Comics: Better than "best."

Tagging your anthology "best of", whether it is a greatest hits CD or a genre-centric compilation or a cookbook, is always a losing proposition. At best, editors treat the label as a marketing burden and freely hone-up to how impossible it will be to live up to the implication. For what might rank as the very limit of editorial self-flagellation regarding the use of "best of," check out David Foster Wallace's self-deconstructing introduction to The Best American Essays 2007, a performance that would well rank as the finest parody of modern liberal academic intellectual paralysis if the reader could shake the notion that Wallace thinks this sort of masturbatory tail-chasing is actually the essence of insight.

At worst, one gets the feeling that the editors knowingly devalue the word. Like "victim," its ever-cheapening modern usage invites abuse by the cynical. The exemplars in this category were the folks at Mammoth, who seemed to put out a doorstop-sized Best of Some Genre or Another every four days. I don't think you can have visited a mid- to large-sized bookstore and not have run into these things: Mammoth Books of Best New Horror, of Best British Mysteries, Best New Sci-Fi, Best New Erotica, and so on. I've worked my way through a couple of these anthos before and the results have always been mixed, with the scales slightly tipped in favor of disappointment. Consequently, when I saw that Mammoth was responsible for a line of comics-related "best of" anthologies, I did not hold high hopes.

Happily, the folks at Mammoth took advantage of my nonchalance to, ninja-style, sneak up on me and kick my ass.

The first of the "best of" comic anthos I picked up was The Mammoth Book of Best War Comics. Read the Amazon reviews of this 500+ page brick of comic goodness and you'll find a common theme: "This isn't the best of! Where's Sgt. Rock? Where's Haunted Tank? Ye Gods! What are you trying to pull here mine editor Mammothy?" This is, I guess, fair. The book is not a collection of fan faves. I suspect that economic played a part in this. What with success of the phonebook-sized Showcase editions converting the back catalog of the Big Two in a surprisingly productive gold mine, near forgotten war comics are suddenly valued properties. More than the capitalist illogic of property right, however, the real reason for the lack of the usual suspects is that the editor of War Comics did something mo' better than a re-run of shop-worn classics. David Kendall produced an anthology meant to not only showcase some of the best comic art about the theme of combat, but to expand the very notion of what war comic was. This is one anthology features manga about the dropping of the atomic bomb, gung-ho post-World War II Brit heroic "realism," '60s underground surrealism abut 'Nam, a fantastically weird children's tale about the Falklands conflict, nightmares about wars still to come, and more. There are acknowledged masterworks, such as Eisner's Last Days in Vietnam and Mill's and Colquhoun's unbelievable Charley's War (perhaps the single greatest comic art statement about men in combat), and surprising choices, such as the Russian artist Askold Akishin and Sweden's Fabian Goranson. Critics who bitch about the lack of The Unknown Soldier are right about the antho for all the wrong reasons. They're like movie-goers who stumble out of Apocalypse Now complaining that it was no The Green Berets. There are some real problems with the Mammoth book. Some of the reprinting is atrocious and seeing some of the fine art so muddied is a distracting frustration. There's also a seemingly random selection of color plates that actually cut out before one of the color stories ends. What's going on there? The cover's pretty cheesy too. That's not so good. Still, in terms of selection, the Mammoth anthology represents not just a solid look at war comics, but a significant contribution to comic's history and appreciation. If I was the Mayor of Comic Business Town, serious fans of the medium would have found War Comics on their required reading list.

Which brings us, Screamers and Screamette's, to The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics a 500+ page doorstop that has the unenviable task of following on the heels of its more martial sister-tome. Is Best Horror Comics another triumph?

The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics is not the essential volume the War Comics is; but it a success on its own terms. Partially, this distinction between the two volumes has to do with a shift in editorial focus. Instead of trying to bush the boundaries of what constitutes the genre, Best Horror makes and effort to establish the long and unbroken history of the horror comic, making an argument for its status as crucial comic genre, perhaps second only to the enduring superhero genre. With this more narrow focus, readers are not going to have their notions of the genre transformed. But they will get a interesting, if necessarily incomplete, tour of the history of scare stories in the comic rags.

