GRAPHIC NOVEL and TRADE PAPERBACK (TPB) REVIEWS

Blood & Roses Adventures 1995 (SC TPB) 160 pages

Writen by Bob Hickey, Joe Martin, Jerry Smith. Pencils by Brad Gorby, Gene Gonzales. Inks by Bob Hickey, Jerry Foley.
Black and White. Letters: Chris Riley, Steve Stegelin. Editor: Joe Martin.

Reprinting: Blood & Roses: Future Past Tense #1-2, Blood & Roses: Search for the Time-Stones #1-2

Additional notes: behind-the-scenes sketches, promotional art work, pin- ups, etc.

Suggested mildly for Mature Readers

Rating: * (out of 5)

Number of readings: 1

Published by Knight Press; characters copyright Skyverse

Sometimes I like to take a risk and pick up a book that I know absolutely nothing about, that I can dive into without any preconceptions or expectations. Sometimes the result is a hidden gem, sometimes the result isn't. Unfortunately, this leans toward the latter.

Blood and Roses Adventures collects two mini-series about two butt-kicking babes who act as agents for a kind of Time police agency that sends them through time, trying to retrieve shards of a shattered time crystal. Tamara Rose is a cop from our future, Christina Blood is from the 11th Century or so, who bristled under the restrictions placed on women in her time (she wanted to fight in the Crusades).

It's not that writer-creator Bob Hickey, his collaborators, or artists Brad Gorby and Gene Gonzales, are without talent, but they do seem a tad un-ripened at times.

The plotting seems a bit slapdash. Given that these were, I believe, the characters' inaugural stories, they're kind of hard to follow, or get much of a grip on -- you'd swear the series already had a few issues under its belt (which may've been the point). Hickey's so busy trying to drag his heroines from one action scene to another, the plot seems secondary. Logic -- even coherence -- is often weak. Despite having comprised two mini-series, each of the four issues has its own plot and adversary -- though a cliff-hanger connects each #1 with its appropriate #2. In the story that, perhaps, most threatens to gel into an actual plot, Blood and Rose find themselves in King Arthur's Camelot...but even here the plot seems just shoe horned in willy-nilly. Looking for a time shard, they instantly assume that Merlin has it (why?), so they go to Camelot...and instantly try to sign up for the tournament (but shouldn't they look for the shard?)...but -- ah hah -- it turns out the shard is ooffered as the prize. But they didn't know that when they signed up! And the resolution...well, it seems more like the writers just ran out of pages, so they hastily wrapped it up without any regard for proper dramatic development.

There's a light-hearted tone to the series, with jokey banter between the leads, but Blood and Rose are hard to distinguish, despite their different historical origins. And they're of the bland, hyper-macho, out-male-the-males type that is kind of dull, and even unlikeable (the characters seem to enjoy fighting for the sake of fighting). TV's Xena and sidekick Gabrielle made an interesting pair...not so these. Sometimes Blood is given to old fashion speaking patterns...and sometimes she isn't. Likewise, the characters in Camelot switch back and forth.

Wouldn't you think if you were going to create such characters, and such a series, it would reflect a personal interest? But one gets very little sense that the writers have any interest in, or even knowledge of, history -- given that the only historical period depicted with any detail is Camelot...a largely fictional era that they presumably based more on B-movies they'd seen than historical texts they'd read. The rest of the action takes place in (ill- defined) futures or pre-history.

As noted, the art is decent enough for an independent comic, with both Gorby (who draws the first mini-series) and Gonzales (who draws the second) not without skill. Though Gorby's work is a little too busy and cluttered, confusing in black and white (it might take better to colour) while Gonzales' is a little too minimalist, with lots of blank backgrounds. Gorby goes whole-heartedly for the cheesecake with the heroines decidedly pneumatic, while Gonzales is much more restrained (which seems odd given that one suspects the marketing of the series was based on the idea of nubile heroines). Though, despite a mild mature readers caution, there's nothing particularly salacious here -- both girls keep their clothes on, and don't even appear in anything particularly skimpy.

There's a real sense this was being written on the fly, with the creators hoping things would come to them as they went (kind of like how I wrote as a kid). Cryptic sub-plots are threaded through these issues that go unresolved, but with little sense of where they're ultimately headed, or why, or even if.

Since this collection devotes more than a third of its pages to reproducing sketches and promotional art (from cards and posters) one kind of wonders what the real intent was. Was Hickey trying to create a comic book, and spinning it off into trading cards and posters was just a sideline, or was his real goal simply to market still art and trading cards, but needed a comicbook property to base them on? Frankly, I could easily believe the latter theory, the characterization and the plotting seem so vague.

