Axe Cop

"One day, at the scene of a fire, the cop found the perfect fireman axe. That was the day he became Axe Cop"


So begins Axe Cop, an online comic strip that is drawn by Ethan Nicholle (age 29), and written by his younger brother Malachai (age 5). According to Ethan, his father has 'very healthy loins.'

The strip is wonderfully drawn, and the storyline should be familiar to anyone who thought or said anything at the age of five.

Read Axe Cop here.

Spoiler: Don't get too attached to Axe Cop's partner, Flute Cop. He becomes Dinosaur Soldier in the first episode!

I love this baby you guys

Just in case you're unfamiliar, I'd like to take a moment to introduce you to Kate Beaton and Hark! A Vagrant.



She has a degree in history. She's from Nova Scotia. She also draws historically-flavoured comics, frequently Canadian in content. And she's freaking hilarious beyond mortal comprehension.

Kate Beaton makes me want to stop drawing comics. She's funnier than I could ever hope to be, and her quick, seemingly-effortless drawings depict such specific emotions and gestures (especially the facial expressions!), that I can't help but laugh out loud at each strip.

I once emailed her to tell her what a crush I have on her comics, then regretted it instantly feeling like nothing more than a creepy, weird fan (of which I'm sure she has many). She soon responded with modest words of thanks.

Fact: Kate Beaton is a class act all the way.

In short, read her comics. Love them. Buy Kate's book. Support her.

This is one of those moments that will make you proud to be Canadian.

SUPERMAN MAKES YOU SMART!

While anyone who peruses this blog on a regular basis is clearly aware that the stern, stoic and no-nonsense journalist-types you'll find around here have no use for meaningless diversions such as comic books (shut up, peanut gallery...), we may just have to re-evaluate our position--because apparently, they can make your kids s-m-r-t (Telegraph). So if you'll excuse me, I think I'll take the rest of the day off to get educated.

A Comic About Overpopulation

Here's this week's Tom The Dancing Bug, an award-winning weekly comic that's usually political and funny. Today it's political and depressing. The strip draws attention to the world's worst environmental problem--yes, worse than climate change. Pretty much nails our situation. (Salon)

To paraphrase third-way politicians, we need to be tough on global warming, and tough on the causes of global warming.

Salon has a few really good cartoons, by the way. Check out last week's This Modern World. It's funny because it's true.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

This week saw the release of Green Lantern: First Flight, the first feature-length adventure of the Emerald Crusader. It comes hot on the heels of news that Canadian-born Ryan Reynolds (CBC)-- one-time paramour of You Can't Do That on Television star Alanis Morrisette--has been cast as test pilot Hal Jordan, the man with the verdant vim. We'll see, I guess. Reynolds is best known for wearing a fat suit in the only Regina-shot movie featured in Roger Ebert's book Your Movie Sucks. On the other hand, the film is being directed by Martin Campbell, who also directed the best two Bond films of the last 30 years as well as the pilot episode of my all-time favourite TV show, Homicide: Life on the Street. So who knows how this movie will turn out.

Interestingly, Gil Kane, the original artist on the 1959 sci-fi revamp of Green Lantern (there was an earlier magic-based GL during the 1940s), based the character's look on Paul Newman.

Here's the 60s Filmation version of Green Lantern, which is pretty close to the Green Lantern comics of that era and probably miles away from what we'll see in the upcoming Ryan Reynolds movie. Pity.

Friday News Wrap Up

Here are a few news items to check out if you're looking to melt your eyes against a computer screen this weekend.

First, there's this story of a Brit who, covinced the Americans were hiding UFO evidence, hacked the hell out of military and NASA computers. He's facing extradition to the U.S., which under normal circumstances would be reasonable for cyber-crime (albeit pretty harmless cyber-crime, $700 K in alleged damage aside). The problem is that the hacker, 43-year-old Gary McKinnon, has Asberger's syndrome and is likely to be emotionally demolished by an experience in the U.S. courts. Nevertheless the U.S. is still pushing for extradition. And his own country is not doing enough to protect him. Story's here (Guardian). Hey, maybe then the Americans can just extraordinarily rendition him to Syria to be tortured. Save all those pesky jail and court costs.

Second, Corazon Aquino, a person and newsmaker I'd shamefully forgotten about, has died. Aquino was a former president of the Philippines who led an uprising to overthrew the regime of son of a bitch dictator (and naturally, friend of Ronald Reagan) Ferdinand Marcos, whose wife was the famous Imelda of the 10,000 shoes. Aquino was an important woman--and this obit in the Globe And Mail deserves your time.

Finally, here's a funny, sarcastic cartoon showing how the U.S. is totally screwed. (Salon) And that's as good a note as any to head to the bar on. Cheers!

Captain America Lives Again

It's common knowledge by now that superheroes never really die. Superhero death and resurrection is at this point completely meaningless. It's so common place that's it the source of constant jokes in the comics industry.

A couple of years ago Marvel Comics decided to kill off Captain America on a slow news day and it turned into a big event for them. But Marvel doesn't trust retailers for some strange reason so nobody knew in advance to order enough copies to meet the demand at the time. What could have been a huge payoff for everybody was quickly lost by poor planning 0n Marvel's part.

