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SPOTLIGHT ON ACTIVE IMAGES
Comicraft is a name known well amongst comics readers, the lettering house headed up by Richard Starkings that has lettered uncountable numbers of books from Marvel, DC and plenty of smaller publishers as well. Less well known is that Comicraft also produces a small, high quality line of graphic novels under the name Active Images. It all started about three years ago, when Starkings put together the creative team of Joe Casey and Jose Ladronn, who had previously worked together on Marvel's Cable, and had them produce a work based on the anthropomorphic hippo Hip Flask, who had been the mascot of Comicraft in ads for a little while.
The resulting book was a surprisingly dark and beautifully illustrated piece of dystopian science-fiction, and from there, Starkings expanded his line slowly. He found out-of-print classics or uncollected works that most had never heard of, gave them sharp production values and put them on the market, and the results were almost always golden. Below you can see my reviews (sometimes alongside Don) of all the Active Images books to date:
Hip Flask: Unnatural Selection
Hip Flask: Elephantmen
Skidmarks
The Spiral Cage
Strange Embrace
Temptation
Tim Sale: Black and White
Every year, Starkings has several new releases for the San Diego Comicon, and this year was no different. What was different is that instead of one or maybe two new books, this time out, Starkings had a half-dozen new books to offer, including the latest chapter in the ongoing story of Hip Flask. I'm sad to say that I wasn't blown away by every entry this year, as I usually am, but that's perhaps to be expected in a crop that's roughly three times larger than normal, and even the books I wasn't crazy about have something to offer, starting with exceptional production values.
No two of the Active Images books are exactly alike. The graphic novels and comics come in varying sizes and page counts, and the only common factor is the high quality of design that you'd expect from a design house like Comicraft. However, each book does feature some sort of "behind the scenes" features, whether it's simply a sketchbook or, more often, an interview with the creator that gives a context to the work. This kind of attention to detail is one of the nice things about the Active Image line, beyond the "lost treasure" quality of most of the material.
Below you'll find reviews of the six newest Active Images graphic novels and comics, and if you've never checked out anything from the company before, I'd definitely recommend stopping in at your local retailer or the Active Images website and giving their books a look, because there's a lot of interesting, off-the-beaten-path stuff to be found there.
BALLAST
by Joe Kelly & Ilya (Active Images)
 There was a time when I was an adoring fan of everything Joe Kelly did, but as time has gone on, I've picked up on a stylistic choice that he makes that drives me absolutely crazy. That choice is front and center in Ballast, and the choice is this: Kelly does not like to tell his readers what is going on. He prefers to lay out scenes, characters, emotions and let the readers put together the puzzle pieces. While this is interesting as a writing experiment, it is often damned unsatisfying for the reader, and that's what I came away with when all is said and done about Ballast. It's interesting, has some exceptionally well-crafted scenes but is ultimately very unsatisfying.
The central notion of Ballast is made a lot more clear in the interviews in the back of the book than in the book itself. Basically, Mason is a soldier of fortune/assassin who has killed so many people that God took notice, and she (represented in this book by a precocious toddler with a foul-mouthed platypus sidekick) offered him a deal for salvation. So Mason now works for good causes, doesn't kill anyone thanks to the ghost guns he has on call, and has to suffer penance by enduring the wicked life he has lived up to this point in small, concentrated doses related to whatever weapon he used for murder. Like I said, lots of neat ideas in there, but it took three reads of the book plus the supplementary material in the back to work that out, and I'm still sort of assuming on the part of some of it. We never see the deal that Mason made, for example, and the story starts right in the middle and works its way to... well, later in the middle.
So that's the downside. Ballast is a four dollar prestige format issue that does not even remotely contain a complete story, and who knows how long until we see more issues of it. The upside is, the story concept is very strong, and the moment-to-moment writing and art are both excellent. Kelly and Ilya choreograph a great-looking firefight/rescue operation in the beginning of the book, and craft a heart-wrenching series of dastardly murders that show Mason's guilt and sins as almost insurmountable without an infinite capacity for forgiveness. Ilya's work here looks quite different from his work on Skidmarks, but it's very nice artwork, with a slightly cartoony vibe juxtaposed by impressive amounts of detail. Ilya is particularly good at using eyes to express key story points, from the wide eyes of the kidnapped child in the opening photo to the focused slits of Mason to the empty, heartbroken eyes of one of his early kills.
With an uncertain publishing schedule and a storytelling style that is deliberately obtuse and unfinished, I can't wholeheartedly recommend Ballast, but the craft in general is strong and if the whole thing were collected into one story, and the whole story has more in the way of backstory and a satisfying conclusion, I could definitely see coming back for it.
