Our zombie overlords have stuck around as an all-conquering pop culture meme a whole lot longer than I thought they would, to be honest. Although I’m not instinctively fascinated by the entire sub-genre, I do like certain iterations of zombie fiction. I’ve even kind of written some myself.

But I don’t read the head honcho of zombie comics, The Walking Dead, any more (all that suffering finally became too much for me, delicate little flower that I am). Fortunately, there are other takes on the risen dead out there in the world of comics, so I thought I’d take a look at a couple of them.

One, Revival, is the first volume of a new continuing series which is perhaps not strictly about zombies, but definitely about the living dead. The other, The New Deadwardians, is a self-contained story, complete in one volume, that’s certainly about zombies but also about vampires, thereby doubling its quotient of zeitgeisty pop culture icons.

They both demonstrate that a bit of imagination and lateral thinking can squeeze fresh and interesting blood even from a stone that’s been pretty much squeezed to death already .

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Any period of superhero comic addiction, such as I briefly enjoyed in my youth, leaves you with one or two favourite characters.  It’s kind of the point: these characters are immortal, corporately-owned properties, their value to their owners largely measured by the persistence and financial implications of the attachment they instil in readers.

For me, there were plenty of favoured characters back in the day, but there was only one true favourite: Daredevil.

So here comes a look at three different takes on Daredevil: one from the 1980s, one from the 2000s and one from right now.  I don’t let my nostalgic inner fanboy out to play in these columns very often, so just this once I thought I’d give him some air.

I could offer the further justification that it’s a simple little case study in the extended life of corporate superheroes, and the effect story-telling trends and gifted writers have on them.  It kind of is, but honestly I’m just a bit of a DD groupie.

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A while back, I said 2012 was notable for two things in comicsworld: Image Comics and sf.  (Advance publication schedules suggest 2013 will also be notable for two things, btw: Image Comics and sf.)

I also said Saga, flagship of the trend, was a certainty for a Hugo nomination and a potential winner.  Still true.  If Saga doesn’t get a graphic story Hugo nomination I’d be a bit uncertain about the point of the category, to be honest (but I’m sure it will, so no worries).  If it doesn’t win … well, tastes vary and webcomics have a heavy advantage over print.  But it’s certainly the most accomplished sf/fantasy comic, of the broadest appeal, I saw last year.

So Saga’s probably my favourite 2013 Hugo-eligible comic.  But only by the narrowest of margins, because it was not the most unexpected, exhilarating, deep-genre Hugo-eligible comic I’ve read.  That prize goes to yet another Image sf product: Prophet.

It too would be a worthy nominee or even winner of the Hugo.  It won’t win, may well not get nominated (but there’s still time to get those nominations in!), because not enough people are reading it; it’s nevertheless remarkable, and feels more deeply rooted in the soil of the sf genre – prose, film, everything – than any comic I’ve read in a while.

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Generally speaking, the physicality of comics is quite a big deal to me.  I don’t get the same satisfaction from reading this stuff digitally as I do from the paper and ink version.  To be honest, if money was no object I’d be reading all my favourite series in hardback, since a hardback collection or graphic novel that’s had care and consideration lavished upon its production is one of (my) life’s minor delights.

Alas, money is an object, so my collection of hardbacks is strictly limited.  The most satisfyingly chunky and heavy of all are the four volumes of B.P.R.D. Plague of Frogs.  You could kill a decent-sized rat with one of these things.  Possibly even a small dog.  You can get the story in other more modest formats but I happened to get the first volume in hardback, and couldn’t bring myself to switch thereafter.  (Hang-ups about format continuity = sign of slightly nerdy fanhood, I suspect).

Fortunately, I’ve not regretted that choice, since it’s been a very entertaining and interesting fictional journey.

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Before I get into the specifics of The Manhattan Projects, a new series from writer Jonathan Hickman and artist Nick Pitarra, one passing observation: The Manhattan Projects exemplifies a couple of notable trends in comics in 2012 (the flagship for both of which is Saga, discussed last time around).

