Curia Regis

Creator: Robin Hoelzmann

So last weekend my love of the comics medium was reinvigorated after attending the International Comic Festival in Kendal. There were some great events to attend. Hearing Bryan Talbot talking about the history of anthropomorphism was a joy, and Peter Doherty talking to Sean Phillips about his journey through comics was incredible, especially as there was an exhibition of Sean Phillips' work in the centre (as well as numerous exhibitions throughout Kendal). Equally as thrilling was the Comics Clock Tower, full of creators to whom you could chat and buy their work.

It is here in the tower that you get a real sense of how vibrant the comic scene is in Britain. It is here that you can come across some unexpected gems. It is here that you find something like Curia Regis for sale.

At the point at which I picked up this comic, I was really wandering whether I could justify the expense of a completely different book. I'd spent more than I wanted (actually that's a lie – I'd spent less than I'd wanted but more than I knew my (non comics reading) wife would tolerate) when two books caught my eye. The first was Widdershins by Kate Ashwin, which looks amazing and is definitely on my list of things to buy post pay day. The Widdershins artist was not at the table, but the Robin Hoelzemann, the brains behind Curia Regis, was and she showed me Widdershins and then drew attention to her own comic. A little description of what it contained, and a look at the interior art and I was sold. Three issues on special offer for the festival were quickly snapped up.

Now as I've already mentioned, I'd bought quite a few comics already (reviews of which will be appearing here) but the first comics I read on returning home that night were the Curia Regis issues. It's been five days since I bought them, and I've read them three times already. Needless to say, I like this comic.

The storyline takes place in an analogue of eighteenth century France. In 1724, with the mob at the gates, the Duke of Astair kills himself. Twenty six years later in January 1740, the King Regent's nephew and the King Regent's spymaster kill each other in a duel, manipulated by the Marquise Maren Reinette D'Astair. We then learn more about Maren, her family, friends and motives, or some of them.

The story is very much in its infancy, but is intriguing in and of itself. The comic itself is quite a dense, rewarding reading experience. Nothing is spoon fed to the reader. As an example, the years between the prologue when the duke commits suicide, and chapter one when the duel takes place, can only be deduced when, at the start of issue 2 there is a notice of an auction taking place on 3^rd April 1740, and a caption reveals we are three months from the duel. Following the death of the spymaster, Maren finds a note with a list of rebels. This list contains the names of several of Marin's friends and associates, some of whom are revealed as we read more about our main protagonist. This is the sort of stuff that makes rereading the issues such a pleasure, and it provides a certain amount of intellectual satisfaction when you start to piece things together. A little work gives a great deal of pleasure, as any reader of literary novels will acclaim.

Aesthetically this books looks beautiful. A great deal of thought seems to have gone into the presentation. Opening each issue shows the inside cover to be a maroon which for some reason strikes me as very regal, especially with the simple but elegant dark stripe down the outside edge. My description doesn't really do it justice, but it is something that really adds to the overall look.

Interior art is very pleasing to the eye, all clean lines and clear page design lead the eye nicely across the panels. There is a great deal of attention to body language. In the prologue we see the duke's servant Timothy suspiciously nervous. There isn't a panel he in which we see him when he isn't doing fiddling, or rubbing his hands together, or twitching. It's subtly, but effectively done. In Curia Regis we never see static figures in the background either. Everybody seems to be doing something that evokes the feel of a world populated by real people, of which we are only able to focus on one particular story. From the second issue the art switches from black and white to colour. I'm not sure why there was a shift, but it works well, adding an extra dimension to the art, with the colours seemingly carefully chosen to enhance the work, resisting the danger to suddenly make it all kaleidoscopic.

All in all this is a wonderful book to find. The comic is online here so you can click and see what you think (and that's also the reason I've not posted any interior art here - go to the website and see it in context of the story). I strongly advise you to buy the physical comics themselves, for ease of rereading and cross referencing, and simply because they are beautiful and deserve a wider audience. From what I've read, Robin has quite a busy job so I suspect issue four is going to take a while, but it is definitely something worth waiting for.

