The Giant Box of Comics Book Report: All My Friends are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufmann, 2003, Coach House Books

There were three reasons that I knew I had to read this book when I first came across it. One, the bulk of the action takes place in Toronto (and on a plane flying to Vancouver), so it was very familiar to me, in the same way that Scott Pilgrim was. Two, the main character's name is Tom. And all of his friends are superheroes. This hits pretty close to home. And three, Tom's love interest is a superhero named The Perfectionist, who simply makes things perfect with her mind. And if that's not a description of my wife, I don't know what is.

There's a lot of anguish in this book, and lot of sadness. I was concerned that it would be a tough read. But it's actually a really beautiful love story, and I let out a little gasp of happiness when I read the last sentence and put the book down. In a time when superheroes are everywhere, it's nice to see something like this book that takes them and makes them blatantly the metaphors that they actually are, and still manages to tell a lovely story. The superheroes in this book are superheroes only in that their identities are wrapped up in a single aspect of their personalities or bodies. The Perfectionist. The Amphibian. Hypno. The Dancer. There's a couple of things I think we have to take from this. First, all of us are good at something. All of us have some ability that we take pride in. I think I'd have to be called The Rememberer. I can remember ridiculous details of events, books, shows, whatever. It's a pretty useless power most of the time, but sometimes it's the most important power. That's what these characters are. On the other hand, it could also be a critique of the way that we tend to essentialize people, in that we define them by a single quality and ignore all others.

But I don't want to critique the book right now. I loved it, and it made me happy, and I would gladly read a comic about Mr. Kaufman's heroes, and their friend Tom.

The Giant Box of Comics Book Report: The Fantastic Four in The House of Horrors, Western Publishing, 1968

Let's dive back into the past, a mere 7 years since the fateful rocket ride that turned these unlikely (and, in some cases, totally unqualified) astronauts into the Fantastic Four. The Big Little Books are, to be fair, not very good. These are simple stories, never, I think, intended for an adult audience.

That said, some of the art is actually quite nice.

The format of the book is one page of text, one page of art, illustrating something that has happened on the preceding page. This puts the Big Little Books far more in the realm of the picture book than the comic. It's one of the fundamental ways of differentiating the picture book from the comic book - in the picture book, the picture illustrates a moment, rather than adding to the narrative in the way that the art complements the text in a comic book. Some picture books straddle this border, but then so do some comics. Is Martin Vaughn-James' The Cage a comic, or a very weird picture book?

I honestly find discussions like that pretty boring. I include this book in my comic collection, as it is a publication whose existence hinges fundamentally on a comic book.

Again, unfortunately, that doesn't mean it's very good. The art has a Jack Kirby quality to it, but it's not Kirby. I found, somewhere on the web, the suggestion that it was Gene Colan doing a Kirby style. But try as I might I can't find that article anymore. If I do, I'll pop a link in here somewhere.

Our story is literally the team following a villain, at what seems like a very slow pace, around a house filled with rooms that are only traps - nothing else, no kitchens or bedrooms. Just death trap rooms. And Dr. Weird is using these traps to try to convince the team to work with him? Every few chapters, he confronts them, asks them to join him, and when they refuse drifts off as a cloud of smoke. Then the FF face some more death traps, and then he asks them again. It was a bit difficult to get through.

So I suppose my recommendation would be that if you love the Fantastic Four, maybe you should check it out, at least for the art, but the story will only make you feel embarrassed for our usually much more competent quartet.

The Giant Box of Comics Book Report: The Three Questions by Jon J. Muth, 2002, Scholastic Press

Though not strictly a comics-related story, the book, by the inimitable Mr. Muth, links by virtue of this amazing artist. If you've never read a comic illustrated by Muth, you're missing out.

The book beautifully adapts Leo Tolstoy's original story, bringing it, as Muth himself notes, to a younger audience. And it is an important story to bring to this demographic. The story, both Tolstoy's and Muth's, revolves around three questions asked by the main characters: When is the best time to do things?; Who is the most important one?; What is the right thing to do?

Young Nikolai asks these questions of his animal friends, before heading off to see the wise old turtle Leo, and becoming embroiled in a situation that finally provides the answers he's sought. It's gentle, beautiful, and very quick to read. But it's not so quick to leave the mind. As with most Zen stories, the tale invited contemplation, and application, in one's own life.

