“Hell, I never vote for anybody, I always vote against.”

~W.C. Fields

I don’t know if it’s just because of the writer’s strike this year, but lately it seems like politics has been the most interesting thing on television. In a way, I guess, it’s not surprising. I mean, with Hillary and Bill Clinton, politics has always been a blood sport. But this year, with a charismatic frontrunner in the Democratic nomination race and without a lot else to watch on TV, Americans seem almost mesmerized. For better or worse, we’re watching these two tear each other limb from limb now. As Clinton put it before Tuesday’s primaries, she’s thrown in everything, even “the Kitchen Sink.” Hey, that’s how it’s always been with the Clintons. And now despite all expectations and party desires to the contrary, the fight—at least on the Democratic side—has become a fight to the death.

I’m kind of loving it.

To be clear, I don’t have a clear favorite in the Democratic race. Their positions are too close, and anyway, I’m a vet, and it says on the back of my membership card that I’m therefore required by law to support the only vet in the race. In November, I will vote for John McCain. But if I had to pick a President out of the Democratic field, I’d probably prefer Obama simply on the grounds of his rhetoric. Even in saying that, however, I have to hedge because the man has very little in the way of a record, and what there is is VERY liberal. Far more liberal than I am personally. And then, too, I’ve gradually come to a kind of grudging respect for Hillary after these months of expectation and hope, followed by disaster, self-discovery, and frantic counter-attack. That right there is an American story. Despite everything, it’s hard not to feel for the woman. So, bottom line, I just want the fight to go on… forever.

And then too, I’ve never seen a brokered convention. None of us have. Our nominating processes have been too well-publicized and too tightly controlled for a real civil war to have occurred in either party in the past fifty or so years. That’s part of what makes this year so unique. You have a genuine force of nature fighting it out to the death with a legitimate, old-school establishment candidate with a TON of resources and experience. That just doesn’t happen that often. In fact, it may never happen again. And that’s why I’d like to see this year’s Democratic convention actually mean something. It’s been a long time since any political convention has meant anything at all, and at least for me, I think we could all use the civics lesson.

Meanwhile, yeah, there are a lot of real problems in the country. The dollar’s falling, slowly but inevitably decoupling worldwide growth to that of the individual US economy. We’re still at war in two places and deeply involved in several more. And we’ve racked up enormous debts, which we seem in no danger of reducing any time soon. Truth to tell, I think the very best thing that could happen would be governmental gridlock because at least then there wouldn’t be any agreement on government spending, and zero spending is honestly about the only level of spending that the nation can afford these days. Because the truth is that the national debt is the thing driving inflation. So yeah, bring on the political knife fight. The close elections. The nail biters. The legions of screaming partisans who’d rather die than see the other guy elected. Bring on the culture wars and the insanity. Bring back the divided nation that can’t agree on anything. If that’s the only thing that can stop all the pork-barrel spending, then I say bring it back. Bring it back with a vengeance.

In the words of Terrell Owens, “Get your popcorn ready, ‘cause it’s gonna be a show!”

Kade: Shivas Sun #0

Writers: Sean O’Reilly & Alex Nikolavitch

Art: Clint Hilinski & Andrew Dalhouse

Letters: Shawn Depasquale

Cover: Greg Horn & Stuart Immonen

Published by: Arcana Studios, 12 pages of story and lots of extras for $.25

The new #0 issue of the new Kade mini series, Shivas Sun, finds Kade deep in a coma following the events of Black Sun and a subsequent voyage to India. With that as an intro, the issue briefly lays out our hero’s backstory and the story of the last arc and then attempts to set up the events leading to Kade’s coma. This is, I think, meant to create the coma as a kind of mystery, which we’ll then slowly resolve in the forthcoming arc.

As always, the nice thing about Kade, the flagship title from Arcana Studios, is the art. The cover in this first issue is done very much in the painterly style of the last mini series while the interior pages come out in a much more traditional superhero storytelling style. Although I could wish for more action and motion in the sequential storytelling, but the story is clear on every page, and the art in general is very well done. It looks very much like a Big 2 book from the late 80’s-early 90’s. If you like that sort of thing, then you’re gonna like this book—a lot. The only nitpick that I personally had with it is that the story itself is sort of dark, with the main character is a comma!—whereas the colors are mostly bright and cheerful. And while that’s fine for a while, I didn’t think it necessarily matched the mood of the rest of the piece.