BRICKMAN BEGINS!
by Lew Stringer (Active Images)
 One of the things that Starkings has accomplished with his Active Images line is to expose readers like me to books that they never might have known existed. Brickman Begins is one such collection, collecting the work of Lew Stringer on a Batman parody that was published in England in the mid-'80s. I think. It's entirely possible that this is all-new work and the time period references from Alan Moore's introduction on into the interview in the back are all a gag on the unenlightened reader like myself. Because that's the sort of book Brickman is, it's an industry parody book that takes aim at a well-known icon (Batman) and pokes fun at him in a variety of stories that are one part classic Silver Age superhero structure and one part merciless mockery of that structure.
There are some very funny gags in the Brickman stories. Stringer plays up his hero as a lout, someone whose secret identity remains secret only because his supervillains and supporting cast are dumber than he is. His number one gadget is the "brickarang," which is essentially a thrown brick, and has exactly the effect upon its targets that you might expect. His villains are defeated through circumstances that would make Adam West howl with laughter, such as Tina (his sidekick) defeating the bloodsucking Gnat-Woman by wearing a false neck filled with helium. And his own crimefighting skills are a bit in doubt, as when he confesses that, in trying to get out of a grilled-cheese related deathtrap, he realized that all he needed was the H20 capsule in his belt. "Unfortunately," he says cheerfully, "I couldn't reach it and I was burnt to a crisp." Stringer blends the modified invulnerability of characters like Daffy Duck in with the superhero parody, creating a cross between classic cartoon storytelling and classic superhero storytelling, all with a dry humorous twist.
The downside to Brickman is that the gags begin to get old fast, and this is a pretty thick book of them. Once you've seen a couple of Brickman's lame foes and their lame origin stories (always with the same amusing catchphrase, "I was rejected by my fellow men, and had no choice but to turn to a life of crime"), you've kind of seen them all. This is not a graphic novel to be read all at once, but instead something to go back to for a few pages of gags before putting it down for a while, more akin to a collection of newspaper comic strips than a standard graphic novel. Those with a taste for superhero parody, however, would be well-served to check this out, especially those who enjoy the Silver Age spoof of Big Bang comics or the sharply observed indie-flavored humor of Lethargic Lad.
THE FLY CHRONICLES
by Michael Blaney (Active Images)
 Like Brickman, The Fly Chronicles is more of a collection of gag cartoons than a graphic novel per se. And like Brickman, The Fly Chronicles has one central gag that gets rather old. Essentially, The Fly Chronicles tells the tale of a family of flies, substituting cliches of a fly's life in with a blue-collar human life and milking that for laughs. I confess that I chuckled at a few of these one panel cartoons, but in general, I thought that Blaney went for pretty obvious humor, and worse, often into grossout humor that is very much not my cup of tea. Flies find vomit and garbage to be attractions, not turnoffs... I got the gag pretty quickly, but Blaney kept milking it until the end. That's not to say there aren't some generally funny bits here, including most of those that substituted fly swatters for guns in a variety of jokes ranging from barbs aimed at the NRA to the perfectly-named SWAT team, but I guess I just didn't find the central premise clever enough to keep my attention.
GUNPOWDER GIRL & THE OUTLAW SQUAW
by Don Hudson (Active Images)
 How Don Hudson isn't a superstar artist is an industry mystery I can't understand. Looking at the art in Gunpowder Girl & The Outlaw Squaw, it compares to the expressive, photo-realistic work of Greg Land or Butch Guice, with solid fundamentals and stylistic touches reminiscent of classic artists like John Buscema. Of the new books from Active Images, Gunpowder Girl is probably the best-looking, with the only competition coming from the lush full-color visuals of Hip Flask, something different enough that you really can't compare the two fairly. Gunpowder Girl is done in sepia tones on parchment style paper, and it's an effect that works perfectly for the old west setting and for Hudson's detailed artwork.
So the book looks great, how's the story? It's good, if not as noteworthy as the artwork. This originally was done as a full-color serial for the Comiculture anthology magazine, and that sort of shows in the pacing. The action is fast-paced and the story moves along at a good clip, but the characterization is pretty cookie-cutter. Hudson's story includes a complicated relationship between the two lead heroines and a local sheriff who takes a fatherly interest in one of the girls, but these stories all play out and resolve along familiar lines. Fortunately, in a genre like the western, familiarity is more acceptable than in an overworked comic book genre like superheroes, and so Gunpowder Girl & The Outlaw Squaw winds up reading like a lost treasure from Marvel in the '70s, when story fundamentals were key and the genres weren't quite so locked down as they are now. This probably all sounds harsher than I mean it to... essentially, Gunpowder Girl & The Outlaw Squaw is an action movie style story, more heavily focused on plot and action set-pieces than deep characterization, and that more or less works.
