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Flight, vol. 1
For my review at www.ugo.com, go here.
Written by Joss Whedon. Pencils by Karl Moline. Inks by Andy Owens.
Fray 2003 (SC TPB) 216 pages
Colours: Dave Stewart, Michelle Madsen. Inks by Michelle Madsen.
Reprinting: Fray #1-8
Rating: * * * * (out of 5)
Number of readings: 1
Recommended (mildly) for Mature Readers
Additional notes: intro by Jeph Loeb; intro by Joss Whedon; sketch gallery by Karl Moline
Published by Dark Horse Comics
Hollywood script writer, Joss Whedon, has made a big splash with cult TV series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003). Anyone who's seen it and appreciates its themes and concepts knows Whedon clearly has comicbook geek in his blood -- and background -- so it's not surprising that, despite the smaller pay checks, Whedon has shifted over into comics from time to time. His recent writing of the comic Astonishing X-Men has garnered mainly great reviews, but a year or two before that, his first foray into comics was the eight issue mini-series for Dark Horse comics, Fray, collected in its entirety in a TPB volume.
Fray was a logical project for Whedon to test his comics scripting skills, because it's actually a spin-off of his most recognizable property -- Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's written in such a way that Buffy fans will recognize certain references and themes even as it's sufficiently self-contained that you don't really have to be aware there ever was such a thing called Buffy the Vampire Slayer in order to follow it.
In the Buffy TV series, it was established that there have been many slayers over the eons, with Buffy only the most recent one. In Fray, we jump ahead a few hundred years into a dystopic, cyberpunkish future where we meet Melaka Fray, a street thief who not only is unaware of her calling as a Slayer...but doesn't even know what a vampire is! The Watcher's Council, which oversaw the Slayers for generations, has long since fallen into disrepair, so that it falls to a horned demon, Urkonn, to advise Fray of her place in the cosmic scheme of things, as a new plan hatched by vampires threatens demons and humanity alike.
In a world of occasional mutations, where Fray's mob boss employer is a fish man, the demon Urkonn makes less of a stir than you might expect, as Fray just assumes he's another mutated human. This is a world where the supernatural has long since become forgotten and no one has clued into the fact that the Lurks -- supposedly sewer dwelling junkies -- are really vampires. Fray, like Buffy before her, is a reluctant convert to the cause, particularly as she mysteriously seems to have none of the Slayer's gifts other than super strength -- no prophetic dreams, no intuitive senses. She's also dealing with her own problems: she's a thief, her sister's a cop, and her brother was killed a few years before by Lurks. She's also acting as a kind of surrogate big sister to the disfigured ragamuffin Loo -- and in little Loo, Whedon pours all his impressive skills for mixing tones. She's funny, touching, grotesque, sweet, and heartbreaking -- sometimes all at once.
Though this was Whedon's first comic, he tackles it deftly enough. Maybe that should come as little surprise, as comics and film are similar mediums. His sense of pacing is good, not making the mistake of dragging out a scene too long. To fans of Whedon's TV work -- and Buffy in particular -- Fray is well worth seeking out. There's no dumbing down, or dilution of Whedon's talents. The quips are witty, the characters complex and multi-dimensional -- even without actors to say the lines, the characters live and breathe. Fray really does seem like what it is...a wholly legitimate off shoot of the Vampire Slayer mythos Whedon created.
It's a spin-off that Whedon couldn't have hoped to film before a camera -- not without a hundred million dollar budget. Chock full of flying cars, death defying leaps kilometres above the streets, epic battles, and a really big monster, Fray is Whedon's imagination untethered by mundane questions of budgetary considerations.
At the same time, despite having clever turns and surprise twists, for an eight issue series coming in at close to two hundred pages, there maybe aren't as many twists, or plot threads, as you might expect. The story stays pretty focused on Fray and its chief plot. The result is something that feels as though it could probably have been a movie with very little trimming or editing. Which isn't a bad thing at all, but for a multi-issue comics saga, one might have expected the plotting to be a little more Byzantine.
It's Whedon, himself, who has raised the bar so high on what fans might expect from him. Fray ultimately is a good read, with the obligatory mix of action and nuanced characterization, of horror and witty quips, of joy and pathos, with a few clever twists and turns, all building to a genuinely grand climax -- but the result might leave some Whedon fans saying: "yeah, O.K....now impress me". There are the trademark wry quips -- but though the lines that are funny, they're not always as laugh-out-loud funny as Whedon managed, say, in his Astonishing X-Men stories. And the very familiarity of Fray and her battles with demons, building to an apocalyptic showdown, means that, despite all the good bits, all the clever bits, it doesn't necessarily surprise. We've seen it before in various Buffy story lines (though fans might note that the axe Mel wields pre-dates its introduction into the TV series' mythos). Even the future Whedon envisions is pretty stock -- though the fish man is neat and, as is mentioned in one of the collection's introductions, you really can't go wrong with flying cars.
