Strange Tales

One-sentence summary: Regardless if you like indies for their off-beat humor or their unflinching address of real themes, these stories will serve you well.

I wasn't sure what to make of Strange Tales when I heard it announced. So many indie creators have an anti-superhero passion that I wondered if it would be a self-loathing collection, but that was never the case. The closest you have to that are the direct parodies, like the Spider-Man redux in issue three, or the Kupperman story in issue one, but even these aren't done mockingly. Instead, you mostly have stories like Bagge's three-part Hulk story where Hulk is torn between two vastly different women who want bizarrely similar things (side note: Bagge did this story years ago, and Marvel just got around to finding a venue to publish it, deciding it was too racy for inclusion in an all-audience Hulk revue). I particularly liked the Hornschemeier Molecule Man story as far as the more serious stories are concerned. Though only two pages, Jeffrey Brown's Fantastic Four story probably had me laughing the most of any thing in the three issues.

All in all, it succeeded quite well at what it was going for: give general comic fans a different, generally humorous take on some beloved characters while introducing several indie creators to a larger crowd (some, like Sakai, most nerds at least peripherally know, but I had actually never heard of Hornschemeier prior to this, along with many of the others).

I unabashedly like revue books, at least when they're not just an excuse to dump some online-exclusive stories. I think it does a mind good to read comics (superhero and not) not written in either 22 or 110/132 page increments. For me, while I consider myself a fairly decent comic nerd, I really don't have a ton of knowledge of the indie scene due to various reasons, so this easy method of getting to know some names and styles was worth it for that alone.

Eisner Thoughts

Oh life -- you sure make writing a blog no one cares about or reads difficult.

So the Eisner nominations came out, and did you hear? People like to talk about them. Here's a few cents of thought (given inflation, it's probably considerably more than 2).

Madame Xanadu? Really? This book has never seemed greater than average and, unlike Air or Unknown Soldier, it doesn't seem to be trying to be much more. For one thing, it's stuck in the same situation as, bizarrely, Cable. They're both books which, while Xanadu probably has more potential than Cable, are hindered by the plot device of time-jumping-forward. It's simply a messy way to tell the story. In both, the characters have gone forward hundreds of years at a time, but don't stay at any of the times long enough for the reader to care. What happens is a mixture of a too-long arc (in Cable, it's just now closing up after 10+ issues, crossover, and related 2-issue miniseries, in Xanadu we don't have her in the present, but we're now into the 20th century) w/too short of stories. All in all, a completely OK book.

The best continuing series is just a bizarre collection. We have one of the best limited series of last year represented, so that's...good? W/the exception of Monster, I've read these series over the last year (I've got plans to catch up on Monster soon, it just hasn't happened yet). I've thought Thor was a pretty solid read, but there are definitely some better books (Incredible Hercules, anyone? Captain America? And that's off the top of my head, from other Marvel titles). Usagi Yojimbo just seems a bit random, though I do like the book, so I'm not going to complain too much.

I guess what this comes down to is the fickle nature of the Eisners. Selected by a very limited group of people pulled from a not-quite-as limited pool which differs year-to-year, you're not really getting a guarantee, as, well, sometimes really smart people who know their craft can have weird taste (if I were less lazy, I'd link here to Ebert giving Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties a 3-star review).

What I'm saying is that Madame Xanadu is a Garfield movie.