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Tomb of Dracula (1972) #30
I love how writer Marv Wolfman makes sure Dracula’s racist towards Blade to in-virtue signal, except van Helsing and his daughter were racist towards Blade too. And hero Frank Drake is constantly racist towards Taj. It’s an unfortunate trivia note to an otherwise solid fill-in issue. Or at least, the Tomb of Dracula version of a fill-in. It’s the same team; it’s just nothing to do with the main story.Instead, it’s a series of flashbacks as Dracula works on his diaries. He’s just buried Shiela and is standing over her grave, working through some mental gymnastics to escape any blame for the situation. He told her he was Count Dracula, Lord of the Undead, didn’t he? Maybe if she’d listened to him, she wouldn’t be dead now.
Joking aside, it’s… character development. Wolfman’s in a pickle with character development on Dracula because any character development will make him sympathetic at this point, and Wolfman wants to keep him a villain. Hell, Dracula wants to stay a villain—he’s rambling about people expecting something different from him.
He’s got three different journal entries for the evening, with Blade showing in the final one; it’s a recounting of their first encounter.
The first flashback is about a Prussian politician’s wife convincing Dracula to kill her husband. While Dracula’s narration complains about her being a bother, he still agrees to do the deed. Only he’s in for a surprise once he gets there. I think Wolfman must’ve been reading some World War I history based on the cameos.
Great art on it from Gene Colan and Tom Palmer makes up for a lot. The story peaks early when Dracula’s thinking about how the wife is pretending his rotten flesh doesn’t stink when he usually has to hypnotize the ladies into not smelling it.
What?
Major detail. Should’ve been in issue five or something. It’s issue thirty.
The next flashback is about Dracula getting involved in a family squabble where the dad doesn’t want to pay for his daughter to go to blind school anymore because he’s a selfish prick. Meanwhile, the daughter asks Dracula to play dolls with her. Great art, somewhat oddly paced story, decent finish. However, Dracula’s inability to understand complex grief and panic ring false.
The Blade story’s the last one. It takes place in 1968, so pretty soon before Tomb starts (the series, at least its start time, is rather well-established for a comic). Dracula’s holding court in China, and Blade wants to talk to him. Cue some racism.
It’s the action story, the one where they can put Blade on the cover to promise an appearance while really delivering a glorified cameo. Despite being their first meeting, Blade doesn’t need to be Blade for the story to work. It’d be better if it weren’t him. And not just because it’d (presumably) cut out racist Dracula.
Still, excellent art, of course, because Colan and Palmer aren’t going to deliver anything else.
The issue starts much better than it finishes, and, despite whatever he’s doing with the racism bit, Wolfman’s tentative character development for the Count is something new in the book and something good.
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Doom Patrol (2019) s04e06 – Hope Patrol
This episode picks up some hours after last episode’s “all the characters are probably babies now” cliffhanger. While fixing up a car (with some great Riley Shanahan bodywork), Brendan Fraser explains to Diane Guerrero he’s had an epiphany, and they’re all about to die, so they better get their houses in order. Guerrero wanted to fight the bad guys (whoever they may be) and expected buddy Fraser to be all set to go.
Instead, he shrugs her off, and she’s left on her own. Heading down to the Underground to consult the other personalities, she also finds them unwilling to help. The conflict gives Guerrero some great material, and she does really well. This season might be the one where she becomes consistently good.
But not having Fraser (and Shanahan) to hang out with means Guerrero doesn’t get to pair off with anyone, while the rest of the episode’s spent on duos.
Matt Bomer (and Matthew Zuk) and new friend Sendhil Ramamurthy get trapped in the big bad’s alternate dimension. Well, not exactly trapped because Ramamurthy can open portals, but Bomer’s not sure what’s going on. Especially not when the omnipresent stooges are walking around with giant scissors, ready to cut off heads.
Bomer and Ramamurthy have an excellent episode “together,” to the point I got curious about how they shoot the scenes. Does Zuk read Bomer’s lines? Do they have them played back? Is Ramamurthy just vamping? Regardless, great work and some excellent character development from Bomer, who’s usually working through old emotional shit instead of getting new stuff to navigate.
Speaking of new and old stuff to navigate, April Bowlby and Michelle Gomez are still paired off. Their reconciliation from last episode—made under extreme circumstances—is holding; right up until they find out they need to break into the Ant Farm, which is the Bureau of Normalcy’s headquarters and full of terrible memories for both–like Bowlby’s boyfriend getting murdered by Gomez’s stooge, again played by Daniel Annone.
