|
PROJECT: SUPERIOR original graphic novel
(Best of the Week!)
|
Adhouse Books
Contributors: Martin Cendreda, Brian Wood, Jeremy Tankard, Bryan Lee O'Malley, Ragnar, Mike Dawson, Jeffrey Brown, J. Chris Campbell, Joel Priddy, Jay Ryan, Joe Meno, John Cassaday, Farel Dalrymple, Ronnie del Carmen, Jim Rugg, Brian Maruca, Dean Haspiel, Jason Lex, John Lucas, Paul Pope, Nick Abadzis, Nathan Jurevicius, Tim Biskup, Seonna Hong, Zack Soto, Graham Annable, R. Kikuo Johnson, Fermin Solis, Tony Consiglio, James Jean, Scott Morse, Rob Ullman, Doug Fraser, Scott Campbell, Onsmith, Paul Rivoche, Chris Pitzer, Tara McPherson, Jim Mahfood, John Kerschbaum, Daniel Krall, Jamie Tanner, Megan Whitmarsh, Victor Cayro, Joshua W. Cotter
Cover Artist: Paul Hornschemeier
Editors: Chris Pitzer, Scott Morse & Dean Haspiel
Price: $19.95 US |
Adhouse Books is a small publisher with a relatively small output, but whatever they put out seems to be impeccably designed and offer a breath of fresh air in an often stale marketplace. Usually you've got to have a fair number of misses before you get your big hit, but Adhouse has a damn near perfect strike rate in terms of quality and professionalism, and even if everything they've done wouldn't be on my personal A list, there hasn't been a single project that I didn't think was excellent comics. Project: Superior is their latest endeavor, an anthology featuring indy creators, animators and even a few mainstream writer/artists taking on superheroes. The result is amazingly beautiful to look at, sporadically brilliant and consistently entertaining. Project: Superior gives the superhero genre a nice little indy kick in the ass.
Nowhere in Project: Superior will you find your average superhero tale. The closest that superhero readers will get to familiar territory is the pastiche/parody of Jim Rugg & Brian Maruca's blaxploitation farce "Shock-A-Con" or the '60s Kirby/Lee tribute of Dean Haspiel or John Lucas, and even those are tinged with plenty of humor for the knowing comic book insider. However, Project: Superior fairly glows with enthusiasm for the genre, or at least its underpinnings, even as the creators poke fun at the notion of neurotic super-beings or take a meta look at how fictional superheroes affect real people's perceptions or even, in the case of Paul Rivoche, present a big, over-the-top Grant Morrison style superhero epic in just a few pages. There's no "too cool for the room" to be found here, and while there's definitely a sense that these creators see superheroes as just as screwed up as the rest of us, there's an undeniable affection for these caped icons as well.
If I were to name the overriding strength of Project: Superior (a difficult task, given that it's an anthology of many creators with strong individual styles), I would say that every project looks beautiful. Whether it's the pages with only shades of blue, only shades of red or the full color pages, the artwork is jaw-dropping on every page. Which isn't to say that every reader will like every artist, but there's no denying that in this book, every artist puts their best foot forward and produces some of their most beautiful work ever. I've got to particularly single out the stylish, duotone pinups of Ragnar and Rob Ullman, the painted red tones of John Cassaday and Paul Rivoche, the painted blue tones of Jim Mahfood and Daniel Krall, the retro faded color look from Jim Rugg and the perfect blend of stylized color and sepia tone paper of Paul Pope, R. Kikuo Johnson and James Jean.
I could write volumes on Project: Superior and not cover every aspect of what makes it so cool. It's got an impressive talent roster and a pretty large page count for them to play with, and the approaches to the stories are also many and varied. However, my favorite stories in this volume tend to be the ones that so perfectly blend the introspective, neurotic style of many slice-of-life indy cartoonists with the superhero genre. Martin Cendreda's story of "The Amazing Friends" posits superheroes as sort of lazy glory hounds, Mike Dawson's brilliant "Ace-Face" shows us a boy who grows up with cybernetic arms and doesn't find them to be much of a gift, Farel Dalrymple's "Hollis" gives us a vision of the superhero as outcast (without actually involving any superheroes) and Ronnie Del Carmen tells a strange, moving story that contrasts a young boy's letter to Stan Lee with his daydreams and his real existence in the Phillipines. Scott Campbell's "Pretty Okay Team" is a hilarious look at under-achieving superheroes with one of the funniest villain master plans I've ever read, John Kerschbaum's "The Superlatives" reads almost but not quite like a classic Fantastic Four style adventure with a twist and Tony Consiglio's tale of "Titanius" visiting a tailor is a hilarious juxtaposition of superheroic pomposity and a mundane chore.
While I'm not familiar with all of the creators in this book, I have heard the name of more than a few, and consider some of them favorites. Many of these indy champs bring to bear stories that play to their strengths, which is to say that they're similar to past works but not repetitive by any means. Jeffrey Brown's "Aw Shit, It's Cycloctopus!" has the same bizarre, funny style as his Bighead stories, Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca give their '70s blaxploitation homage Afrodisiac from Street Angel his own delightfully warped full-color adventure, Dean Haspiel brings his angular style and hipster vibe to "Bobbing on the Edge of Breakfast" and "Flight of the Yellow Kite" and James Jean and Paul Pope both provide trippy, emotional stories that blend real life drama with the melodrama of the capes and tights set. Scott Morse, eschewing the superhero parody style of Magic Pickle, instead embraces absurdity with "The Solutionist," a hero whose refusal to accept the easy answers provides plenty of laughs. Jim Mahfood similarly skips his usual hip-hop ethos in favor of a fourth-wall-breaking look at "One Page Filler Man," a terrific poke at the foibles of superheroes and anthology comics with some of Mahfood's best artwork yet.
In these pages, there are old favorites doing top-notch work and new favorites just waiting to be discovered. Humor, adventure, big ideas, romance, heartbreak, petty differences elevated to the stuff of cosmic conflict and cosmic problems reduced to the difficulties of day-to-day life, all of these things and more can be found in the pages of Project: Superior. It's a bit of a step to the left for both mainstream fans (who will probably find it "weird" at first glance) and indy fans (who will probably scoff at so many talented creators doing "superheroes"), but it's a step worth taking for everyone. Hats off to Adhouse Books for one of the best anthologies of 2005 so far, and indeed one of the best anthology books I've ever read. 10/10
Email Randy Lander comments about this review. |
