showed that the classic con-man is as undying an American type as the stuff we need escapism for.

Flailing his points home like a charismatic receiving divine bulletins or a prophet undergoing a series of lucid strokes, Trav channeled the likes of P.T. Barnum, who fleeced urban bumpkins in the fringe theatre of his time not far from where Trav was plying his trade.

Halfway in, he ditched some of the folksy drag for an adventure into the self-imagined sophistication of those same urban bumpkins, with a satire of spy-thriller literature that extended the genre’s over-exposition into intricate descriptions of its own arbitrary coincidences and ethical failings.

Some jokes you could see coming like the meteor you’re dying to watch whack the earth at a summer multiplex; most left you hysterically wondering at the license number of the truck that just hit you so you could get it to back up over you again. In these United States there’s always another one coming — but get on the road, because there sure ain’t a Trav S.D. born every minute.

[http://travsd.wordpress.com; www.dixonplace.org]

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.