So does it need to surprise? Not entirely. Fray is entertaining, and keeps you turning the pages. And for fans -- even TV watchers who might not normally consider picking up a comic -- this is just as legitimate an extension of the Buffy universe as, say, the TV series Angel.
Artist Karl Moline was, apparently, not that well known when he was tagged to draw this, but he emerges as an accomplished talent right off the bat. There is a slight cartooniness to aspects of his work, but there is an energy and inventiveness to his pictures that blends well with Whedon's script, and he nicely captures the sense of this far future dystopia, with its towering skyscrapers and flying cars and its squalid, ground level ghettos, where the story demands a seamless mix of the real, the sci-fi and the supernatural. In all this he's aided by inker Andy Owen, and by colourists Dave Stewart and Michelle Madsen who go for a lot of effective earth tones of greens and browns as opposed to the more obvious metallic sheens you might expect for a future adventure. Granted, in some of the fight scenes, with the beheadings of vamps, Moline maybe could've toned down the graphics a bit. Instead, it's nudged slightly into mature readers territory.
The story ends with a reasonably satisfying conclusion...even as Whedon leaves things open for future adventures. Whether those adventures will ever materialize is the question. Melaka Fray made a brief appearance in the Dark Horse graphic novel, Tales of the Slayers (which featured short pieces about slayers through the ages), but other than that, I'm not sure she's had any further adventures. Only time will tell if Whedon and co. will return to her. If Fray returns, fine, but if she doesn't, that shouldn't really take away from what's here.
'Cause what's here is pretty good.
Cover price: $__ CDN./ $19.95 USA.
Written by Frank Miller. Art by Dave Gibbons.
Give Me Liberty 1990 (SC TPB) 200 pages
Colours: Robin Smith. Letters: Dave Gibbons (?). Editor: Randy Stradley.
Reprinting: Give Me Liberty #1-4
Rating: * * * * (out of 5)
Number of readings: 1
Recommended for Mature Readers
Published by Dark Horse Comics
Pegging who and what Frank Miller is -- ideologically speaking -- isn't the easiest thing in the world. Arguably one of the most critically regarded writers (and sometimes artists) in the comics biz, Miller's varied works are often a wild combination of satire and solemnity, boasting an astonishing humanity and insight into character, while at the same time wallowing in a senseless, puerile love of violence and brutality. Miller can be one of the smartest writers in comics...and one of the dumbest. Sometimes within the space of a few panels. One merely has to contrast his classic Batman mini-series, The Dark Knight Returns, with its unfortunate sequel, The Dark Knight Strikes Again, to see the two extremes of Miller's creative personality.
After spending most of the 1980s tooling around in the comic book mainstream of super heroes (save the off beat, and under-appreciated, Ronin) Miller started exploring other genres in the 1990s. One of the first of these was Give Me Liberty (ironically subtitled: An American Dream). It's a combination of a violent, science fiction thriller with a farcical social satire -- a combination that I'm not sure could be pulled off as well in any other medium (movies, novels). You see, it's meant to be taken seriously, in the sense that the daring escapes and threats are meant to be edge-of-the-seat stuff, and the characters are (mainly) meant to be real people with real emotions. And yet, it's also blatantly, in-your-face silly as Miller satirizes any and everything in his portrayal of 21st Century America (this having been written in the 20th Century). When American troops battle fast food consortiums, and the consortiums send Godzilla-sized robots of their company icons marching across the battlefields, it's not so much that you don't know whether to laugh or scream -- you're meant to do both, you're brain reading it on both levels simultaneously.
One suspects Miller was influenced a lot by Howard Chaykin (particularly Chaykin's American Flagg), but Miller is the more sentimental. Underneath the caustic satire, there's some touching character stuff.
The saga follows Martha Washington, a young black girl growing up poor in a ghetto-cum-prison under the seeming unceasing reign of an oppressive dictator/president who has rewritten the Constitution to give himself almost limitless power. After much trial and hardship, Martha eventually joins the army -- the only way out for her -- but by this point there's been an unexpected regime change, with the right wing dictator being replaced by a liberal who wants to direct the country's military might towards more positive goals (such as saving the rain forest from the burger companies). What follows is a rollercoaster ride of twists and turns, of double crosses and coup d'etats, taking Martha all across the increasingly divided and disintegrating U.S.A. I had initially assumed the series was military SF, since the first issue culminates in Martha joining the army and a sequence of jungle warfare seeming lifted from an old Vietnam War movie. But that isn't what it's about, as the story strays far afield from simply grunts in the trenches.
The best part of the saga is the first chapter, chronicling Martha growing up in the crime ridden, cordoned off, ghetto, as Miller depicts his dystopian future as perceived by one of its "have nots", her growth taking her from the ghetto, to a mental hospital, to the streets. At times it's almost heartbreaking, while also being clever, and witty. When Martha finally joins the army, the reader can experience a simultaneous sense of relief (as she finally achieves stability and security) and horror (as she's plunged into the maelstrom of war).
