The Joker gets better
Robert Johnson sells his soul
Peter Pan in Long Island
The Thing meets the Dashwood sisters
Someone's made another graphic mixtape for you
Every Wednesday we run down the 5 most interesting comics or graphic novels coming out for the week.
5. BATMAN: GOING SANE
Written by J.M. DeMatteis, Eddie Campell and Daren White; Art by Joe Staton, Bart Sears and Steve Mitchell
DC Comics
$14.99
If you've just seen The Dark Knight, then you're probably going to be one of two minds on the matter of the Joker. Either Heath Ledger's performance is going to make you hungry for all things Joker or he is the be all and end all and has effectively closed the door on all other iterations of the character, be it in film or comics. Well, if you're nothing like me than you might be interested in reading this collection of a Joker story that was originally published in the comic Legends of the Dark Knight a few years ago. After seemingly killing Batman, the Joker has to move on with his life and that means a backward slide into sanity. It's an interesting concept that builds on the dynamics of that classic antagonistic relationship.
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4. ME AND THE DEVIL BLUES VOL 1
By Akira Hiramoto
Del Rey Manga
$19.95
This week's head-scratcher is a manga about the life of legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson. Except that since virtually nothing is really known about Johnson's life the story focuses on the idea that he once sold his soul to the Devil and runs wild from there, even having Johnson meet up with gangster Clyde Barrow of Bonnie & Clyde fame. Just the idea of a Japanese writer/artist portraying the life of an African American blues musician in 1920s America would be interesting enough but throw in Satan and some other bizarre elements and things could get really out there.
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3. NEVERLAND
By Dave Kiersh
Bodega
$6.00
Dave Kiersh ruminates on life, love and Long Island in this short but densely cartooned 32 pager. Kiersh has an interesting child-like style that works well for a story that jumps into a Peter Pan inspired fantasy sequence but that also tackles both the physical and emotional landscape of living in suburbia: water towers, cicadas, strip malls, listening to bad radio and hooking up in the back of a car.
You can preview the book here at Kiersh's website.
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2. FANTASTIC FOUR: TRUE STORY #1
Written by Paul Cornell; art by Horacio Dominguez
Marvel
$2.99
Okay, maybe this is actually the oddball pick of the week. The Fantastic Four journey into the world of Fiction and meet up with Willie Lumpkin, Dante and the Dashwood sisters from Sense and Sensibility? Huh. It's a new mini-series written by Paul Cornell, popular British writer of various Dr. Who novels, the recent critically acclaimed Wisdom series for Marvel and the current Captain Britain and MI:13 series. English majors are going to get a kick out of this series especially but, really, who wouldn't get a kick out of seeing Ben Grimm interact with some Jane Austen characters?
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1. POPGUN VOL. 2
By Various
Image Comics
$29.99
Last week was the big week for anthologies but this one probably tops all of those anyway. The second volume of this hip anthology, or "graphic mixtape" as editors Mark Andrew Smith and Joe Keatinge like to call it, features eye-catching work from people like Jim Rugg (again with Afrodisiac which we saw in last week's Meathaus anthology), James Kochalka, Paul Maybury, Dean Haspiel, Erik Larsen, Ryan Ottley, Joelle Jones and of course this very appealing cover by Paul Pope.
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SPOILERS
The thing that irritated me about the very well-written "Going Sane" was that it seemed (to me) to land too firmly on the untenable side of the argument that "Batman is the cause of the Joker."
The Joker is a force of nature, the agent of chaos. Although one can argue that Joker is so crazy that only he would "regress into sanity" as a reaction to the death of Batman, I really wish that there had been a different catalyst for his "return to insanity" than the recovery of Batman, or at least a little more ambiguity about what the catalyst was.
Joker may be somewhat co-dependent with Batman, but he isn't truly dependent on Batman for his identity (even though he may believe he is). Alfred's take on the Joker (by way of describing a mad raider in his past) in the new movie sums it up in a nutshell:
"Because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn."
Actually it was Tommy Johnson that supposedly sold his soul to the Devil to learn how to play guitar. Robert Johnson just wrote a song about it.