Capsule Review: Fatale #16 (Image)

Write: Ed Brubaker
Artist: Sean Phillips
Colours: Elizabeth Breitweiser

It’s the nineties and Jo has amnesia and has shacked up with a dysfunctional grunge band. Lance, our main protagonist, is robbing banks to fund the making of a video he hopes will help get them back on track. The singer is based, a little too obviously, on Syd Barrett as he starts to lose his mind and talent. There are others, a guitarist who suffers from nightmares, a practicing doctor and the singer’s girlfriend. I think that is what their roles are. The guitarist is a definite as it is shown in this issue, but the other two just are not memorable enough for me to care what relationship they have to the story. Meanwhile a serial killer with a predilection for necrophilia is hunting for Jo, having previously believed that he’d killed her and that her fresh corpse was waiting for him back in his lair.

Jo seems a little more manipulative than we’ve previously seen, and that makes her character somewhat unpleasant and difficult to empathise with. Sean Phillips turns in another excellent issue of art, his tone retaining and emphasising the dread atmosphere, beautifully supported by the palette of Elizabeth Breitweiser. His portrayal of Jo is perfect, keeping her alluring and sensual without showing too much. This is no titillating pornographic comic. Still there is one misstep when the scene switches to Darcy, the singer’s girlfriend, and we see her on the toilet, knickers around her knees. I’m no prude but I’m not sure what purpose this panel serves. Is it just to try to be edgy (which it isn’t)? There are any number of images that could be used so why this one? We’ve not seen anyone else on the loo; it isn’t a slice of life story where the protagonist wants to bare all; there has been no horror or threat focused on the loo (or if there has been I’ve missed it);  Darcy isn’t even a particular focus of the story thus far. It just seems a little gratuitous and lets the whole thing down somewhat.

As accomplished as it is, I have some reservations about Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Fatale at the moment. Originally this was meant to be a twelve issue series, before Ed Brubaker extended it to an ongoing series. Unfortunately it is starting to seem a little stretched, and I’m unsure as to how much life this particular concept has in it. We’re only on chapter two, so things may change, but up to now this seems like, yet again, Jo is going to mesmerise the men around her, and the men will meet a sticky end and likely will never be the same again. I’ve loved this series, but the story needs a resolution unless there is some major development. Otherwise we could be another sixteen issues down the line and reading about some men falling for Jo and coming to a sticky end again, and again, and again….That failure to live up to its original promise would be the real horror.

Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon

Writer: Matt Fraction
Artists: David Aja, Javier Pulido (Alan Davis/Mark Farmer on Young Avengers)
Colour Artist: Matt Hollingsworth

A Page 45 Comic Book of the Month

Clint Barton (aka Hawkeye): “Ok...this looks bad.”

Page 45 have been running the Comic Book of the Month Club for about six years now, the idea being that they recommend a comic every month and those that sign up get 20% discount. There's no tie in, and you don't have to buy each one. It's a wonderful way to expand one's literary horizons, especially given that the people there have very good taste. I've probably not enjoyed two of the books, and given there's been seventy four of them so far, that's an excellent hit rate. It has to be said also that even the ones that missed at least had something interesting about them. The seventy fifth Comic Book of the Month (or CBOTM) was announced at the start of April – Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon. A super-hero book for the first time in the club's six year history.

I am not a big fan of modern day super-hero comics. I've tried to like them, and always find myself gravitating back towards them, only to leave after a year or so. For the most part they are extremely derivative and incestuous. An example would be the prevalence of major supporting characters and villains that first emerged fifty years ago, or at best twenty years ago. They seem to have lost their sense of fun and are written as if they want to be taken seriously as adult works, but have the most ludicrous plots this side of Dan Brown. An instance of this would be known psychotic Norman Osborne being made head of the US intelligence agency, or whatever SHIELD is, a few years ago due to one action during an invasion by aliens. That would work in a comic aimed at children up to the age of fourteen, as they used to be. Aimed at an adult audience, that sort of weak writing just does not hold water.