The first is the resurgence of its publisher, Image Comics, which has become the vehicle of choice for a pretty dramatic new wave of creator-owned comics from well-known writers and artists. The second is the dominance of speculative, and especially science, fiction as the genre of choice for those talented creators. 2012 has been, in part, the year of those two things in comicsworld: Image Comics and sf. If you’re not an habitual comics reader you won’t have noticed, of course; but the comics industry as a whole sure has.

Even if they’re both part of a bigger pattern, though, Saga and The Manhattan Projects are as different as different can be. If Saga was all about understated, relaxed mastery of the medium, The Manhattan Projects is crazy, dense, inventive, satirical, provocative, flashy and all about being uniquely itself. It’s really a whole lot easier to experience the thing than to describe it, but for my sins I’m here to attempt the latter.

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Before I even laid eyes on the first collected edition of Saga, by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples, I had it pegged as a certain nominee for and potential winner of the 2013 Best Graphic Story Hugo. The online comics commentariat had greeted the series rapturously. The internet was awash with folks calling it the best sf comic of 2012, and there were plenty calling it the best comic of any kind.

I already knew Brian K Vaughan has some remarkable technical gifts as a comics writer, and therefore pretty much believed the hype. I was prepared to be entirely blown away by Saga. When I did read it, though, I was not blown away. I liked it well enough, but was not struck dumb by its awesomeness.

Then I thought about it for a bit, I read it again, and – belatedly – I got it. Saga is very good, just not in quite the dramatic ways I was half-expecting. It’s not wildly innovative in technique or narrative; it’s not a revolutionary statement of new possibilities for comics.  Rather, its goodness – perhaps even greatness – is of the comparatively quiet, unshowy sort, making the difficult and sophisticated look simple and effortless (and thus, perhaps, invisible).  It’s all about the craft, this one.
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I talked about Demon Knights, the Paul Cornell-scripted series from DC, in this column not so long ago, and thought it’d be fun to follow that up with a chat with the man himself. Here’s that chat, but first just a word or two of intro.

Paul Cornell’s got a pretty remarkable body of work under his belt, from the writing point of view. He’s a screenwriter, novelist and comics writer of very considerable experience. He’s also a knowledgeable and sincere fan of all things science fictional, as regularly demonstrated on the Hugo-winning SF Squeecast, where he’s a regular.

The two comics series that currently have his name on them are the aforementioned Demon Knights from DC (though since this discussion, it’s been announced he’ll be handing over those writing duties to a successor shortly) and Saucer Country, his creator-owned series from DC’s Vertigo imprint. Also imminent is the first in a series of novels, London Falling, more info on which will be revealed in what follows.

On with the talk …

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In 1954, Fredric Wertham’s book Seduction of the Innocent was published, and the US comics industry was never the same again. His angst over the corruption of young minds by comics led fairly directly to all manner of stifling consequences, not the least of which was the near extinction of a previously thriving market for horror comics. (And, perhaps indirectly, the rise to dominance of the smothering comfort blanket that is the superhero genre).

Japan never had a Wertham to contend with. There, a million strange and unsettling flowers have been allowed to blossom unhindered in the comics medium; including, notably, some pretty full-on horror blooms. I can’t imagine what Wertham would make of modern manga. Quite possibly, he’d have a seizure of some sort, the poor chap.

I am consistently caught off guard by manga, in a way that US comics very rarely manage. I regularly have my brain twisted into shapes to which it is unaccustomed. (Wertham would not approve). Witness today’s example, which in the space of just three volumes took me from ‘This is rather silly, but kind of creepy’ to being genuinely startled by its disturbing closing chapters. Plus, it changed the way I look at snails, which is … well, no comic’s ever done that before.