The writing is effective mostly because it sets up a mystery that fans of Kade will want to see resolved. There’s an unexplained circumstance, a grim sense of foreboding, and an uncertain resolution. That stuff is all good. Where it starts not working for me is in the specific language of the narration. That’s probably a nitpick, but the whole book, at least for me, made me want to go through with a red pen and eliminate unnecessary words and generally re-order the text to give it a more active voice. Groan if you want, but that level of attention to detail in the writing would have improved this story a lot, as would adding just a bit more actual action.

With all of that said, I’m more than sure that fans of Kade, and to a lesser extent fans of fantasy in general, will enjoy this book. And for $.25, there’s absolutely NO reason not to give it a shot. There’s plenty to like, from the throwback art to the setting, which is pretty damned exotic given that the story is set in ancient India. I don’t know if the new Kade is gonna be a must-read for everybody, but fantasy fans should at least check it out and see if there’s something there for them. If the new series pays off what’s been set up in the number zero, then I expect it’ll be well worth your time.

Friday Mad Science

Against my better judgment, I’ve managed to get into this year’s American Idol. I think the fact that they’re letting the contestants play instruments helps. It makes it seem like they aren’t all a bunch of talentless hacks up there; some of them can really do actual music.

I mean, it always comes out that some of them can do music anyway. It’s just never been important before. Take last season’s Blake Lewis. Here’s a guy who re-arranged virtually everything he sang, and he beat-boxed because, well, what choice did he have? He wanted to be more than just a talking (singing?) head. He wanted to be a part of the actual music. But without any instruments, there wasn’t a lot he could do. It would have been interesting to see what he’d have done with this year’s competition, but I suppose that it doesn’t matter. The guy got his record deal, after all.

I only bring it up because I hear he’s supposed to be on tonight’s show (this is me, writing on Thursday afternoon), and I’m more than a little interested to see what he’s going to do.

With all of that said, I can only name one of this year’s Idols, and that’s Brooke. And even that’s only because I really liked her Carly Simon thing last week. The rest of them look more or less alike to me.

It was a much better week for comics for me this week. I really enjoyed the new issue of Runaways, thought Conan was quite a bit better than I expected it to be, and even had a blast with Star Wars: Legacy. For all that I knocked Legacy last week, with that huge cast they’re using they can tell an awful lot of stories. I really admire the fact that writer John Ostrander is making a serious effort to not only pay off a lot of the various storylines from the various novels out there but also follow up on all of the factions that George Lucas introduced in the movies. That’s something that Lucas himself sure as Hell didn’t do.

After thirty years, the Star Wars Universe has become a big and diverse place. It’s good that Legacy is a whole big, unlimited monthly series because there’s a lot that we’re still wondering about, and even if that’s sometimes frustrating, it’s fun to see it all play out over time. And I guess that the big bottom line there is that with an unlimited, time is a commodity we have in plenty. At the very least, they’re not dragging it out with some kind of endless decompression.

The other comic I read this week that I really enjoyed was the first TPB from the Spawn spin-off Sam and Twitch. It was new at my library. And what a great book! I’m not sure, but I think this Trade collected the first-ever mainstream page-rate writing from Brian Michael Bendis, and WOW! Have we ever lost something as that guy has gone to the big-time. That first Sam and Twitch Trade is Bendis at his foul-mouthed, crime-fiction best. I dug it for a lot of reasons: his ability to plot a fast-moving story, his dialogue (of course!), and his layouts, which honestly, I don’t think get enough credit.

It’s no secret that Bendis used to draw. In fact, I’m sure he still occasionally draws. But he did ALL of the basic layouts for Sam and Twitch, and they’re just great. They really are. He continually uses not only a lot of densely crowded pages with a ton of story on each one, but he also keeps it moving. And he always, always, always comes back to the big two-page spreads, even when he breaks them up with a zillion panels all over the pages. But that keeps it visually diverse and interesting, even when all we’re watching is a pair of people talking.