Anyway I don't want to digress too much into my feelings on a genre of comics. I just felt it necessary to lay the context for this brief review of Hawkeye.

So what did I make of Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon? It has a lot to recommend it. Stephen Holland at Page 45 said that “...it's not even a super-hero comic” and he's right. Five of the chapters are extremely light on the tropes you would expect of the genre, and the first chapter especially is close to wonderful, without anything that would indicate this was part of the whole tights and capes thing. It feels much more of a crime comic, and one can't help but speculate as to whether the creators would like to have pursued that route, with Russian gangsters and a flawed, and very vulnerable hero, trying to do the right thing. At times it reminded me very much of Frank Miller's run on Daredevil in feel, when Miller was desperately trying to disguise the crime stories he wanted to write. David Aja's art especially seemed to evoke this, particularly in the scene in which Clint Barton enters the underground casino.

Matt Fraction and David Aja were unfortunately only together for the first three issues here. Unfortunate because, despite the couple of issues which I will be coming to, the there was real promise of something a little different. Matt Fraction's plots feel fresh and his dialogue is sharp. His handling of foreign languages is brilliant and funny:

Ringmaster: “Ladies and gentlemen. (French stuff.) (Wait, maybe some Italian too)”

Trust me this comes across much better on the page. The real star is David Aja though, which is why it was such a shame he only did three chapters of this book. The design is beautiful, but it fits perfectly into a seamless storytelling. There's a scene where our two heroes are walking across the floor to some stairs at a posh circus party, and Aja executes this with such grace it makes you want to shout out with joy. It is this quality that makes this shortcomings all the more galling.

Let's take the first problem I found. In the first issue, Matt Hollingsworth uses a nice subtle colour code to illustrate time, with pages that take place later in the narrative in a predominantly blue pallette. It worked well until the Russian thugs visit Hawkeye in a vets, which utilises the colours to let us know this is later in the narrative. At the bottom of the page we cut to a long rectangular window seen from the outside, and that blue palette. The very next panel, at the top of the next page shows Hawkeye being thrown through a window and landing outside. The same blue colours are used, so I didn't click that this was going back in the story again. I could have noticed that the window was different, but these were action scenes so the pace is fast. The average reader doesn't slow down to examine every detail in the panel during these scenes, or if they do the artist has usually done their job incorrectly (although admittedly there are times when you want the reader to slow down during an actions sequence). A minor thing maybe, but it pulls you out of the story, and thus shatters the spell that the creators have been trying (successfully) to weave to that point.

The second major problem is much more intrusive. The thing with super-hero comics is that they usually rely too much on prior knowledge on the characters and what has happened to them. In order for this book to really succeed as a self-contained effort, it would need to be a satisfying read for a reader with no prior knowledge of the characters inside. To this end I tired to approach it as if I did not have any knowledge of the characters (not too hard as I've never really read much of Hawkeye outside his Avengers exploits, and I know nothing of Young Avengers). So Kate Bishop, the other major character in this story, is introduced thus:

Clint Barton (aka Hawkeye): “Kate took over for me as Hawkeye once upon a time when I was...well dressing up like a ninja, sort of, is the short version. She is without doubt the finest and most gifted bowman I've ever met but she's like nine years old and spoiled rotten.”

She's nine years old. This brings up some major problems with the whole story, but the first thing I wondered was why Matt Fraction didn't bother to tell the artist, or why David Aja decided to draw her more like a young woman the a pre-pubescent girl. There are other problems at work here too, such as why Matt Fraction, having said she's nine years old, then tells her one of the reasons he wants her to work with him is that he doesn't want to sleep with her, which together with the images leads the reader to think that maybe she's not nine years old after all, but closer to twenty. Kate is persistently portrayed as being sexually mature until Javier Pulido draws her being unmasked in a later story, in a panel swiped directly from one of the Hernandez brothers in which she looks just like a little girl. There's also the unlikely ability of a little girl to pass herself off as a major criminal, to mix in adult society with ease, and to drive a car like an expert. Normally you could pass this off as the sidekick genre trope, but the book moves so firmly away from these tropes that this jars badly. We're shown Hawkeye getting consistently hurt and ending up in hospital at times. It goes to such great lengths to present a much more adult tale, and this aspect just ruins all of that.

