Monthly Archives: May 2018

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Artificial

Artificial

A Review of Jeff Lemire’s Black Hammer Vol 2: The Event (Dark Horse, 2017)

By Derek Newman-Stille

Nothing is quite what it seems in the perfect small town that superheroes Barbalien, Golden Gail, Abraham Slam, Talky Walky, and Colonel Weird, and Madame D have found themselves in. It is a town that is held apart from the rest of the world, surrounded by an energy field… but it is also a town without history, where the history books are blank and everyone seems to just keep repeating the same patterns over and over again.

In Black Hammer Vol. 2: The Event, Jeff Lemire creates a world out of the golden age of superheroes, but he complicates the world, pulling it out of the easy morality of golden age comics and making his superheroes confront realities that they have denied and their own complexities. Barbalien has to deal not only with his disconnect from his home planet Mars, but also with the homophobia that surrounds him and prevents him from being in a relationship with another man. Golden Gail has to face the duality of her identity – young girl when she is in her superhero identity and older woman when she leaves that identity. Here in this village out of time, she finds herself trapped as an eternal child, cut off from her adult identity. Abe (Abraham Slam) faces the opposite experience, flashing back to his experiences as an ageing superhero now considered obsolete and his life in the village where he has created a space of comfort for himself to age away from the superhero scene.Talky Walky, a sentient robotic life form with a taste for adventure has to deal with being trapped in a small space, unable to escape and venture into the wider world. Colonel Weird, a man trapped between worlds, able to see the past and the future, has to confront his knowledge of the future while keeping it secret from those around him. Lucy, the daughter of Black Hammer has found her way into this strange world cut off from her own and lost her memory of the outside world. She has to confront the people she knew before The Event and see how they have changed in this altered world. Meanwhile Madame D tries to maintain this strange bubble of reality and prevent what she fears the most – a supervillain.

Black Hammer Vol 2: The Event is a comic about the effects of battle on the superhero psyche and the damage that it does. It is a tale of repression and avoidance where characters seek to hide from themselves even while they face aspects of their pasts.

Lemire brings attention to classic comic books while adding his own complexities and twists to these worlds, creating uncertain realities and characters who are equally uncertain about exploring them.

To find out more about Black Hammer Vol. 2: The Event, go to https://www.darkhorse.com/Books/26-745/Black-Hammer-Volume-2-The-Event-TPB

To find discover more about Jeff Lemire, go to http://jefflemire.blogspot.ca

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Who Said Unicorns Were Majestic?

Who Said Unicorns Were Majestic?

A review of Katie Shanahan and Steven Shanahan’s Silly Kingdom: A New Steed Indeed (www.sillykingdom.com , 2105)

People frequently portray unicorns as majestic, gentle, caring creatures… but not the Shanahans. In their comic Silly Kingdom: A New Steed Indeed, The Prince becomes obsessed with the fact that a neighbouring prince, Peatrid, manages to have a pet unicorn where The Prince only has the traditional steed of his kingdom… the llama. Obsessed with beating his rival, The Prince heads out with Markus The Kingdom Jester in search of a rare Nocturnal Black Unicorn.

He quickly discovers that his prey is far less gentle than he had assumed… and far more of a trickster herself. In a set of Wiley Coyote and the Roadrunner-like attempts to catch the unicorn, The Prince and Markus end up realizing that the unicorn they are searching for has a wicked sense of humour and a lot of attitude.

Like their first Silly Kingdom comic, Katie and Steven Shanahan combine the magical with the hilarious, bringing the reader on a ridiculous adventure into a world of mishaps and magic. In this second comic, the Shanahans focus even more on the visual than they had in their first comic, stepping away from the conversion from radio play to graphic medium and instead getting into the storytelling power of images. They allow the images on the page to tell their own stories, relying on the power of expressive faces to reveal their own internal narrative and set the tone for dialogue that is used.

To find out more about Silly Kingdom: A New Steed Indeed and the work of Katie and Steven Shanahan, visit http://sillykingdom.tumblr.com/about

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A Necromantic Frankenstein

Check out my review of Kenneth Oppel’s “Such Wicked Intent”, a story of Victor Frankenstein’s early life experimenting with alchemy and the body.