MBHC will start with a surprise selection for many comic fans. Editor Peter Normanton begins his historical overview nearly a full decade before the '50s boom most of us identify as horror comic's Big Bang. In the war years, anthology comics would plunder well-known short stories for ready material. In the case of 1944's "Famous Tale of Terror," from Yellowjacket Comics, it's Poe's "The Black Cat" that gets the comics treatment. From this interesting start, the book divides horror comics into four broad periods: a golden age in the 1950s, a revival period in the 1960s and 1970s, a period of decline in the '80s and '90s, followed by a second revival in the early 21st century.

Unsurprisingly, the first two sections are the strongest. These are widely admitted to be the golden and silver ages of horror comics. In fact, just the look of these works is so synonymous with "horror comics" that almost anything you chose is going to feel iconic. Not that the editor takes advantage of this to phone it in. The selections from the first two great periods of comic horror are consistently solid, often great. Regular readers of LoTT-D member blog The Horrors of It All will recognize some the material from the '50s. Fans will recognize the talent of luminaries like Jack Cole, Don Heck, Rudy Palais, Jack Katz, and Jerry Iger.

The selections from the last two periods are more spotty. This is almost necessarily so, as the premise of the last two periods is that horror entered an era of slim-pickings and that the new era has just started up. In the former case, you take what you can get. In the latter, nothing's yet attained the critical patina of "classic" yet. Still, even if we grant those difficulties, it is only in these later sections that we start to get some duds. Most notably a couple of stories that rely on photomontage techniques or drawn-over photos to create their visuals. Though these techniques were popular throughout the 60s and 70s in some Mexican comics, they have never really caught on in the US. I have a complex and nuanced theory as to why this is. My theory goes like this: it looks like crap, that's why. The talent in these later sections includes Steve Niles, Mike Ploog, and Arthur Suydam.

Best Horror dumps the whole color plate thing – which is fine with me considering that they were somewhat wasted in Best War. Though there are some problems with the quality of the reprints, I think Best Horror is an improvement over the previous collection. Scholars and hard-core fans will want to seek out the originals, of course, but more casual fans and first time readers wouldn't find themselves distracted by QC problems.

While less ambitious than Best War Comics, Best Horror is, in its own way, no less successful. Fans of horror comics have had histories and overviews to read before (notably Sennitt's Ghastly Horror), but this is the first comic anthology that covers the same ground. People will always quibble about what should have made the cut. It comes with the territory when you slap "best" on anything. But that's nitpicking. The real goal of "best" isn't to establish a canon or showcase new and hot writers. Instead, it sets a timeline for the development and evolution of horror comics and makes a case for the genre's enduring importance. Great and ghastly stuff.

The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics is published by Running Press and it is going to set you back about 18 clams. It's out now.

Comics: City stompin' mega-monster action; cheap as free.

Boom Studios, an indie comics publishing house, recently made comic biz buzz by offering one of its new series in simultaneous print and free online formats. Though retailers groaned, Boom claimed the strategy was a success and that the print edition sold out. (It is actually nearly impossible to judge the accuracy of their claim due to some quirks in the comic biz publishing model – still, it was news.)

"You will let me know when I should start caring, right?" you may well ask.

Tough crowd.

Fair enough. Here's why you, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Q. Horror Fan, care. Boom has picked up the reprint rights for Steve "30 Days of Night" Niles's 2005 mini-series Giant Monster. Several years ago, Niles – then the one-man vanguard for horror comics – was tearing through the dusty horror subgenres, trying to revive them with a crazed mix of off-kilter approaches and over the top ultra-violence. His take on the BFM subgenre was fun, but it didn't capture the imagination the way his vampire epic did and ended up gathering dust while other his other works were republished in nice collected editions.