The two chapters drawn by Javier Pulido are decent enough, but it is a bit of a let down after the opening chapters, and does not appear to advance the plot any from chapter two, at the end of which it appears that Clint Barton has drawn the eye of many of the heavy hitters in the underworld. In fact my last main criticism of this book is the inclusion of the Young Avengers chapter at the end. If anything it should have come near the start to illuminate the relationship between Kate Bishop and Clint Barton. As a self-contained work it would really have been more useful to have just included the issues that advanced the overarching story, unless this has not been finished or even dealt with. The Young Avengers chapter instead just reads like filler.

Surprisingly enough I did actually enjoy reading this book, especially the first three chapters, despite the above criticisms. As I said earlier, the standard set by Fraction, Aja and Hollingsworth was so high that the faults, when they appear, impact a lot more than they would normally have done. I would still urge all to read this, even if just for the consummate skill Aja shows in his page design and storytelling. That's half the fun of participating in the CBOTM club. I would never have picked this book up on my own, and so would have been unaware of just how good Aja can be. Now he's an artist I'll be on the look out for, and definitely someone I'll be investigating further, and so the sum of my knowledge becomes a little greater, and my appreciation a little deeper.

The New Deadwardians (Vertigo)

Writer: Dan Abnett
Artist: I.N.J Culbard

A Page 45 Comic Book of the Month

“Chief Superintendent Carstairs: What the did, they did with the most principled intentions.

Chief Inspector George Suttle: They ruined the world, Carstairs.”

In the week that Margaret Thatcher died, it is hard to think about Dan Abnett and I.N.J Culbard's “The New Deadwardians” without reading a condemnation of the former Prime Minister's policies into the narrative. For some she was a figure to be admired, somebody who got Britain respected in the world community again. The Daily Mail newspaper had the headline, “The Woman Who Saved Britain” on the morning following her death. For others it was a cause for unprecedented celebration. Whatever one's political stance, the one thing that can be said for certain is that, in light of the diametrically opposed reactions to her passing, she was a divisive figure who left a divided country.

The theme of a divided Britain, along lines of class and class privilege, runs right through this book. Some sort of disease has run through the working class, turning them into mindless zombies, greedy for human flesh. To combat this the ruling classes took what they called the “Cure” which turned them into vampires. The poor were kept in zones away from the ruling classes who were now immortal, or at least unable to die as they were already dead. There are demonstrations and riots by the common folk who have not succumbed to the curse. This all seems very symbolic of Britain in the Eighties.

Chief Inspector George Suttle is the last homicide detective left in the Metropolitan Police. His department has all but been dissolved as there are no murders, at least among the vampiric ruling classes; until one of them turns up dead with none of the three known ways they can die (impalement of the heart, decapitation and incineration). The subsequent investigation leads him right up to the very highest power in the land.

Our protagonist comes across as a decent sort of man. He looks after his elderly and infirm mother, he dislikes the derogatory term “brights”, which is used to refer to the common folk who are not zombies, He takes his maid for the cure after she is bitten by a zombie, and speaks respectfully to all he comes across. He is haunted by memories of the war fought against the zombies in 1861, and the acts he had to commit for Queen and Country. It is through Suttle's musings that we come to the second main theme of the book, that of the nature of life. In giving up their lives to become undead, they lose all their old desires, dreams and motivations. They lose all that made life worth living and so for them they are merely existing. Some are able to fool themselves, but like Antoine Roquentin in Satre's Nausea, Suttle is tormented by the existentialist dilemma. In living forever they have lost their life. They are no longer living, merely existing.

