Felan Reads the Comics is going on summer hiatus for a month or so, while I run around to weddings, conferences and move house. Rest assured, I will continue to Read the Comics while away. In the meantime, feel free to comment and suggest comics in any format or medium you’d like to see in future profiles – I’ve got a good list but fresh material is more than welcome. Generally speaking I prefer to profile less well-known comics (or at least comics that would be less well-known to people who aren’t giant comic nerds), but all suggestions are welcome.

“Finite Summer” illustration by Meredith Gran of Octopus Pie.

Some Sundays, Felan is too busy to write a full profile, so he posts his favourite webcomics instead.

Alex Robinson is known for his Top Shelf-published graphic novels Box Office Poison and Tricked, both of which chronicle fairly mundane, everyday events, but Lower Regions is pure fantasy. The series began as a short print comic that followed the adventures of a Red Sonja-esque barbarian warrior fighting her way through a dungeon full of monsters – all presented with no dialogue! Robinson’s art charmingly invokes poorly-but-enthusiastically-sketched heroes and monsters in the margins of math homework, and he makes wonderful use of unique, pulpy title headers on each page. The current volume, currently being serialized online as Lower Regions: Entering the Blood Tunnel, follows a familiar D&D party (warrior, mage, cleric, rogue) as they descend into the dank gloom of an ancient system of catacombs full of iconic monsters, in search of a sacred artifact at the behest of a mysterious brotherhood. Robinson’s treatment is affectionate, and he lets the innate nerdy silliness of the subject matter speak for itself rather than relying on overt jokes and parody.

The original Lower Regions book is available from Top Shelf here: http://www.topshelfcomix.com/catalog/lower-regions/596. You can read Lower Regions: Entering the Blood Tunnel here: http://lowerregions.tumblr.com/

On Sundays, Felan profiles his favourite comics and graphic novels from across the diverse medium’s history.

Parker is one bad motherfucker, and not in a hip, Quentin Tarantino sort of way. The coldly violent, unrepentantly criminal, borderline-sociopathic anti-hero of the series of crime novels by Richard Stark (pseudonym of Donald E. Westlake) between 1962 and 2008. More people are familiar with the character than you might think, albeit by different names – Lee Marvin portrayed a version of Parker in Point Blank, and Mel Gibson did a turn in Payback, both based on the first Parker novel, The Hunter, and there are a handful of other film adaptations, including new one rumoured to star Jason Statham. Writer and illustrator Darwyn Cooke’s Richard Stark’s Parker is the first graphic novel version of the series.

Parker is in many ways an archetypal hard-boiled crime fiction protagonist – betrayed by his woman in collusion with his enemies and left for dead, and having lost his previously easy life of living in resort hotels between freelance heist jobs, he sets out for revenge and to get paid what he’s owed. Where he differs is in his coldly calculating attitude and unabashedly violent methods. There’s no real shred of honour-among-thieves in Parker’s world, and as such it’s difficult to find any redeeming qualities in him – he’s driven almost entirely by self-interest and a sense of entitlement. As the bodies pile up behind him, he marches onwards towards the vague goal of vengeance and reclaiming his comfortable life. One of the strengths of the the comic is that it doesn’t pull its punches: Parker is a pretty horrible person, and even though it’s supremely entertaining to watch him at work, it’s frequently disconcerting as well. This is particularly apparent when Parker starts cutting on his dead wife’s face to keep her photo out of the newspapers – a monstrously pragmatic act that phases him no less than making a phone call.

Cooke’s adaptation is apparently stays very close to the Parker novels, and retains the 1960s setting, but the most immediately remarkable feature is the artwork. Cooke, who has worked on wide range of comic and animation projects over the years, is a graphic designer by trade, and it shows – he cleverly chooses to illustrate the morally ambiguous criminal underworld in the style of 1960s graphic design and advertising, using a pallet of black, white and blue throughout. In some ways Cooke’s art is similar to the work of contemporary indie comic artists operating in a nostalgic mode (fellow Canadians Seth and Michel Rabagliati in particular), but combining it with the hard-boiled crime genre gives the images a thrilling kinetic energy. This distinctive visual style contrasts wonderfully with the bursts of often-brutal violence that pepper Parker’s misadventures, and help situate the story in a very particular, iconic version of its historical moment. (Fans of Mad Men will likely appreciate this!)

All in all, Richard Stark’s Parker is a masterfully executed adaptation of a classic crime fiction series. Two of a projected four volumes, The Hunter and The Outfit, have been published so far in nicely designed hard-bound editions as well as trade paperbacks by IDW Publishing. You can find more information, and a preview, here: http://www.idwpublishing.com/catalog/book/608

Some Sundays, Felan is too busy to write a full profile, so he posts his favourite webcomics instead.

Doctor Cat is a cute, funny and well-drawn webcomic by Sarah Sobole “about a doctor who happens to be a cat.”  And that’s about all there is to say about it. Click here to read it!

Some Sundays, Felan is too busy to write a full profile, so he posts his favourite webcomics instead.