Boom has taken upon themselves to correct this oversight. And they're doing it up nice. For Boom's new collected Giant Monster, the publisher is revisiting their double-barreled online/print approach. This time, though, the online edition is being released in a serialized form. Comic Book Resources started things off by posting the first 22 pages of the comic. Every day, CBR will post the next page. Eventually, all 90-some pages will be available, completely free.

Here's the first pages.

If you get impatient, the hardcopy book is available at your local comic shop.

Movies: 29 days of night.

Over at Comic Book Resource blog Comics Should Be Good they run a regular feature on rumors, urban legends, and lingering questions regarding comics and the comic biz. Recently, they had a curious bit about the history of the recently adapted vampire mini-series 30 Days of Night.

From Comics Should Be Good:

COMIC URBAN LEGEND: 30 Days of Night was a movie pitch BEFORE it was a comic book series.

STATUS: True

The success of Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith’s 30 Days of Night comic was an influential event in comic book history, as the series demonstrated to many others the value of having a comic book to use to make a movie pitch. Soon, a great deal of independent publishers began to look at comic pitches as basically, “Could this be optioned for a film?”

Reader Kris N., though wrote in last week to ask, “Is it true that 30 Days of Night was a movie screenplay before it was a comic?”

And the answer, interestingly enough, is basically yes.

I say basically only because it was not actually a screenplay, but the development from comics to film for 30 Days of Night did, in fact, begin in the realm of film.

I think Steve Niles can tell the story better than I can, so here he is, courtesy of an excellent article by Scott Collura and Eric Moro over at IGN.com:

“I pitched it as a movie for two or three years,” recalls Niles, who prior to 30 Days has been best known for his work in the comics industry. “I pitched it to just blank faces. And they’d say, ‘It sounds like Buffy, it sounds like Buffy.’ And honestly I had just about given up.”

Following the rejection of the 30 Days pitch, Niles continued to focus his energies on his comics work, writing various books for Todd McFarlane including Spawn: The Dark Ages and Hellspawn. It was on the latter comic that he first worked with Ben Templesmith, a first-time artist who would go on to partner with Niles on the 30 Days comic.

“It was just one of those weird things,” says the scribe. “Ted Adams from IDW called and said, ‘We want to do some comics. We can’t pay, there’s no money, but you can do whatever you want.’ So I just pulled out a sheet of my pitch list and said, ‘Here’s pitches that nobody ever bought.’ And he was like, ‘This vampire in Alaska thing looks kind of cool!’ Ben liked it, IDW wanted to do it, so we just did it and didn’t get paid a dime. And the day the ad for the first issue hit, we started getting calls from every studio, every producer, even people I had pitched before. People to this day deny that they rejected it, and I love it! Even one of the producers on the movie had originally rejected it.”

Movies: Good night.

I think one can say, without fear of overstatement, that Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith's vampire horror mini-series 30 Days of Night is the single title most responsible for jump starting the revival of horror comics. Go into some comic book specialty store and, on any given month, you'll find a short stack of new horror titles, from Eisner-winning continuing series to re-launched anthology series to gore-splattered one shots and collections. Though this is a relatively recent phenomenon. When IDW, then a new publisher on the comic scene, ran with 30 Days of Night, there were so few horror titles out that you could be forgiven if you thought the entire genre had gone the way of the dodo.

Its place of the comic in genre history threatens to overshadow its genuine merits. Unlike other comic milestones, such as Contract with God or The Watchmen, 30 Days f Night isn't a revolutionary work. The slim (under 90 pages) but attractive book relied on straight-forward and tradition narrative techniques; featured a cast of characters that were fairly stock types; didn't push the boundaries of comic content; and had a phantasmagoric painted art style that is not the norm, but clearly owes much to pioneers like Dave McKean. But the value of 30 Days didn't rest on its revolutionary potential. Instead, what it did was show readers and the industry that well-done horror comics could still kick ass. It didn't need to be a great work of literature. It didn't need to fundamentally shift the way in which we thought of sequential art. It just needed to prove that the supposedly moribund horror genre still had some unlife in it.