Y’know, these days Bendis gets a lot of slack for basically inventing the made-for-trade decompression that has made Marvel such a drag these past few years, but that’s a bum wrap. Because when Bendis does it, it’s not decompression. It’s scene told through dialogue. It’s pacing that moves more at the speed, and via the methods, of prose rather than through huge guys throwing each other through walls on every page. It works because it gets personal. Because even when they’re just talking, the characters have something at stake. And because, in reality, no one is ever just talking. People are always thinking and feeling and reacting… living life in the space of minutes spent in conversation. The only downside of that is that a lot of people have tried to copy what Bendis does, but not that many have the talent, patience, or training to make it pay.

That’s not Bendis’s fault, but like I said, he gets a lot of slack for it.

With that as inspiration, I finally sat down to write my first comic story in well over a year. It’s been a while because for one thing I stopped doing comics to write my book last March, and then I started another after that. And then too, I got really depressed after I had a pair of artists bail out on my favorite of my unproduced OGNs, Green Mountain Gunslinger. After that, there didn’t seem to be any point to writing comics. But anyway, even though the new strip is just a ten-page short, I had a blast working on it. And I haven’t even written the full script yet!

You may remember me mentioning it awhile ago. It’s a piece for my friend Alan Evans’s pro-wrestling webcomic Rival Angels. Which means that not only is this my first comic piece in over a year, it’s also my first wrestling piece—ever!

Heh. Here’s hoping that my career as a pro-wrestling booker is about to begin!

My point in bringing all of this up is just this: having seen what Bendis did with Sam and Twitch, it inspired me to get out the old Sharpie and actually do my own layouts for the RA story. I mean, I usually do my own layouts anyway, but almost never by hand. Hell, I draw terribly. But seeing as how I’m not doing too much with comics these days—besides reading them—I think this qualifies as a special case. I might as well have fun with it.

The last thing I want to point out this week is another response I got to my question, “What else should I be reading?” I got this one from Jeremy Dale, who’s book Absolute Zeroes is a indie staple. Jeremy’s currently working on a bunch of GI Joe related stuff for Hasbro as well as a few other things:

Looks like you'd enjoy Space Doubles from your column last week-- and hey, I had a story in the first issue!

I'd also recommend a lot of fun books, like Hulk, Franklin Richards, Marvel Adventures Avengers, RASL, and anything Doug TenNapel touches.

Well, yeah. I took a look at Space Doubles, and it does look just cool as Hell. I’ve never seen it in my local shop (Forbidden Planet on 14th Street in Manhattan), but ever since you posted that link, I’ve been trying to figure out how to scam a review copy off the guys at Th3rd World. Still haven’t figured out how to approach that. Stupid as this sounds, I don’t want to come off sounding tacky.

It’d be cool to see those guys at a convention.

I could stand to be more familiar with Doug TenNapel’s work. He’s probably a comic legend, but I don’t think I could pick him out of a lineup. Which is no one’s fault but my own, trust me.

As for the rest… Marvel Adventures probably won’t ever by my personal thing, but I’ll admit to thumbing through a copy of the Planet Hulk HC in Borders the other day, and it looked really, really cool. More of a sci fi/fantasy take on the Hulk than is the norm for the title, but I can see why they did it. How else to actually focus the story on the Hulk? Honestly, even after a brief glance at it, I can say that it was a much cleverer, more well-executed idea than I thought it’d be.

And that’s all I got. It’s been a kind of an exciting week for the Tennessee Titans in free agency, but so far not a lot of folks have actually been signed. Hopefully next week we’ll have more something more concrete to talk about there.

In the meantime, stay safe and have a great weekend.

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Dan Head is a utilities analyst and freelance writer. You can learn more about him and his work on his ComicSpace Page or by visiting his hosted forum at AwesomeStormJustice.com.

To get your comic reviewed here, email Dan at dan@paperbackreader.com.