As I mentioned in last week’s round-up of TCAF finds, Octopus Pie by Meredith Gran is one of my favourite webcomics. On paper, it sounds like any number of other comics – “normal,” responsible main character Eve and wacky stoner friend Hanna are Brooklyn twenty-somethings dealing with job troubles and relationships and having adventures with an ever-expanding supporting cast – but in execution there’s a lot more to it. Not unlike Bryan Lee O’Malley’s work on Scott Pilgrim, Gran’s visual characterization masterfully balances honest realism with cartoony expressionism, and likewise while some storylines remain grounded in the everyday, others cross over into outlandishness and outright fantasy. There’s a clever sophistication to Octopus Pie that is practically non-existant in webcomics, but at the same time Gran never shies away from a great gag.

You can read Octopus Pie at http://www.octopuspie.com/, or in one of the two collected print editions available for order on the website, There Are No Stars In Brooklyn and the forthcoming Listen At Home With Octopus Pie (due out this month).

A FELAN READS THE COMICS SPECIAL REPORT

This weekend, I spent some time at the world-famous Toronto Comic Arts Festival. TCAF is a unique festival in that it focuses entirely on indie, self-published, small-press, webcomics and other non-mainstream comics (no spandex-wearing superheroes here, unless they’re been ironically subverted). Instead of a regular profile, I thought I’d recap some of the things I picked up – which may in future be featured on Felan Reads the Comics right here at TBR!

I’ve read a little bit of Joe Daly’s Dungeon Quest, and it’s pretty awesome – a bizarre, profane hybrid of fantasy role-playing games and indie comix. Looking forward to reading more!

Hey look, it’s James Stokoe, the creator of Orc Stain, the first comic I ever wrote about on TBR!

I’m a huge fan of Meredith Gran’s ongoing chronicle of the weird lives of twenty-something Brooklynites, Octopus Pie (it’s probably one of my top five webcomics), so I was excited to pick up the first Octopus Pie collection, There Are No Stars In Brooklyn from Ms. Gran herself, who was kind enough to autograph the book with a sketch of Manuel the cat, looking rather alarmed:

I also picked up Adrian Tomine’s adorable Scenes from an Impending Marriage, and wanted to buy everything in sight but couldn’t afford it. That’s all I got for this week – keep an eye out for these titles in more in future editions of Felan Reads the Comics!

More Warren Ellis this week! Global Frequency is a mini-series comprised of 12 one-shot stories, each penned by Ellis and illustrated by a different artist, including some big names like Gene Ha, and what I consider to be the single greatest penciller and inker pairing in the business, Chris Sprouse and Karl Story (issue #8). All the stories, while self-contained, are linked by the eponymous shadowy covert organization that always seems ready to save the world…

The Global Frequency is basically a real-life Wiki-like organization of 1,001 people around the world, coordinated by a central hub to deal with disasters, crises and other dangerous situations. Each individual agent is an otherwise ordinary person who specializes in a particular field (computers, chemical engineering, parkour, hand-to-hand combat, etc.), and has no knowledge of the larger organization beyond having been recruited and given a high-tech communication device that summons them when needed. The best thing about Global Frequency is that it’s essentially a superhero comic, but instead of one, all powerful hero, the “hero” of the story is a crowd-sourced, distributed network of specialist but otherwise unremarkable individuals.Each issue depicts a new crisis, and a purpose-specific team is assembled from the 1,001 agents and dispatched. In some cases, the missions are executed entirely via phone and the Internet, while others require the team to meet in a specific location to confront the threat. The threats range from psychopathic mutants, to doomsday cults, to hive-mind meme viruses, all characteristic fixations of Ellis’ work. Most of the series is action-driven, but Ellis also weaves horror, science-fiction and other generic elements into various stories.


The only recurring characters in the series are Miranda Zero, the mysterious director of Global Frequency, and Aleph, a hacker who controls the central communications hub and coordinates the organization’s activities. Given the nature of the organization, there is minimal characterization, but the series is full of little glimpses into the everyday lives of the agents, which give a sense of realism and also provide a source of humour – in the first issue, an MIT expert on black holes provides valuable information to the team while in full BDSM gear (only the audience is aware of this, making it even more delightful).

Because it’s a mini-series, Global Frequency leaves you wanting more, and doesn’t offer any conclusions or revelations about the nature of the organization, but part of its charm is that it alludes to so much without ever directly explaining anything, just as the agents on the Frequency themselves never really learn any more than is absolutely necessary for them to complete the mission.

Global Frequency was originally published by the sadly now-defunct Wildstorm Comics, and is now available in two trade paperbacks, Planet Ablaze and Detonation Radio, from DC Comics. More info here: http://www.dccomics.com/dccomics/graphic_novels/?gn=1753
BONUS: A Global Frequency television pilot was produced but never aired, and can be viewed or downloaded easily via the Internet. It’s not very good, and very much misses the point of not having the agents as recurring characters, but is interesting nonetheless. (Rumor has it a new series is in production as well.)

On Sundays, Felan profiles his favourite comics and graphic novels from across the diverse medium’s history.