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As I said the other day, this was meant to part of a single post about a couple of comics from DC’s relaunched ‘New 52’ line, but I fumbled the well-intentioned ball of concise fun-focus and found myself writing about other stuff that popped into my head while reading. Result: two columns, not one.

So welcome to Part 2, wherein I take a look at a well-known but nevertheless B(C?)-list member of DC’s mighty character portfolio, Catwoman.

In a sense, this is all quite well timed, as some of the stuff I’m going to get into connects rather closely to recent discussions on the world-renowned SF Signal podcast. I’ll link to the relevant episode(s), down below. I’ll also just note, by way of getting my excuses in early, that I have more questions to offer than answers.

Some of the other stuff I’m going to talk about is not nearly so tricky, though, so that’s probably the place to start.

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Last year DC Comics – one of the two corporate behemoths dominating the monthly comics market in the US – cancelled all their superhero titles, some of which had unbroken runs stretching back decades, and relaunched with 52 new #1s. It was a Hail Mary pass, prompted by long-running and cumulatively punishing declines in circulation. (Marvel, DC’s great competitor, is similarly afflicted and they’re also going to try something dramatic, if less ambitious, relaunching 20+ of their titles starting in October).

As a result of the DC relaunch a heap of collected editions is starting to emerge, all introducing new storylines, characters and/or status quos, all notionally good starting points for the new or lapsed reader. As a semi-lapsed superhero aficionado, I figured I’d test these fresh waters, in a quest for nothing more complicated than fun.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I failed to adhere to my self-imposed quest parameters, getting thoroughly distracted by non fun-related things like the structure of certain famous movie endings, the power of nostalgia and the objectification of women in superhero comics. Indeed, despite only trying to talk about a couple of comics, I got distracted at such length that I’ve split what was going to be one column into two.

Today, then, you get the first installment, which is the one in which I get sidetracked by movie endings.

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Sooner or later, if you’re talking about comics with speculative fiction elements, the conversation’s going to get to The Walking Dead. This right here is that point.

Why? Because: best-selling comic in the US this July? Walking Dead #100. By a loooong way. Anniversary issues always get a jump in sales (in this case, more of a rocket launch than a jump), but even so here’s a black and white, creator-owned zombie comic dramatically outselling Batman, Spider-Man, any corporately owned and marketed superhero you care to mention.

I’ve read the first eleven trade paperback collections (out of sixteen available), so what follows is based solely on that much reading. It’ll also be spoiler-free, which is always my preference but – almost uniquely in the world of online comics talk – there is anyway a widely, if imperfectly, observed self-imposed ban on spoiling The Walking Dead. That tells you a lot about the nature of the series’ appeal, as I’ll get into below.

My expectation: this is going to end up with the subjective and objective colliding, beating one another about the head and collapsing in an unresolved heap on the floor, because I have issues with The Walking Dead that are in part to do with me, not the material. But that in itself is interesting, if obvious: the reader brings their own preferences, state of mind, entire life, to a text and the resulting amalgamated experience can be about much more than any inherent qualities of that text.

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Superheroes are going to feature in this column quite a bit over the next few installments. Not exclusively, but pretty regularly.

I could waffle on at length about the fascinating idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of the whole superhero sub-genre that’s essentially run in the US by Marvel and DC, but I’m not sure anyone else would find it half as fascinating as I do (although, honestly, it’s one of the most unusual systems for creating, publishing, distributing and selling fiction you could ever imagine). So for now here’s just one proposition that sets the scene for the two titles I thought I’d talk about today.

Quite a lot of the long-running superhero series display a couple of apparently contradictory characteristics that can be an obstacle for the objective, casual (i.e. non-‘fan’) reader. They revel in dense and new-reader-hostile continuity, the established canon of past stories that exists in their respective shared universes; yet they also play fast and loose with the narrative, psychological or physical plausibility and internal consistency that are staples of most other kinds of fiction. Sometimes, superhero comics require not so much the suspension of disbelief as its ritual sacrifice upon an altar dedicated to the gods of never-ending, bombastic soap opera.
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Finder is sf of a very distinctive kind that isn’t going to be to everyone’s taste. I’m not even certain it’s wholly, or always, to mine.

