The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1942: The Age of the Sentry #3, January 2009

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Today's featured creator, Colleen Coover, won my heart with her amazing, amazing girlie porno series Small Favors. As I was looking for comics to read to celebrate my LGBTQ+ family, I was delighted to come upon her name and this excellent faux-history romp with the Sentry.

For a moment when I was reading the second story, illustrated by Ms. Coover and written by her partner Paul Tobin, I was a little mystified as to why the story was so, so straight. On the one hand, it's definitely because it's a mainstream superhero comic from about 10 years ago, when they weren't quite ready to have so much queerness on display. But then I also thought about the fact that Ms. Coover, according to her wiki, identifies as Bisexual. We're a mysterious breed, we bis, sometimes accused of greed, sometimes of not existing at all. But we exist, and persist, and as a bisexual creator, Ms. Coover is going to create some art that, sometimes, doesn't look very queer at all. I think in these cases, we have to read a little more deeply into both art and words, to see if there is a different inflection to the heterosexual stories that are told by bisexual creators. How do we identify them as bisexual stories?

And, really, do we need to?

More to follow. 

Further Reading and Related Posts

I've got a couple of other posts about Ms. Coover's work here.

And there's some other stuff about The Sentry here.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Weekly Graphic Novel: Week 59 - Dave Stewart's Walk In, July 2007

Before I begin to talk about this story, I want to offer a nod to the ostensible creator of the series: David A. Stewart. He's well-known as one half of the 80s pop giants Eurhythmics, and continues to be a driving force in music to this day. After his split with Annie Lennox in the very late 80s, Stewart created a rock group called Dave Stewart and the Spiritual Cowboys. They released 2 albums and number of singles over the next 2 years, and then split. Their debut eponymous album is, by far, my favourite album of all time. I have been listening to it on a regular basis since first buying it 27 years ago. So when I discovered that Mr. Stewart had made a foray into comics (and, it should be noted, there is a well-known Dave Stewart in comics already, the colorist of such stellar series as Hellboy and DC: The New Frontier), I was overjoyed. It took a while to find the brief run of Walk In. I have most of the individual issues, but was fortunate enough to come across a trade collection not long ago.

Walk In is quite strange. The first trade reads very much like a first trade, introducing the primary characters (Ian Doremouse and his stripper sidekicks), the setting (Moscow), and the situation (strange psychic phenomena). And once we get to the end of the book, our heroes are trekking across the Russian wilderness in an effort to defeat the extra-dimensional enemies they've discovered.

And that's where the story ends. There are times when this isn't really a problem. The end of Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo's Enigma is a perfect example. The characters, having bonded, walk off-panel, and into a new story. We might want to follow that new story, but we have to be okay with the story we've just read having ended. Walk In doesn't do this. It seems to end right at the beginning of the story proper, like what we've just read is the introductory arc. I suppose that that arc in and of itself is telling an interesting story, but I think it leaves us with more questions than a short piece should. A talking bear shows up in the last chapter, and, unless I missed it somehow, I have no idea why. It feels like, even if this wasn't going to be an ongoing series, there was definitely going to be a follow-up eventually. I'll keep waiting.

All this said, Walk In is a mostly-satisfying read. It's weird, it's funny, and it has a couple of relatively profound things to say. And, if the intro is to be believed, it's based on sort of true stories of one of my favourite musicians when he was a young up and comer.

Onward!