Mike Mignola is best known for his fantastic work on Hellboy, but there are some other gems in his oeuvre that are less well-known. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser is a sword-and-sorcery adventure mini-series featuring two of the most iconic (although these days perhaps a bit obscure) characters in fantasy literature. The titular Fafhrd and Mouser were created by Fritz Lieber in the 1930s and starred in in a wide range of short stories published right up until the late 1980s. This comic book version, written in 1991 by Howard Chaykin with pencils by Mignola, inks by Al Williamson, and fantastic colours by Sherilyn Van Valkenburgh, adapts seven of these stories.

Written in the same era as the grittier but equally influential Conan the Barbarian stories, Lieber’s imaginary world originates and formalizes many of the tropes of the fantasy genre (and of any number of Dungeons & Dragons campaigns), including the archetypes of the Northman and the rogue, the typical sprawling, dangerous fantasy city and the practically mandatory Thieves Guild. The series traces the many and varied exploits of Fafhrd, a towering barbarian hailing from the frozen North, and the Gray Mouser, a small, stealthy and streetwise rogue. Both now make their living as petty thieves and adventurers. Fafhrd and Mouser are freelancers, unsanctioned by the Thieves Guild, and so are constantly on the run from or directly confronting the supposedly noble organization and its dark secrets. One of the best things about Lieber’s stories is the fast-paced, theatrical dialogue between the two rogues (think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead), and the comic book translates this beautifully, with interlocking speech bubbles filling every available space around Mignola’s subtly evocative and finely detailed sword fights and rooftop chases.

This particular brand of fantasy is more indebted to swashbuckling tales of adventure than to the epics of Homer or Wagner (or Tolkien for that matter) – Fafhrd and Mouser mostly spend their time pursuing personal revenge and monetary gain, getting into trouble rather than attempting to save the world from certain doom. Although the comic is hugely charismatic and entertaining, it also depicts a very serious and dangerous environment in which witty banter is a defensive mechanism for coping with a chaotic lifestyle with no certainties. The stories take place in a wide range of settings, but the comic begins in the city of Lankhmar, and returns there intermittently. The sprawling metropolis is perfectly rendered by Mignola, Williamson and Van Valkenburgh, all sagging rooftops, shadowed alleys and crumbling archways. There is a sense in the story that all roads lead inevitably to wonderous, horrible Lankhmar, no matter how much distance our heroes put between them as they visit exotic, faraway places. All in all, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser is a hugely satisfying book for any fan of fantasy comics, that brings artistic and narrative nuance (not to mention a wry sense of humour) to a genre that all too often collapses into its own self-seriousness.

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser was originally published by Epic Comics, and is now available as a trade paperback from Dark Horse Comics. You can find more information here: http://www.darkhorse.com/Books/10-686/Fafhrd-and-the-Gray-Mouser

BONUS: You can also spot Fafhrd and Mouser in a cameo role in Fables, which has previously been featured on TBR!

Some Sundays, Felan is too busy to write a full profile, so he posts his favourite webcomics instead.

Creator Kris Straub (who also did Checkerboard Nightmare and the ongoing Starslip) describes Chainsawsuit as “disposable Internet humour,” and while that may be accurate, it doesn’t quite do this simply drawn gag-a-day strip justice. Straub is a master of the self-referential parody-within-a-parody, framing real groaners in a way that lets you laugh at both the joke itself and the conventions of terrible jokes in general. This is like a really brilliant version of those dumb little comics you and your friends used to draw in the margins of your schoolwork. Rife with clever pop-culture satire (TV being Straub’s favourite target), but without falling into pointless reference-comedy, Chainsawsuit is more than just an outlet for Straub to toss out his weirder, sillier and cruder ideas – I consider it to be his best work. You can read Chainsawsuit most weekdays here: http://www.chainsawsuit.com/

(Bonus! Straub is also responsible, along with his pal Scott Kurtz of PvP, for the Flash-animated series Blamimations for Penny Arcade, and specifically for one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on the web – check out the LARPing segment that starts around 1:00 of this episode: http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/blamimations/109/)

Some Sundays, Felan is too busy to write a full profile, so he posts his favourite webcomics instead.

Gastrophobia is like an amazing Saturday morning cartoon that never existed. Set in a highly-fictionalized Ancient Greece, it follows the ongoing adventures of Phobia, an exiled Amazon warrior, her son Gastro, and their slave Klepto, as they fight mythical beasts, complete epic quests and tell bad jokes. This comic is all about style, though – creator David McGuire’s delightfully expressive limited-pallete artwork is an over-the-top combination of Archie, old newspaper comics, ’70s indie comix and teen-oriented manga, and is filled with pitch-perfect facial expressions, flip-takes and pratfalls. Matching the style, McGuire’s gags are perfectly, hilariously unfunny – it takes real talent to write a truly terrible punchline!

Gastrophobia is updated sporadically at http://www.gastrophobia.com, and there are about sixteen finished storylines (as well as numerous one-off gag strips) in the archives at http://www.gastrophobia.com/archive.php!