Cover price: $17.50 CDN./ $12.95 USA 

Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards 2005 (SC GN) 166 pages

Written by Jim Ottaviani. Illustrated by Big Time Attic (a.k.a. Zander Cannon, Kevin Cannon, Shad Petosky)
black and white

Rating: * * * * (out of 5)

Number of readings: 1

Additional notes: published in oblong format

Published by GT-Labs (General Tektronics Labs)

Comics are generally associated with super heroes -- of course -- as well as personal, autobiographical independent comics, plus occasional sci-fi, noire, etc. But a less common genre is the docudrama or the comic book equivalent of the bio-pic. It's not unheard of -- Chester Brown's Louis Riel, Ho Che Anderson's King -- but it's hardly common place.

Bone Sharps (subtitled "A Tale of Edward Drinker Cope, Othniel Charles Marsh and the Gilded Age of Palaeontology") chronicles the early days of fossil hunting in America, focusing inparticular on the bitter rivalry between Edward Cope and O.C. Marsh. It was the days after the notion of dinosaurs and fossils had become accepted (it might almost be interesting for someone to do a story about the very earliest days of the profession, when people first started speculating about the bizarre possibility of pre-historic dragons) but before cooler, more disciplined heads prevailed. Too some extent, for people like Cope and Marsh, fossil collecting (at least as depicted here) seemed to border on being an obsessive mania, where the acquisition was all. This was hardly restricted simply to palaeontologists -- in the 19th Century, archaeologists were so keen to dig up whatever they could that the claim is modern museums still have basements full of uncatalogued artifacts.

Anyway, despite actually sharing similar theories, Cope and Marsh were bitter rivals and, at least here, with Marsh emerging as more blatantly the villain of the piece. Cope was difficult and arrogant but a "warm human being and a likeable rascal" as one character remarks. A man who essentially drove himself to death with his fossil hunting. But Marsh, more an armchair fossil hunter, underhandedly sabotaged Cope's work and stole the fruits of his efforts. (Yet Marsh also acted as an advocate for some Native people, suggesting he wasn't entirely without his virtues). Other historical figures who were part of this world flitter in and out -- P.T. Barnum, for example. With perhaps the level-headed "anchor" character being Charles Knight, the artist whose illustrations helped to popularize dinosaurs -- though Knight, too, appears only sporadically through the story.

The result is, generally, an intriguing, entertaining work. Nicely, and subtly written, as well as appealingly illustrated. In my review of Louis Riel, I suggest it would be interesting to see a less stylized art style applied to a non-fiction comic. The artistic collective, Big Time Attic, still has a cartoony style, but it's a more expressive, realist cartoony style -- reminiscent of maybe Dave Sims, or even Will Eisner. Not with the same compositional flare, perhaps, but nonetheless, the scenes are told well and with clarity.

Bone Sharps is a bit of a sprawling effort, covering a lot of ground and characters. Had this been a movie, it perhaps would've demanded a little more, um, constructive recreation -- dropping or amalgamating characters, and crafting a better arc to the material, building to a dramatic denouement. As it is, the creators take some liberties with the material, but generally stick to the facts. Yet by telling the tale in this narrative way, it perhaps brings a drama and humanity and, well, entertainment aspect to it that a straight, non-fiction book wouldn't have. So while losing strengths of a straight text book or a straight Hollywood-ized movie, it finds a strength in its own middle way approach -- kind of what comics should be.

What's also intriguing is that, like with Brown's Louis Riel, the authors feature footnotes at the back, pointing out where they took liberties with the material (and sometimes, the liberties are pretty minor and easily justified). It actually makes it harder to criticize those liberties because, at least, they're being up front about it (unlike a movie where the myth is left to stand as though it's fact).

Cover price: $22.95 USA

The Books of Magic 1993 (SC TPB) 200 pages

Written by Neil Gaiman. Illustrated and painted by John Bolton, Scott Hampton, Charles Vess, Paul Johnson.
Letters: Todd Klein. Editor: Karen Berger.

Reprinting: The original, four issue Books of Magic prestige format mini-series (1990-1991)

Additional notes: intro by SF novelist Roger Zelazny

Rating: * * (out of 5)

Number of readings: 1

Mildly suggested for mature readers

Published by Vertigo/DC Comics

A young English lad, Tim Hunter, is visited by four supernatural agents: The Phantom Stranger, John Constantine (of Hellblazer comics), Dr. Occult, and the more obscure Mr. E. He is told that he has the potential to be a great wizard -- for good or ill -- and is taken by each of them in turn on an odyssey to learn about the world of magic and the supernatural, to see if he wishes to become part of that world.

There's an interesting side thought in regards to Tim's similarity to another boy wizard...but more on that in a bit.