The tricky thing about Gunpowder Girl & The Outlaw Squaw for me is that the protagonists are, in a lot of ways, the villains of the piece, but Hudson doesn't really acknowledge that. I suppose there's a long tradition of outlaw heroes in the old west genre, but usually their law enforcement enemies are made out to be corrupt or just as brutal. In this case, the girls are essentially thieves and murderers, and their pursuers are law enforcement types just trying to do their jobs. For all that, the girls are fairly sympathetic, if only because they're the underdogs from the start, but it's hard to root for them to win when that essentially means rooting for a couple of cold-blooded killers whose humanity comes more or less in how they relate to each other rather than to their fellow man.
HIP FLASK: MYSTERY CITY #1
by Richard Starkings & Jose Ladronn (Active Images)
 The latest installment of Hip Flask is a sumptuous collection of beautiful science-fiction imagery and a story that is, well, a little difficult to follow. The Hip Flask series is a bit frustrating, because it's well-crafted, but the year-long wait between issues makes the decision to tell an ongoing and not altogether straightforward narrative somewhat puzzling and frustrating. I suspect that when the story ends and it is all put together, everything will make sense, but when read in issue chunks like this one, the effect is akin to reading a bunch of vaguely-connected vignettes set against a social backdrop that is not entirely explained to the reader.
Despite the lack of clarity in the storytelling, though, there are still a number of intriguing elements to the story. The way that the half-human/half-animal "elephantmen" have assimilated into this futuristic society is fascinating, and I love seeing little things like their anti-science bias or their haunted memories pop up over the course of the story. In some ways, Mystery City is a pure noir story with science-fiction elements as background, but the experiments that created the "elephantmen" are woven deeply into the story and turn it into something more akin to cerebral, sociological science-fiction. Though we only see any of them for a page or two total, there's also a very interesting cast here, from the scientist who created the "elephantmen" in the first place to shady characters like Camel Joe (a cute visual in-joke as well) and the Kingpin-like industrialist/crimelord Obadiah Horn.
While the story tantalizes, the artwork positively engrosses the reader. Ladronn's work is done in a lush style that mixes the detail of European artists like Moebius with stark, larger-than-life characters who pop off the page like Camel Joe or Hip Flask himself. Ladronn drags the reader into this world, and surrounds us with technological detail, bizarre and alien human/animal hybrids and the familiar realities of clothes, bullets and other mundane elements of modern existence. The resulting blend is both utterly fantastic and believably real, and as a visual piece of work, Mystery City is a triumph. I just wish that the story were either clearer or more self-contained, especially given the infrequent publication schedule.
SOLSTICE
by Steven T. Seagle & Justin Norman (Active Images)
 This is a case of saving the best for last, because Solstice is definitely my favorite of the new Active Images offerings for 2005. The art is not as amazing as that in Hip Flask or Gunpowder Girl, though it's certainly nothing to sneeze at, but the story and art work perfectly well together to tell a non-linear tale of family loyalty, abusive relationships and obsession, centered around a quest for the fountain of youth. Seagle's story is about a young man who has basically subsumed his own life into the desires of his father, a wealthy industrialist and complete bastard whose obsessive desire to find immortality has cost him every human relationship... not that he cares.
Solstice is told from the point of view of Hugh, a son so trapped by a love of his father that he can't see that his father has basically destroyed his life. Everything that might have brought Hugh momentary happiness is taken away when his father decides it doesn't fit into their goals, and his father does everything from selling him to someone for a night of sex to (it is suggested) trying to murder him by setting him on fire. Hugh could easily have been a completely unlikable protagonist, seen as weak-willed and maybe even stupid, but Seagle sets up a believable emotional dedication that just makes his father look more evil as we learn the things that he's done to Hugh in the search for the fountain.
While Solstice is in many ways a think piece, diving into snippets of the past to tell the story of a flawed familial relationship, that is not to say that it lacks a strong plot or any action. Instead, while Hugh is recounting the story of his relationship with his father and their quest for immortality, he's on the latest quest, a search in Chile for the fabled fountain of youth. The story begins with his father's death as they're on the run from a group of natives who ambushed the party, and the story jumps around to show the attack, the aftermath and the tail end of the quest, which comes with a surprising twist that puts a new spin on the relationship that has driven the story. Solstice is a troubling look at abusive relationships and obsession, a story that keeps the reader turning pages until the end and leaves them thinking about what they've read, and I'm very glad that Starkings and Active Images rescued Solstice from its unfinished fate.
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