When Miller's at his best, he can use the comicbook medium better than almost anyone, repeating phrases and juxtaposing words to images, for ironic or surprising effect. Granted, there are aspects of over indulgence, as Miller relies on some of his familiar stand by techniques that can seem a bit like rote for him (the incoherent babblings of the mentally ill).
The ensuing chapters, though entertaining, and never less than fascinating, are perhaps not as strong. The strength of the series is that you really can't guess where it's headed, as Miller veers all over the place, zagging when you thought he would zig (the jungle war, which I assumed would be the main story, is actually over fairly quickly). It's fast paced, not really allowing you to get too bored...or complacent. The weakness, though, is that Miller seems to be putting his wild concepts ahead of a strong core narrative, and even ahead of the characters. Although Martha remains the heroine throughout, after the first chapter, it seems less about her and more about the events.
Miller's handling of characters can be intriguing, particularly the new, liberal president Nissen who even as he goes from hero to villain, may lose our sympathy, but not our empathy. Yet other times, the characters can arise abruptly, such as a Native Indian guy who becomes Martha's ally...but I'm not entirely sure where he came from, or whether he was one of the Apache Indians who held her hostage at one point.
The strength of the series is that its fast paced and audacious in the wild ideas thrown at the reader (the Surgeon General as a mad messiah always seen, creepily, in surgical gown and operating goggles) but, as such, our emotional attachment becomes less after the first chapter. The reader's just trying to keep up with Miller, with little time to become too involved.
Another plus for the saga -- and a surprising one for me -- is Dave Gibbons' art. I've never been that big a fan of his work -- he's a realist artist, to be sure, but often un-dynamic and prone to stiff figures. But his art works quite well here -- perhaps away from the more flamboyant world of super heroes, his style can come into its own. Or maybe the material just inspired him more than other things have, with its shifting between drama and comedy, gritty realism and sci-fi extravagance. But his faces are expressive, his scenes energetic and well presented. Granted, his Martha tends to look a bit older than the teenager she's supposed to be.
Gibbons also seems to share Miller's penchant for sliding from sophisticated satire...to just sophomoric. Miller likes to use joke names for characters, while Gibbons depicts orbiting laser satellites as blatantly phallic.
A further, inevitable, weakness is that, like so much in the comicbook field, Give Me Liberty was not necessarily meant to be stand alone (it was followed by the mini-series Martha Washington Goes to War, and some one-shot specials). It doesn't end "to be continued", and the story climaxes with Martha confronting her arch nemesis, but the structure, which basically relies on the idea that "the more things change, the more they remain the same" means that we don't get satisfying closure. Even though the follow-up was three or four years later, it feels like Miller intended to do a sequel all along.
I began this piece by saying it's hard to peg Miller because Give Me Liberty can seem a bit unfocused, as Miller directs a merciless barrage of seeming genuine outrage, with equal parts goofy parody, at just about every political stripe -- Right and Left. Until, by the end, you aren't entirely sure what his point is (though his thread about protecting the rain forest seems without irony). But I think Miller can be described as, well, an idealistic-cynic, or maybe an idealistic-nihilist. He's idealistic enough to be outraged by the injustices of the world (injustices he then inflates and extrapolates upon in a science fiction milieu), while being cynical and even nihilistic enough to not believe there's much hope or solution. Miller's knack for characterization (when he's at his peak) indicates a man who can care deeply for people as individuals...even as one suspects that he despises people as a species. This might explain why Miller has also become enamoured of film noire type archetypes (as demonstrated in his long running Sin City stories) -- film noire being characterized as a cynical genre with little in the way of a moral centre.
As such, Give Me Liberty is more about saying that "life sucks...but it can make for entertaining stories."
Perhaps, if one were to draw any consistent theme from Give Me Liberty...it's that nothing's ever as simple as it seems, as characters, both good and bad, try to wrest control of the political order, and to"improve" things, only to have things fall apart as every solution opens up a slew of complications. Not as strong as perhaps the best of Miller's 1980s work (Batman, Daredevil, Ronin), Give Me Liberty is still aentertaining, clever saga...and more disciplined, and more effective, than his much later Dark Knight Strikes Again.
Ironically, these kind of biting, bitter parables can actually be over taken by time. Written in the 1990s, Miller's initial fascist, right wing president, is clearly modelled after Ronald Reagan (with his good ol' boy homilies and church yard exclamations -- "Gosh!"), yet it's still intended not as a criticism of America as it is, but of an America that could be. Read a few years later, during the reign of George W. Bush, one would swear that Miller was writing about him...and it doesn't seem so much like science fiction after all.
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in 1980 by Tom Doherty - Black & White