And that's exactly what it did.

The premise of the comic was brilliantly simple: in Barrow, Alaska, where the sun vanishes for an entire month in winter, a group a vampires, no longer checked by the regular coming of the dawn, come to ravage the town. It's high concept perfection. Even on hearing it, you think, "Of freakin' course, why didn't anybody think of that before?" The plot is about as lean and mean as you can make. There is a slight detour involving the efforts of ancient vampires to keep the existence of vamps a secret and the efforts of a crew of folks from the Big Easy trying to blow the lid off the undead cover-up. But that's a slight intrusion on what is otherwise a straight out story of survival against impossible odds. Basically, it did what the writers of zombie tales quickly discovered was the key to crossover success: it was vampy story as disaster story.

David Slade's new adaptation, the film 30 Days of Night, is, I think, the best adaptation the comic could have hoped for. The protagonists of the comics were a husband and wife team of police officers in Barrow. The other residents of Barrow were basically there to get eaten or get saved. Slade's adaptation complicates the relationship of the central couple (played adequately by the wooden Josh Hartnett and the creepily skinny Melissa George – Melissa, sweetie, I thought it was a special effect or something; we're all worried about you) and adds a handful of fleshed out residents to serve as the holdout crew we'll follow through the assault. The adaptation also wisely cuts out the subplot involving ancient vamps and the vampire hunters. These subplots went nowhere in the original comic and aren't missed here. Trading them off for more time to flesh out the other victims of the assault is a smart choice.

Slade also works from a screenplay, partially created by Steve Niles, that decompresses the action. The original comic – partially due to the limitations of space, partially due to the artistic style of Templesmith (which is better at mood than action) – had a dream-like logic that didn't lend itself to action or suspense. Instead, it was like looking into a nightmare. The film expands on the conflict between the vamps and the humans, with several excellent action/horror set pieces, and manages to build up an entertaining amount of tension with regards to who will and will not make it at the end of the flick.

The film also expands on the role of the Renfield-like "Stranger": the human thrall of the vamps who heads into Barrow prior to the long night, prepping the town for invasion. The flick also more closely associates him with Renfield, making the ties between him and the character of the ur-vamp tale more explicit. In the comic, the Stranger shows up out of nowhere, makes some threats, and that's about it. Here, we see him arrive via ship (with the vamps, just like Renfield and Drac) and he makes his servile relationship clear.

Finally, though the film has some genuine shots of beauty, Slade is selective in his efforts to capture the look of Templesmith's art. He avoids the slavish visual loyalty one sees in many current comic adaptations. The vampires look very much like Templesmith's monsters. These are not suave, seducers. They have shark-like mouths, never bother to clean the gore of their animalistic feeding off of themselves, and dress like homeless Euro-trash. In one scene, the lead vamp actually slicks back his hair with the blood of a victim his ripped open. That's the sort weird rawness Templesmith brought to his vamps and it is captured here. But, for the most part, Slade eschews the dream-like surrealism of Templesmith's art. People will argue about this, but I think it is a smart move. What film can give us that comics can't is the sense of bodies moving through space. In film, a sense of space is crucial to creating tension and action. Recreating the look of the comics would have hobbled the film.

The chief problem with 30 Days of Night is that the film does not share the relationship to film horror that the original comic shared to the genre of horror comics. The original comic simply had to be good to instantly become the best horror comic on the market. The comic just had to prove that horror comics were still viable. But the film comes out on what might be the tail end of a long and remarkably creative horror flick boom. There's a way in which the film can't just be "good." To stick out, the film would have to be brilliant. Unfortunately, it isn't brilliant. 30 Days is a well-made, solid flick. It doesn't drag, it doesn't make you feel stupid for paying 10 smackers for your ticket, and you'll feel a couple of "holy moley" moments. That's nothing to sneeze at. That may be a modest success, but it is undeniably a success. But it can't recapture the eye-opening excitement of the original comic. That feeling was a product of the unique moment the comic was released. Even the comic, picked up now, can't recreate that experience.