Also, while you are checking it, check out this other kickstarter for Frankenstein stories – We Shall Be Monsters at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1357195744/we-shall-be-monsters?ref=cijr21&token=126156be

We Shall Be Monsters

A Necromantic Frankenstein

A review of Kenneth Oppel’s Such Wicked Intent: The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein Book 2 (Harper Collins, 2012)

By Derek Newman-Stille

Kenneth Oppel’s Such Wicked Intent takes the Frankenstein story into a darker space where alchemy and trips to the underworld shape Victor Frankenstein’s quest for knowledge. Oppel imagines Victor Frankenstein not just as a scientist, but as a man who craves any kind of knowledge and power.

In Oppel’s first Apprenticeship of Frankenstein book, This Dark Endeavour, Victor begins meddling with alchemical knowledge as a way to construct a cure for his twin brother, Konrad’s illness but eventually discovers that alchemy is substanceless and ultimately ineffective. Now that Konrad is dead, Victor again goes searching through ancient tomes, believing that he has the knowledge and power to change his brother’s death. He is fuelled by grief, but also by his own belief that he has…

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Wiley, Weird, and Wizardly

Wiley, Weird, and Wizardly

A review of Katie Shanahan and Steven Shanahan’s Silly Kingdom: Alengrimrickshaw’s 211th Birthday (www.sillykingdom.com, 2011)

By Derek Newman-Stille

I just got back from the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) and one of the first things that caught my attention was a short comic by Katie and Sreven Shanahan called Silly Kingdom.

As adorable as it is hilarious, Silly Kingdom: Alengrimrickshaw’s 211th Birthday is a tale of the magical in the mundane. It is a story of magical mishaps and jealousy by a 211 year old wizard who is jealous of a jester who performs magic tricks as part of his act. Katie and Steven Shanahan’s playfulness suffuses every page of this short comic involving an overly optimistic princess and a prince who enters far too easily into existential crises. This is a cute, fast paced, and exciting comic that brings humour and the fantastic together.

Silly Kingdom: Alengrimrickshaw’s 211th Birthday was originally a radio play that was adapted into graphic form, providing a fascinating view on the process of converting a tale from one format to another. One would think this would create a text-heavy comic, but the Shanahans have been able to adapt the story effectively to graphic novel pacing. The story is as much told by the hyper-expressive facial features and exuberance of movement by the characters as it is by the dialogue.

To discover more about Silly Kingdom: Alengrimrickshaw’s 211th Birthday and about the ongoing work of Katie and Steven Shanahan, go to http://sillykingdom.tumblr.com/about

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WONDERful

Wonderful

A review of Cait Gordon’s A Night at The Rabbit Hole in Alice Unbound: Beyond Wonderland edited by Colleen Anderson (Exile, 2018)

By Derek Newman-Stille

Alice in Wonderland is a story that plays with identity, disrupting the power that normativity has on our society. Cait Gordon has tapped into that power that Wonderland has to resist normativity and creates a GenderQueer Alice who has just come out and taken on their new name and pronouns. It is refreshing to read a story featuring a GenderQueer character that is not about the struggles of occupying their identity. In A Night at The Rabbit Hole, Alice is instantly accepted for their gender and people don’t slip up and refer to them as anything other than “them” after one quick correction.

Gordon uses the Alice in Wonderland text for its power to disrupt power structures that erase identity possibilities and instead writes a story filled with potential and possibility.

A Night at the Rabbit Hole is a tale about a meeting in a dance club where Alice is given a pill that transforms their perspective and gives them an expanded view of the world around them, allowing them to see through human disguises to the creatures beneath. Gordon plays with the question of what could alter someone’s perspective like the “drink me” potion and mushroom that Alice takes in Carroll’s story and ultimately comes up with the connection to club drugs. After Alice took their pill (here called a “tart”), I have to admit that the Jefferson Airplane song White Rabbit was running through my head as Alice’s perspectives were warped, and I think that Gordon intended to plant this trippy tune in the minds of her readers.

Cait Gordon’s characteristic playfulness comes through in this tale of altered reality and questioned norms and she invites readers to chuckle at clever witticisms at the same time as they speculate about possibilities beyond the simple world that they live in. This is a story that empowers at the same time as it entertains

To discover more about Alice Unbound, go to http://www.exileeditions.com/shop/alice-unbound-beyond-wonderland/

To find out more about Cait Gordon, visit her website at https://caitgordon.com