The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 870: Gremlin Trouble #21, 2000

The last issue in the collection of Gremlin Trouble stars surprisingly few gremlins. This issue focusses more on the human characters allied with the gremlins - a group of highly trained scientists who are also an "idol singing group" (I have no idea what that means). Apparently the goblins who represent the dark forces are susceptible to melodic music. And nuclear weapons.

Have I mentioned what a strange, strange comic this is? And the comparison to Bakshi's Wizards just gets stronger and stronger. I'm not going to lie: I'm going to be keeping an eye out for this one. I'd love to know how things got to where they are in the nine.

But, as often happens in this project, there's an excellent chance this is all I'll ever read of Gremlin Trouble. I've enjoyed it more than I thought I would. A lot of the series I pull out to read are kind of obscure and I read them mainly because they're there, and the point of the project is to read EVERYTHING!!! But it's nice when the series is actually entertaining. And this was that.

Some ideas for what to read tomorrow, but you'll have to wait until then to find out. To be continued!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 869: Gremlin Trouble #20, 1999

Coming to the end of my run of Gremlin Trouble, just as things appear to be heating up for a final confrontation between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. I assume it's the final confrontation, anyway, as there are only ten issues left in the series. I have no idea if the story was finished in a satisfactory manner, or if it suffered the fate of many indie comics and simply could not continue. In the event that I'm unlikely to find the rest of the series, I'm going to assume it ends in a nice, neat way.

One problem I'm having with the series, a problem that is directly a result of only reading issues in the last portion of the series, is keeping all the different factions straight. There's Gremlins, Goblins, Pixies, Tuberians, Nimrods, Humans, Fairies...I think that's it. And I'm not sure who is allied with whom. I think it's a case of all of them being slightly at odds with each other, but having the common enemy of the "Dark Forces" that, one imagines, will bind everyone together. That's usually how these things go.

I'm not sure I've mentioned it, but there's a wonderful humorousness to the comic that is always prevalent, even in dire situations. Today's comic has two great examples, both in the character of Pentangle. The first instance is an entry in her diary, which outlines the very serious mission that the group is undertaking, and then goes on to note the amazing shampoo she tried the day before, which left her hair looking "even more silky and gorgeous than before." The second instance, also hair-related, is during a duel that Pentangle is sure she's going to lose until her opponent accidentally slices off a lock of hair, at which point the Gremlin princess loses her shit and goes full berserker. It's a tough line to walk, keeping the humour level up even in serious situations. Many stories will have humorous moments and serious moments, and the two are kept separate for dramatic effect. But the "action-comedy" genre in which Gremlin Trouble exists leaves the possibility (and, indeed, probability) of humour in all situations. It sets a nice tone for the book.

Last issue I have tomorrow. To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 868: Gremlin Trouble #19, 1999

I hope you'll forgive this, but my wrists are both quite sore today, so I won't be saying much. Today's comic puts the small people back in touch with the human world. I'm starting to be more and more intrigued by the setting. It's starting to feel like a manga version of Ralph Bakshi's Wizards in some ways.

Art's still a bit fan-service-y, but there's an aspect to it that is slightly ironic - like it's aware of exactly what it's doing, and is celebrating in its ridiculousness. Not unlike the best superhero comics do, really.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 867: Gremlin Trouble #18, 1999

Totally forgot yesterday that I'd said I'd read my run of Gremlin Trouble this week. So, with a slight detour into Calgarian comicdom, here it is. I may have mentioned this in the previous post, but we're totally in media res here, experiencing the final phase of a huge war that, I think, happened in the issues just before what I have. Which is no big deal, because the last four of so pages of this issue are devoted to a complete recap of the last 17 issues. Super helpful, and kind of makes me want to see if I can track them down. There's a sci-fi element to this series that I hadn't realized until this issue, both in the narrative proper and in the recap. It's easy to pigeonhole comics based on surface reading. A comic with a superpowered protagonist is a superhero comic. A comic with fairies and gremlins as protagonists is a fantasy comic. But if there's one thing I've come to realize over the course of my education (which, just in the interest of transparency, I quit last week), it's that genre is a much more malleable construct than that. Batman is a superhero, and his comics are superhero comics, but they're also detective comics, tragic comics, occasionally science fiction, occasionally fantasy. And just so, Gremlin Trouble is both fantasy and science fiction, comedy and action. Is it time to start moving beyond genre, perhaps? It's a useful tool to generally classify a work, but very often a work, if it is determined to "belong" to one genre, is relegated to that genre. And this relegation can mean that it is not considered as contributing anything to genres outside of the one it belongs to. Cormac
McCarthy's The Road is science fiction, even though we may classify it as literary fiction (a genre in and of itself). Spenser's The Faerie Queene is part of the fantasy genre, even though we relegate it to the genre of Early Modern poetry. Recognizing that genre is fluid (funny how genre and gender sound so alike) is, I think, an important way to start talking about the important impact of some comics. It's one of the things I ran up against in my academic career, the idea that just because a work is part of the superhero genre, it is relegated to only being about that, and therefore not worth talking about in any other context.

I didn't mention anything about the art in Gremlin Trouble last time, but it's quite excellent. Though, as the cover up there demonstrates, there's a reliance on objectifying female anatomy, it's not something that tends to impinge upon the story itself. More like what we might call fan service in a manga or anime. That aside, the art gives the story a feel of being action-driven. The characters are always in motion of some sort. It's a fundamental of comics art, the idea that the pictures should never really look static, but it's not always something that comics achieve. Gremlin Trouble manages it quite nicely.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 865: Gremlin Trouble #17, 1999

If I'm to be completely honest, I have no idea where or when I got this comic. I'm thinking it must hearken back to the days of the Magic Mirror. Every now and again, Diamond Distributors would send out an email listing stuff that they were selling off cheap. There were lots of indie comics, some statues, action figures, that kind of thing. So I think I must have ordered this to fill out my back issues before I'd acquired a couple of collections with which to do so. Today is certainly the first time I've read an issue.

So, yes, that's a fairy with daisies covering her delicate bits on the cover. Which actually has very little to do with what goes on in the issue itself. This character (Princess Tantium of Mollymuck) is actually, purely in the context of today's issue, a secondary character. But, hey, who can resist having a sexy lady on the cover of a comic in order to grab attention?

(The answer is lots of people, but let's not hold that against the creators of this comic.)

The story itself is thoroughly intriguing, even though I'm coming in well into the series. Though the art is cute and certainly manga-styled, the story itself comes off as a Tolkien-esque fantasy. We're seeing, in this issue, the aftermath of a large battle between the fairies and the gremlins (referred to by the fairies as "goblins"), and the attempt by two of the gremlins to retrieve their lost comrades from the castle of the fairies. I get the suspicion that the story, though utilizing quite a bit of humour, is actually a pretty serious piece, though we'll have to wait and see if this is born out by the following issues. I only have a few of them, but they'll be on the docket for the next few days.

To be continued.