But do I think it’s remarkable? Absolutely. I’ve got a feeling that if comics were regarded as a normal, integral part of the sf field by fans and particularly critics, in the way that novels, short stories and to some extent film/TV are, there would be those – not everyone by any means, but some folks – citing Finder as a major work in the context of that whole field and giving it a lot of awards.

Do I wish there were more comics like Finder in the world? Definitely; but not too many, because I’m not sure my attention span’s up to the job. I don’t think my descriptive faculties are up to the job of conveying what Finder is like, either, but it doesn’t do to let inevitable failure deter one so off we go.

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Three preconceptions I had about manga, before I started reading the stuff, were that it had:

1. a puzzling fascination with teenage girls, extending into their sexual objectification, and a sideline in the oddly child-like depiction of adult characters
2. a persistent interest in organic horror – the transformation, corruption or cancerous eruption of the body
3. wildly complicated, over-extended storylines that require obsessive inclinations and a big bank balance to follow.

My conclusion, after recent paddling about in the margins of the manga ocean, is that all of them are true. But only sometimes, no more so than any of the easy generalisations that could be made about US or European comics, and often in ways that are surprising.

The manga I want to talk about now is shortish – a mere four concise volumes – so that’s the preconception about over-extended storylines quashed. But it’s definitely preoccupied with the transformation of organic forms, and is largely about teenage girls (though thankfully restrained on the overt sexualisation front).

Buckle up. A wild ride lies ahead.
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I realise that the big news about the 2012 Hugo nominations lies in another category entirely (congrats to the whole SF Signal crew of 2011!), but I thought I’d fire off a reaction to the announcement of the Best Graphic Story nominees.

Those nominees are:

• Digger by Ursula Vernon (Sofawolf Press)
• Fables Vol 15: Rose Red by Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham (Vertigo)
• Locke & Key Vol 4: Keys to the Kingdom by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW)
• Schlock Mercenary: Force Multiplication by Howard Tayler, colors by Travis Walton (The Tayler Corporation)
• The Unwritten Vol 4: Leviathan by Mike Carey and Peter Gross (Vertigo)

The truth is, what I mostly want to do is talk about the one (yes, just one) of the nominees that I can actually say something substantial about, but we’ll get to that in due course.

The Best Graphic Story category in the Hugos has only been around since 2009, and all three of the awards to date have gone to Girl Genius, a webcomic . Its creators, as I understand it, think it’s time someone else had a turn and consequently withdrew their comic from the fray this year, for which I’m inclined to applaud them.
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I guess most folks round here have noticed that there’s been something of a digital revolution turning book publishing on its head, the last year or three.

Difficult though it might be to believe, the whole print/digital thing is, if anything, even more complicated in the world of comics than in the world of prose fiction. There’s a chaotic plethora of formats, styles, distribution models, monetization hopes and basic approaches. Sampling the variety within that plethora is what this post is all about, rather than talking in detail about the individual stories concerned.

I thought it’d be worth dipping my Words & Pictures toes into these turbulent waters for three main reasons:

1. There’s a vaaast amount of material out there, and a lot of it is speculative fiction,
2. Much of it’s FREE!!! So, should the fancy take you, you can pop over right now and read the entirety of whatever it is I’m going to talk about (with a bit of a catch in one case), and…
3. I actually don’t read all that many webcomics, though I’ve sampled a lot, so this is a chance for others to offer their own recommendations, which would be very gratefully received in the comments if anyone’s got any.

On with the (Free! Did I mention that already?) show.
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written by John Layman, art by Rob Guillory, published by Image

Chew is science fictional craziness unlike anything else you can read in comics at the moment (as far as I know). It’s also, in its own idiosyncratic and deceptive way, one of the most ambitious and accomplished comics you could ever hope to read.

