Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Two books again this week. I can’t say for sure yet whether this will become the norm, but right now the comic industry is just so bursting with wonderful things, it’s hard to pick just one book to talk about each week. Hell, this week, it was tough to pick just two, with the likes of the last issues of The Delinquents and Batman Beyond Universe shipping, Spider-Man 2099 getting in on the Spider-Verse action, and Genevieve Valentine’s exciting new run on Catwoman shifting into high gear. But far and away the two biggest deals in the world of comics this week were the launches of two titles that I personally have been looking forward to for quite some time (and I know I’m not alone in this sentiment).
First up, I hope you’re stocked up on your anti-psychosis meds, because Matt Fraction’s idea of Greek mythology is liable to make you taste colors without any kind of substance aid. Much ado was made a few weeks ago about Harley Quinn’s scratch-n-sniff special containing a cannabis smell, but I would tend to think you’d get much better consciousness-altering results just from looking at Christian Ward’s artwork for any length of time while trying to digest Fraction’s idea of a remake.
ODY-C is, as you might have suspected, something of a retelling of the Greek poet Homer’s original “road epic”, The Odyssey. It is a retelling in the vein of the Coen Bros. film O Brother, Where Art Thou? in that it subverts and changes every detail of the story, only retaining the barest skeleton of the original story. ODY-C, however, makes O Brother look positively faithful in comparison. In Matt Fraction’s headspace, all the male roles have been replaced with females (up to and including the most buxom Zeus you’ll ever see), and all the female roles have been replaced with…well, also females. But not really. There is one male, though – or is there two? Also, it’s in outer space. Deal with it. The book opens with an absolutely stunning eight-panel foldout showing the triumphant Odyssia wading through a broken battlefield on the planet Troiia. On the back of this is the largest amount of backmatter I’ve ever seen at the front of a comic – and don’t even think about skipping it, because the rest of the issue is not interested in catching you up on who these characters are, why they matter, and what the whole sacking of Troiia thing was about. It helps if you’re familiar with the original text, but so many details have been switched around that even the most devout Homerian scholars could find themselves lost if they don’t read through Fraction’s condensed “previously-on” segment that happens to cover the entirety of an alternate version of The Illiad. I can almost see Matt Fraction chuckling to himself, asking “Are you a bad enough dude to read my comic?”
Well, Matt Fraction, not only am I a bad enough dude to read it, I even liked it. Take that. Much has been made of the preponderance of remakes and do-overs populating the silver screen these days, and many have attributed it to a lack of ideas. I’m not going to say that this is never the case (I’m looking at you, The Omen remake), but I think people are too quick to pass judgment on remakes and retellings as a whole, and books like ODY-C are the strongest argument I know of to stop doing that. It’s often been said that there are only seven basic stories, and only the details and settings change over time. Odysseus was a man. Odyssia was a woman. Odysseus captained a sailing vessel. Odyssia was master of a swiftship plying the cosmos. It doesn’t really matter, because they both had to contend with a mighty Cyclops, who may or may not have looked like John Goodman. So if the stories really are all the same when you boil away the ornamentations of whatever society is telling them, why pass judgment on a story that realizes and accepts this fact, and, rather than trying to tell us something new and likely failing, tries to tell us something old in a new way.
At the end of the day, it’s all about entertainment anyways, and ODY-C delivers that in spades, even if you’re just shaking your head in disbelief that something this strange could see print. If you needed further proof that we’ve entered into a second renaissance in Independent comic books, this is it. And while Matt Fraction’s whacked-out ideas may be the genesis of the book, and the propellant that keeps the story moving forward to the Ithacaan destination we know it must someday reach, the star of the book by a wide margin is the art of Christian Ward. Holy cow, is this guy something. I’ve seen many books over the years that have made use of wide-ranging, psychadelic color palettes, and very few have ever pulled it off well. Here, Ward throws every color in the spectrum at you, and a few that probably haven’t been invented yet, in a loud and boisterous attempt to bring you entirely into this world where the sky is a toddler’s finger-painting, and warm and cool colors have moved past their millennia-old enmity and freely intermingle on the page, probably busy trying to create some of those new colors I just mentioned. Ward’s pencils are very reminiscent of Sean Murphy and, to an extent, Rafael Albequerque, but the pencils are a complete afterthought to the huge splashes of color that make up this book’s visual palette. I could seriously stare at this book all day.
I’m not entirely sure all of that made cohesive sense, but I’m also not sure it should. This book doesn’t make any sense. It’s beautiful, it’s epic, it’s completely, irrevocably bat-guano crazy, and you absolutely need to read it.
Have I lost you yet? Still here? Alright then, how about we talk about something, if not normal, than at least considerably less weird. The Spectre is one of my all-time favorite DC characters, so when I heard he was getting a new book, I was so giddy that I didn’t mind the fact he seemed to be joining the massively-overpopulated Batman stable, or that Ben Templesmith, someone I’ve never much cared for, was providing the art for the book. Now the book is finally here, and I think I’ll foil the spoilsports who skip to the end by putting my summary in the first paragraph: Gotham by Midnight is the best DC debut since the launch of The New 52 3 years ago. Now, that statement is just chock full of bias, as a series that mashes The X-Files and Gotham Central together, and heads it all up with Jim Corrigan and his pasty alter-ego (who, tellingly, doesn’t even show himself in this issue, although he is referenced) is pretty much a comic-shaped cupid arrow aimed right at my beating fanboy heart.
While the feel is classic X-Files, though, the plot of this debut issue seems more to have been lifted from the premiere of the more recent X-Files descendent Torchwood, in that an outsider enters a paranormal police unit, and the enigmatic leader of that unit shows said outsider that the world is a far stranger place than they’d like to believe. While I can’t speak much for the rest of Torchwood, I love it’s premiere, and this issue absolutely lives up to the story it seems to have most borrowed from. Right off the bat, we’ve got an offbeat, motley cast of characters (aside from Corrigan, they aren’t that well-fleshed yet, but that will likely change with time), a compelling mystery, and art that works much better than I was expecting.
Part of the change in my feelings towards Templesmith’s art is that this is probably the least sketchy and stylized I’ve ever seen him. The work still undeniably bears his stamp, but a lot of the rough edges seem to have been sanded off. Some may see this as a detriment, but I always found his storytelling in the past to be difficult to look at, and a little hard to follow. Seeing this book, though, he still wouldn’t have been my first choice, but as someone who isn’t a fan, I can tell you he works remarkably well here, and the last page is just incredibly creepy.
Ray Fawkes is shaping up to be one of my favorite horror writers, and fully deserving of the faith Jeff Lemire placed in him taking over Constantine at DC. While I was never blown away by that book, his subsequent work on Batman Eternal (I can only assume the Corrigan bits in that are his domain), Intersect, and now Gotham by Midnight have been top-tier all the way. I can scarcely express the joy I feel at having a new Spectre ongoing AND what amounts to a supernatural Gotham Central successor at the same time, and the fact that it’s as great as it ought to be is just icing on the cake. It gives me great joy to recommend that you go out and buy this book…well, not today, because your local comic shop ought to be closed today. But bright and early tomorrow.
I hope everyone’s having a wonderful Thanksgiving – till next week!