This original mini-series was evidently successful enough that it spawned a subsequent monthly series -- a series which, itself, has been collected in a series of TPB volumes. While in his introduction, author Roger Zelazny holds it up against the myth templates laid out by scholar Joseph Campbell in Hero with a Thousand Faces (Campbell having won devotees among sci-fi fans for his assertion that Star Wars wasn't just pop corn entertainment, but modern mythology). Zelazny goes on to refer to the "depth" of this story and how it is "rich and resonant". I mention all this just to present one point of view. Because there's another. Which is, it's also a touch dull.

One can't shake the feeling that Neil Gaiman read Arkham Asylum (also by a writer from across the pond)...and actually liked it. Just as Arkham Asylum was a fully painted book, in which Batman wanders aimlessly through an asylum, stopping to have conversations with crazy people (who are familiar Batman villains) before moving on, so in The Books of Magic, Tim wanders through time and space, stopping to have conversations with magical people (many familiar DC Comics' characters), before moving on. To me that doesn't really seem like a plot, per se. Nor is there a great deal of character development, in that Tim doesn't really seem like a different person by the end than he was at the beginning. Given that the story begins with the supernatural "trench coat brigade" debating what to do about Tim, how he could grow into a force for good or evil, the reader has no greater sense of which way he might lean by the end. Tim is personable enough, and there are characters with personality in the story, particularly the roguish John Constantine who guides Tim in chapter two, providing a lot of humour. But there's little character development.

In the second chapter -- the chapters are semi-self-contained -- there's a thread of people trying to kill Tim, but it never really gels into a plot, either, and is just used to break up the talky scenes.

Overall, the third chapter is the best. Here Tim and Doctor Occult wander through the realm of fairy. Sure, it's still largely aimless, but at least Gaiman breaks away from the talking head format, where Tim listens to not very insightful monologues by not very interesting people. Here things actually happen, there's some adventure and running about, a greater sense that we're getting the bones of a story, rather than just a dissertation masquerading as a narrative.

Obviously, if you can lose yourself in the writing and the art, perhaps one can become enamoured of it all, or find the little snippets of conversations, or tossed out ideas, provocative. Such as Tim, briefly, encountering DC's resident debunker, Dr. Thirteen, who assures Tim there's no such thing as magic, and John, in a sense, concurs, by explaining it's all in one's perspective. But I'd much rather see such ideas explored -- even demonstrated -- in a story, withh plot twists, and character development, rather than just stated boldly, and lazily, without context.

Even then, the ideas tend not to be particularly concrete, or provocative. For all that there is "good" and "evil" magic, Gaiman doesn't really get into defining what is good and what is evil.

Tim's journey takes him to the very end of time and though I've enjoyed the eerie, ineffable nature of such sequences in other stories (H.G. Wells' The Time Machine for one), stacked on top of a story that was largely non-existent, it just seemed one more dry, talking head episode, rather than anything to blow your mind. Though it maybe crystallized what I should've recognized earlier (and in Arkham Asylum as well) and that is an Alice in Wonderland flavour to it all (Alice also being about a character wandering aimlessly, having curious conversations).

I guess I just don't "get" the idea of reading a story about a character passively standing around, observing things. Uh, isn't that the reader's job? What's next? TV series about people watching TV? A protagonist should be a little more involved -- hence my greater enjoyment of chapter three.

Each chapter is tackled by a different artist and the painted art, as it so often is, is a mixed bag. It lends the thing a certain weight, a sense that "this isn't just a comic book". But I also wouldn't exactly call this great art -- it's O.K., to be sure. But in the sense of whether faces convey nuances, or even whether it's always clear what's going on, there are weaknesses. The underlying drawing can be uneven (despite the fact that I've loved some of Bolton's other stuff). The final issue, by Johnson, can be particularly hard to make out what you're looking at at times.

In a sense, for all the pretension, this seems very much aimed at hard-core DC Comics fans. As noted, many of the characters Tim encounters are familiar DC Comics characters -- like in Arkham Asylum, sometimes tweaked slightly from their conventional interpretations. If you aren't familiar with them, usually you can figure things out thanks to Gaiman providing background here and there, but at other times, the scenes are pretty nonsensical if you don't know who the characters are. And even if you do...well, is that really enough? Once again, devoid of much context -- that is, story, or character development -- are a parade of cameos really worth the effort?

I mentioned at the beginning the curious similarity Tim has -- dark haired English lad, with glasses and a pet owl, who, previously unaware magic is real, is told that he has the potential to be his age's greatest wizard -- to another character: Harry Potter. Yet The Books of Magic came out a few years before Harry... Make of that what you will.

Ultimately, what the regular series was like, and whether it benefited from better plotting, I don't know. But this Books of Magic was less than enchanting.

Cover price: $32.95 CDN./ $19.95 USA 

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