It’s a good arc for the two of them, but it’s not as much about character development as exposition and figuring out how the season’s big bad ties into past events on the show. It’s very nice to have Bowlby and Gomez pals again, though. They’re excellent together.
The final dynamic duo is Joivan Wade and Elijah R. Reed. We got to see a kid version of Wade show up at Reed’s door last episode, but we missed the (occasionally mentioned) baby version, whose diapers Reed had to change.
It’s a solid friendship arc, even as it backtracks over Reed’s previous appearance when he told Wade it was too late for them to save the friendship. Given Wade’s continued reluctance to talk to anyone about getting rid of his superpowers and Reed just being a regular guy, their scenes end up making Reed the protagonist. It works out, but if there’s anyone the show doesn’t seem to know what to do with this season, it’s Wade.
Doesn’t he have an ex-girlfriend turned terrorist out there still?
Anyway, another excellent episode. It’s the mid-season finale, so it’ll be a while for the cliffhangers to resolve, but the show manages to get most of the team together for the last scene.
Some outstanding music from Kevin Kiner and Clint Mansell, particularly during Fraser’s second epiphany scene. Fraser (and Shanahan), as usual, do fantastic work.
It’s going to be a long wait for next episode.
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War Story: Johann’s Tiger (2001)
I was a little curious whether writer Garth Ennis was going to be able to get away withJohann’s Tiger in 2023. The comic came out twenty years ago when Nazis and Nazi sympathizers weren’t (openly) part of the public discourse. Tiger is one of those “German army” stories, though. They’re not Nazis; they don’t like the Nazis; they’re just trying to survive with war and preserve the lives they can. Well, the lives on the same side, but still. They feel bad about the rest, but it’s war, after all.It’s a tank story. Ennis would go on to more tank stories, but he very quickly gets to the heart of what makes a tank story so singular. It’s a group of guys living inside “burning coal.” Tiger’s cast is also different because they’re trying to escape the war, heading west hoping to find the Americans. They want to surrender and be done with it. Germany has lost, the Russians aren’t so much kicking ass as grinding it, and the commander—Johann—doesn’t want his men to die for Hitler’s war of aggression.
Johann narrates the comic. At times, I wondered what it sounded like in its native German, then realized Ennis wrote it in English. It’d be interesting to hear in German. He’s trapped with his memories of the war and his profound (and profoundly justified) self-loathing. See, Johann wasn’t ever a gung-ho Nazi; he was just utterly indifferent to the suffering they and he caused. Until all of a sudden, he wasn’t, and it’s breaking him, page after page. Getting his men to safety is all he can do to alleviate the damage. It’s not about amends; it’s about saving instead of killing.
At the same time, he’s an experienced tank commander and sees the world through those eyes, which Ennis does a phenomenal job with in the dialogue and narration.
There are several excellent battle scenes, which artists Chris Weston and Gary Erskine visualize superbly. Weston’s layouts remind of more lionizing war comics, but he and Erskine’s details are all the horrors.
It’s an excellent book.
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Ginseng Roots (2019) #10
It’s been a while since I’ve read Ginseng Roots and even longer since I’ve read the first few issues of Ginseng Roots, but I’m pretty sure when creator Craig Thompson brings up Roots’s generative problems, it’s for the first time. In issue ten of twelve, he reveals after spending months trying to turn his research into a comic, he was left without any drawn pages and ready to get into animation.A very amusing Hollywood meeting cures him of that ambition.
Now, Thompson had established a creative malaise and trying to get out of it with this new project… but I don’t think he’d mentioned problems realizing it once he’d done the legwork.
The issue opens with Thompson and his siblings hanging out with their parents before leaving small town, ginseng farming Wisconsin, while the parents talk about death. The way Thompson visualizes it—with he and his siblings passive observers on the sofa while the parents sit in their regular chairs and discuss death for the nth time—is devastating.
Thompson has a chance for a eureka moment with the parents, something he’ll only have much later and even further away. It turns out Thompson’s work is big in South Korea, and his publisher there would love to bring him over. He calls up little brother Phil, who started the issue with him visiting the parents, and invites him to come along; it’ll be a chance for them to reconnect.
The comic then becomes this whirlwind of South Korean ginseng industry information, framed through Thompson first casually, then explicitly. The local news is willing to fund his research in exchange for filmed footage, as they’re making a ginseng documentary. So these two American ginseng farmer’s sons, familiar with ginseng as a food product, not a cultural item, all of a sudden immersed.