Fun is a big deal. For the reader, it might come from many sources: the energetic excitement of a kinetic adventure story, the interaction of immensely likeable characters, wherever. Sometimes from comedy, of which I confess I’m not the most instinctive or biggest fan but I tend to think the most satisfying species is comedy built not on gags but on humour earned through setting, character, events. Chew‘s got exactly that kind of humour.
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You sometimes hear the science fiction genre described as an ongoing dialogue between current authors and those who have gone before (I’m paraphrasing. I want to say the idea was articulated by the late Charles Brown, of Locus fame, but I might be wrong.).

The notion’s appealing, though I’ve never been quite sold on it as a characteristic uniquely applicable to prose science fiction. But suppose it’s true. Does that mean your enjoyment of a given novel, no matter how great, is less than it could be if you had greater familiarity with its antecedents? I don’t know. But I’m going to – kind of – talk about it anyway.

Our subject is a manga series that takes the idea of dialogue with past creators to an extreme. I know pretty much nothing about the older material that inspired it. I enjoyed it enormously, though. So much so that I think any sf fan curious about the comics medium should consider giving it a look.  I kind of think this is what Isaac Asimov might have come up with, were he a 21st century manga creator with an urge to tell robot stories.
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Two comics based on an identical science fictional trope: humanoid animals walking, talking and fighting. Both pretty good, but doing radically different things with that basic idea.

written by Daryl Gregory, art by Carlos Magno, published by Boom! Studios

This new ongoing series is written by the (rather talented) speculative fiction author Daryl Gregory and drawn by Carlos Magno. I figured it might be worth a try, the whole apes-as-overlords thing being one of the most fun ideas in science fiction. Honestly, if you don’t get a little buzz out of gorillas riding horses and brandishing guns as they herd humans around … well, I don’t know if I can help you.

The story’s set 1300 years before Charlton Heston’s unscheduled arrival in the 1968 movie. Ape society is at its steampunky zenith, with humans making up a somewhat rebellious underclass. Things turn ugly when the Lawgiver, an ape champion of species equality, is mown down by a human assassin wielding lost ancient technology (specifically, a machine gun).

What follows is an entertaining, if not yet especially surprising, yarn as ape and human authorities hunt the assassin and the simmering pot of ape-human relations boils over. (Actually, one surprising thing, which you rarely see in any kind of fiction: the leading female human protagonist is heavily pregnant. Intriguing.)

The mystery of the assassin’s identity won’t puzzle readers for long, but it’s not really supposed to. This is less of a ‘Whodunnit?’ and more of a ‘Let’s get this revolution started!’ thing. It’s traditional, straightforward comics story-telling; a long form linear narrative, adeptly paced and splendidly illustrated (some gorgeous ape imagery here). Early days, but there’s enough potential to persuade me back for at least one more volume, to see how things develop.

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Welcome, gentle readers (and the not so gentle ones too, I suppose), to Words & Pictures, a modest little corner of SF SIGNAL devoted to talking about comics and graphic novels. Comics and graphic novels of a broadly sfnal sort, as you might expect. Before we get to the serious business – the first ‘proper’ post won’t be along for a day or three – I thought a little scene-setting might be in order.

Back in the distant past, i.e. the 1980s, I read a lot of comics. And I really do mean a lot. Even after having disposed of boxloads of them, I’ve still got hundreds upon hundreds in a cupboard, occupying storage space I could really do with freeing up. As the 1990s got underway, for a variety of reasons that need not detain us here, I went cold turkey on comics. I paid absolutely no attention to the medium for something approaching fifteen years, and to be honest I didn’t miss the comics-reading habit one little bit. Then, somewhere around 2005/6, I cautiously dipped my toes back into the water. And lo, I got myself hooked all over again.
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