The Bite-Sized Too Busy Thinking About My Comics

As a general storytelling principle, show don't tell has more than just considerable worth. Well of course it does. But the supposed heresy of telling has its virtues too. For some, the dogma against it has hardened to the point at which voice-overs on film will be automatically decried as cheats and thought balloons in action/adventure comics slapped down as childish. That both have been brilliantly and repeatedly put to use over the decades is surely undeniable. But the one-size-fits-all would-be writing guru insists: display trumps declaration. Yet if all there was to stand against that homogenising credo was writer Sara Kenney and artist John Watkiss et al's Surgeon X #1, then the case for sometimes tell don't show could still be decisively made. Consider the above. It's the full page cliffhanger to Surgeon X's first chapter. As a first glance will tell, it's an initially unpromising exemplar of decompression. With all the potential ...

1 .   I wonder if the facial expressions in John Forte's many Legion stories were ever as subtle and singular as they are here. On the surface, The Mutiny Of The Legionnaires is a typically charming early LSH sci-fi potboiler. For all of its spectacle and invention, Edmond Hamilton's story appears at first glance no more or less than a playfully overwrought melodrama aimed at pre-teen readers. So it is, and wonderfully so too. Overwhelmed by a catastrophic procession of emergencies, Sun Boy becomes obsessed with saving the people of a planet threatened by destruction. As his laudable intentions shade into mania, The Mutiny Of The Legionnaires tips its hat to Mutiny On The Bounty , the Reed/Milestone film which, with Marlon Brando in the role of Fletcher Christian, had debuted less than 18 months before. For a few pages, Sun Boy appears to distill the imperiously cruel excesses of the movie's Captain Bligh. In their turn, his fellow Legionnaires feel obliged t...

What might Sara Ryan & Carla Speed McNeil's Bad Houses have to teach the makers of a typical action/adventure potboiler? Despite a few thrown punches, a sprinkling of martial arts poses and a jeopardy-packed climax,  Bad Houses is no way a heroic melodrama. What it does offer, amongst its considerable virtues, is a textbook-worthy example of how to introduce a character that is, on first impressions at least, wonderfully, captivatingly loathsome. As dozens of superhero movies will attest, it's far, far harder to create a compelling villain than it is a sympathetic, virtuous protagonists. But in the first appearance in Bad Houses of the seemingly irredeemable Fred Peck, Ryan and McNeil spell out several ways in which an apparently unpalatable and largely humourless antagonist can be made utterly fascinating. As the pages progress, Peck will be poignantly shown to be anything other than a one-dimensional moustache-twirler. But even given how the reader will leave him at ...

From 2016's "Action Comics" #977, by Dan Jurgens, Ian Churchill et al Of all the sweeping changes made by John Byrne to the Superman mythos in 1986, it was perhaps his depiction of Krypton that proved the most contentious. Even many who embraced the back-to-basics puritanism of Byrne's post-Crisis reboot balked at how Superman's homeworld had overnight been transformed from super-scientific paradise to sterile, hidebound dystopia. In the words Byrne gave to Jor-El, the new Krypton was a "cold and heartless society, stripped of all human feeling, of all human passion and life". As with the Kryptonians, so with their world. No longer a wonderland of pulpish micro-environments, Byrne's Krypton was an icebound wasteland. How was the loss of the Arcadian Krypton to inform Superman's character and mission when his birthplace was now anything but a paradise lost? Hell rather than heaven, this reworking of Krypton introduced a serious of fascinati...

1 . The Strange Persistent Obsession With Auteurship Like a great many others, I'm convinced Marzena Sowa and Sylvain Savoia's Marzi: A Memoir is a masterpiece. But I'm not convinced that the credit for the book's brilliance is always appropriately shared out. There's long been a tendency when discussing comics to concentrate on the supposed auteurship of the writer. For a variety of reasons, including the relative difficulty of recognising and describing the vital contributions of artistic collaborators, their contributions tend to get short shift. That tendency - as misleading as it is manifestly unfair - is only intensified when it comes to stories that are as emotionally captivating and politically powerful as Marzena Sowa's. Marzi: A Memoir depicts the first stages of Sowa's coming of age in the Poland of the Seventies and Eighties. If the stories were nothing but local explorations of that universal theme, they'd still be undeniably begu...

I failed to resist this unexpectedly affordable hardback album containing ten consecutive 2003 issues of the Franco-Belgian comicbook Spirou . If only more anthology titles were collected in the form they were originally published. It makes undeniable sense to strip mine out the successive chapters of the most commercially promising strips and publish them as individual volumes. But the original issues of any mix'm'match comic have a fascination of their own. The way in which familiar and unfamiliar tales and styles sit together. The character that individual editions are lent by their unique mix of stories, editorial content and adverts. The choices made about cuts to strips now known as self-contained graphic novels. The suggestion of a single moment in time, complete with all the printed features that would never be collected in their own right, that would never get to live outside of this single context.    For the reader who knows nothing of any language but Englis...