In some ways, the issue’s very controlled. It’s mostly a travelogue. Not much visual digression, except when he gets food poisoning and the series mascot has a bout on the toilet. Otherwise, it’s all very tight. Even when Thompson lets brother Phil render his experiences a couple times in the issue’s last few pages.
It’s a great device. Half the panel is Craig Thompson, the other half Phil, art, writing, and, most importantly, perspective.
The issue doesn’t have the highest gee whiz rating the series has ever reached, but it’s an exceptional comic. Especially given how little time is left, Thompson—the protagonist—has to make something of his experience.
There’s some beautiful travelogue art of South Korea. Thompson ably toggles between almost comedic people and then hyper-realistic settings.
Roots is such a good book.
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Giant-Size Werewolf (1974) #3
Giant-Size Werewolf #3 might be artist Don Perlin’s best… oh, wait. He just penciled. Sal Trapani inked. Perlin was penciling and inking over in regular Werewolf by Night at this point. Okay, never mind. I mean, it’s okay art—especially for Perlin—but it’s nowhere near as impressive with someone else helping out. Especially since my biggest compliment was Perlin doing a nod to Mike Ploog’s Topaz every sixth panel. The other five panels aren’t good (people’s noses change shape, or their eyes move up and down on their heads between panels in the same scene). But there seems to be an attempt at a Ploog nod.Maybe it’s coincidence.
But Perlin does better with the Eastern European Universal Monsters village setting than he ever does in L.A.
The Werewolf story is thirty pages, the bulk of the issue but not considerably longer than the reprint backups (four, five-page stories). The feature comes with the caveat the first chapter is a red herring to fill pages. Jack, as the werewolf, goes back to his family castle off the coast of Monterey. Writer Doug Moench goes overboard with his adjectives and adverbs here, including variations of Monterey. It’s a lot.
He (Jack) thinks Topaz is being held prisoner there; only once he completes the level, he finds out—rather anti-climatically—she’s actually being held in another castle. His family’s summer villa back in Transylvania. After a brief chat with step-father and uncle (I just realized Werewolf is Hamlet with a happier family situation), Jack and seventeen-year-old sister Lissa are off to the old country to find Topaz. Lissa wants to go because it might have to do with the Darkhold, and she’s been about to turn eighteen for three years and over two dozen comics. It could happen anytime. Birthdays are weird in the Marvel Universe.
They get to the airport and run into Jack’s best friend, forty-something Buck Cowan, who the comic goes out of its way to imply is way too touchy-feely with Lissa.
In Transylvania, they discover the villagers are angry at a traveling band of Romani people. The band is hanging out at Jack’s family castle; only when he gets there, they’re not. Worse, Topaz is being held somewhere else again! Only this time, Jack’s going to werewolf-out to rescue her.
The story’s got some twists and turns and silly werewolf fights, but Perlin and Trapani aren’t bad when the action’s in long shot. And even though Moench’s obnoxious writing of Jack’s inexplicable narration (past tense describing things Jack doesn’t remember), the actual dialogue’s okay. It’s nice to have Topaz back, all things considered.
It’s a much better Giant-Size Werewolf than I was expecting. Not good, but not a waste either.
The backups are similar in quality. They’re all early fifties Atlas reprints, mostly without writer credit.
George Roussos has art chores in the first story about a creeping, killer mist. It turns out to be an inter-dimensional thing, kind of like Lovecraft. It’s decent throughout, but the finish is blah.
The second story’s much better, though, with a similarly blah finish. Written by Carl Wessler, with art by Pete Tumlinson, it’s about a suicidal eighty-year-old who discovers a magic spot in the river. It doesn’t drown you; it sends you back in time. He keeps going back, getting richer and richer (thirty-five years before Back to the Future Part II revived the trope), only there are bad guys after him. With a better ending, it would’ve been something.
Still, engaging.
Then there’s an all-horror killer rat story; art by Manny Stallman. A random guy happens upon a man talking to rats, and the rats understand him. The rat-keeper is planning on having the rats kill the guy until the guy mentions a rich uncle. It’s fine. Cute rats.
The last story has inks by Abe Simon and pencils by none other than Don Perlin, twenty years before he did the feature. The guys at a newspaper send a female reporter out to cover a strangler case, even though it makes her a target, and she doesn’t want to go. Once she arrives in the town, she immediately finds herself trapped by the stranger. Or does she?
It’s okay. The reveal’s logic is fine; it’s just too rushed.
All in all, a solid Giant-Size. Well worth the four bits.
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