As far as the art goes, it's goddamn ridiculously beautiful. It's Jon J. Muth, for crying out loud. His Mythology of an Abandoned City is easily one of my favourite comics I've read. The book is every bit as rewarding as a piece of visual art as it is a story. Indeed, Muth's background in comics does rear it's head somewhat, in that the pictures we see are not simply illustrations of the words on the page. For example, when the dog, Pushkin, says that the right thing to do is "fighting," the picture shows him leaping up a tree and barking at Gogol the monkey. It's this narrative mixture of visual and verbal that makes comics, and that makes this storybook more graphic novel than picture book.

The Giant Box of Comics Book Report: Superfolks by Robert Mayer, 1977, Dial Press

I've a large number of comics-related novels and books on my shelves, so I've decided that 2019 will be the year that I actually read them. Let's start at the beginning:

"It was morning in Moscow. Even the sun was gray."

Robert Mayer's seminal superhero novel Superfolks is full of these kinds of lines, almost throwaways in the background of the story of a retired superhero facing one last challenge.

There's a lot of rhetoric around the book, from outright accusations of theft (see Grant Morrison's take on Alan Moore's work from this perspective, or Mayer's own thoughts on The Incredibles), to claims of influence of Biblical proportion, to the author's own thoughts that the book really was meant to be funny, not paradigm-shifting.

But I don't want to talk about that stuff. Yes, of course, I see in this story influences on so many of the superhero stories I love. Honestly, the plot is actually pretty much what Moore uses in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, so much so that it's hard to take his protestations seriously. However, I find this to be a similar situation as that faced by the aforementioned Mr. Morrison in the wake of the release of The Matrix, a film that really does seem to be telling Morrison's The Invisibles, in part and in different order. After the initial anger, Mr. Morrison noted that this kind of radiation of influence is really exactly what should happen with art. We're so much concerned with ownership and credit that we often forget that one of the major purposes of art is to be built upon.

Many have built upon Superfolks.

It is, most assuredly, a funny book. The inclusion of so many figures from American popular culture as side and background characters, makes sure that we never mistake this world we're reading about for the one we inhabit. This is an iconic, albeit decidedly ironic, superhero universe. There is a physical edge to the universe (a la the Source Wall), superpowers are acknowledged, if not common in the setting (a la Watchmen), and the hero is, for all intents and purposed, Superman.

But was it a good book? Well, yes, absolutely, obviously. It's definitely a niche read. I'm considering giving a copy to a non-superhero, non-comic-reading friend, just to see if it has crossover appeal. For fans of the genre it is a treat, though, given the year it was published, it's commenting on much older superhero stories than what we read now. That's the whole point, right? Superfolks created in so many ways the cast of the genre over the last 40 years or so by commenting on the 40 year prior. We all credit Watchmen with being the pinnacle of this kind of deconstructive reading, but Mayer beat Moore to the punch almost a decade earlier. The problem is that this is, 100%, not the kind of story that could have been published in comics at the time. There's often, I've found, a bit of hesitance on the part of comics readers and scholars to attribute too much influence to comics from outside of the medium. We'd rather talk about how current comics were influenced by the Modernist ideas of Krazy Kat than T.S.Eliot (whose Prufrock is liberally deployed as commentary on the existential crisis of main character David Brinkley). It's not an overstatement, though, to suggest that without this novel, we, quite literally, would not have the comics that we have now. I suppose, based on one's sense of taste, that's either a good thing or a bad thing. For me, I'm thankful, though I kind of wish the Grim'n'Gritty(TM) comics of the 80s had had a bit of the sense of humour that Mr. Mayer's novel does. It might have made Dark Knight, or Watchmen, a bit more palatable is they weren't taking themselves soooo seriously the whole time.

Definitely highly recommended. If you're a long time comics reader, or have immersed yourself in an almost unhealthy fashion in the hobby, there are so many rewarding moments in this book. I can find very little information on Mayer himself, though he notes that this was written from the memory of his childhood reading comics. This explains Plastic Man/Stretch O'Toole's primary role in the story, as well as the prominent superheroes featured in the "cameos" throughout the book.

It's also a notable piece because I think it must be one of the first novelistic takes on the superhero that was not simply an attempt to adapt the comics form to the written page. Which, I don't have to tell you, never works.