There is much to like about this book. I.N.J. Culbard produces some attractive art. Detailed backgrounds are used where they are required to communicate some crucial part of the story (e.g. the Houses of Parliament where the murder victim is found, and for all establishing shots). However for large parts of the book the backgrounds are blank. This helps focus the eye on the characters, emphasising where the importance lies – this is a book about people and how they are treated. There is also a symbolic element to this, as the walls remain empty of décor and detail in the same way that the lives of the vampires are empty.

Dan Abnett's script is tight. He manages to tie everything up in eight issues where some would have tried to string it out as long as possible. His dialogue is realistic and there are some nice, humorous touches, as in the following exchange between Suttle and his driver Bowes:

“George Suttle: I'm not familiar with the area myself. I live in Zone-A, Marylebone.

Bowes (muttering): You don't live nowhere at all, mate.”

Unfortunately there are some areas where this strip lets itself down, not least in it's treatment of women. There are only really four women characters in it. Suttle's mother serves to comment on George himself. George's maid is there to be a victim of a zombie attack so we can see how wonderful Suttle is. Sapphire, the whore who falls for George incredibly quickly and for no discernible reason other than it served the plot as she later becomes a kidnap victim. The murder victim's mother is there to mourn her husband, and her daughter is a stereotypical firebrand feminist who is defined by her stance against men. It is perhaps a little unfair to pick up on this here as The New Deadwardians is far from alone in this depiction of women, and I don't think it was a deliberate decision to have all the females defined by the relationship to men, but it stands out in a book which appears to want to point out the problems with social inequality due to class.

These gender issues are a shame as this is otherwise a wonderful book, with memorable scenes and with a desire to say something, to reflect something about our society. I'd still recommend purchasing this as it is well written, but the problems with gender are to the detriment of the work as a whole.

Cherubs! (Dark Horse)

Script and Layouts: Bryan Talbot

The first Cherubs book came out in 2007 and, whilst a satisfying read on its own, it did not complete the tale. Due to the artist, Mark Stafford, having to work on the book when he could whilst he spent earned a living, the conclusion to the tale has only just seen print. Fortunately for the reader new to the story, the whole thing is now available from Dark Horse.

Cherubs concerns five cherubim, bored in heaven and desperate for something exciting to happen:

“Yeah! There's nothin' excitin'? No sex, no war, no crime, no violence, no sex...”

“Y-you mean like on Earth? Now that's a happenin' place, dude!”

“But we never get sent there anymore! Last time was durin' the Renaissance, y'know posin' for those Italian guys...”

The trouble is that they soon encounter some unwelcome excitement when they witness the archangel Abaddon murdering the Grand Council before heading down to Earth and framing them for it. In quick order they descend themselves, determined to find Abaddon and clear their names. Along the way they meet a “tart with a heart of gold”, are pursued by two seraphim enforcers who cannot be stopped, and encounter vampires, werewolves, zombies and other supernatural entities.

This book is packed with pop culture references, and it is great fun spotting them all, from Terminator and Dirty Harry through to Alan Moore and Ossie Osbourne, and many more in between. Some are obvious, some you don't immediately get, but it certainly feels good when you suddenly make the connection.

Mark Stafford's art was new to me, and it has a certain cartoonish, frenetic quality to it. There was an interview on the Comic Book Resources website (here) with Bryan Talbot where he mentions that the strip was informed by the anarchic British strips such as the Bash Street Kids by Leo Baxendale, and Stafford's art certainly lends it that sort of feel. The extras at the back of the book show a comparison of Bryan Talbot's initial layouts and Mark Stafford's subsequent pencils, and the difference, and the flavour that he brings to the art, is obvious.

Bryan Talbot delivers a tight, funny script that packs a lot in. There were periods in the first half where I felt my interest fading a little, but the final third is a complete triumph, and had me laughing out loud at several points. There is enough depth here to suggest that Bryan is criticising certain aspects of popular culture and modern life, but at heart what the script seems to want to really do is grab you by the balls and entertain the crap out of you, which it certainly does.

Overall, for a fun and entertaining read that you will find yourself returning to again and again, even if just for certain scenes where you see/read something and realise, “That's what that was!”.