Well Marvel is trying to create buzz again with the latest issue of Captain America - issue #600 and once again they didn't trust the retailers to know what they were planning. (Robot 6) Just the standard memo "Trust us, order lots, there will be a national news announcement." Marvel is even allowing comic stores to sell the comic (for additional shipping charges) early on Monday June 15, 2009 when the "news" breaks instead of the standard comic day Wednesday but only if retailers had managed to jump through all of Marvel's magic hoops and were paying attention when they briefly solicited it. More than a few didn't bother to take Marvel up on it.

So the big announcement is that Captain America is coming back to life. (Robot 6) But this time there's actually news going on in the world and nobody really cares. Life is always less interesting than death in the news. My favorite is CNN's take. "Perhaps he should be called Captain Phoenix?"


But there already is a new Captain America - former Cap sidekick Bucky and I guess he's going to get moved to the sidelines. He currently runs around in a shiny Captain America costume with a handgun and the shield. And truth be told he makes a far more interesting Captain America than Steve Rogers ever did. Sure the handgun seems a little controversial but then it's not like Cap never carried a gun before.

Three In The Afternoon

The following items are chewing on my ankles, demanding attention.

1. WE SHOULD BE TOLERANT OF OTHER CULTURES An eight-year-old Saudi Arabian child successfully divorces her 50-year old husband after courts originally said she'd have to wait until puberty to request permission to leave the union. Ha ha! Take that, you smarmy, preachy human rights advocates! I dare you to call Saudi Arabia a medieval backwater now! (Yahoo!)

2. ALBERTA: IGNORANT AND PROUD Live in Alberta? Have kids? Want to indoctrinate them in your extreme fundamentalist Christian beliefs, like evolution is pretend and gay people are made of satan, without some "public school" butting in and teaching them "facts"? Things are looking up. (CBC)

3. TORTURE 'TOON the new This Modern World is pretty good. If you haven't read TMW before, it's a long-running weekly political comic and maybe the best of its kind. Check it out here. (Salon)

21st Century American Capitalism ...

as explained by Calvin and Hobbes.

h/t to Crooks and Liars

Now I've Watched The Watchman Too!

And I have to say my friend Paul Dechene is, once again, being a big softy. Then again, he's a Battlestar Galactica fan so I can't say I'm surprised.

I liked Watchmen well enough. The effort the director, Zack Snyder, put into keeping the story faithful borders on superheroic (haha) given the complexity of the material. I have no idea how someone who hasn't read the comic would understand half of what's going on in this flick. And that's one of the movie's problems: in it's attempt to honour the source material it stiffens up. You can see this most in the acting but it also permeates scene design--for example, some moments feel overblown, phoney or contrived because they're too focused on slavish recreation to the comic.

Well, the movie isn't a comic. They're different art forms with different rules, and sucessful adaptations of comics neeed to recognize that and be brave enough to play things a little differently. Especially when you're dealing with a comic that has more to it than punching out Lex Luthor.

One big problem Snyder has is that he's trying to adapt this particular comic book--a near-legendary comic that's a deconstruction of comics themselves. Yes, on one level Watchmen is an examination/commentary on superheroes, power, vigilanteism, etc. But on the deeper level Watchmen the comic is about time and its nature, and metaphors about time fill the book.

For example: one character, Dr. Manhattan, is a disintegrated physicist who now exists outside linear "reality". For him, moments are experienced in a non-sequential order: First he's in 1985 having a fight with his girfriend, now he's a child learning about watchmaking (speaking of time and rich, layered meanings) from his father in the 1930s, now he's locked in a particle discombobulatron getting microwaved-up into an atomic superhero, now he's on Mars having another fight with his girlfriend.

Dr. Manhattan's experience of time parallels the comic reader's experience of this dense graphic novel: you can read it in order but you can also experience it in a different but equally meaningful way if you open it to a random page (which you'll end up doing because the freaking thing weighs three pounds and takes a couple of days to read so you'll have to double back through pages just to keep the plot straight in your head).

Comics, because of their structure as sequential self-contained panels depicting a series of frozen moments, are an ideal medium to talk about time, it's relation to space (i.e. the space on a page) and even the fetishism of/obsession over the meaning inherent to a so-called "frozen moment". Watchmen's creator Alan Moore (who has vehemently disowned this movie) knew all this as a very, very clever comic creator, and he dicked around with these themes in Watchmen, his most famous and best-selling work.

In Watchmen, Moore's nudging his readers to ponder the nature of time--which, from what little I understand, the physicists say is wildly different from what we think it is.

Put it all together (like a dissambled watch!) and it's called a thesis: something real art has and something this movie lacks.

So Is Watchmen the movie better than Watchmen the comic? No way. But I got a kick out of it. Rorshach, a deranged Batman-type, and Dr. Manhattan, a big, blue, naked Superman with a big (really big!) atomic shlong, are two great characters. And I liked the action, and the gore, and Ozymandius' genetically-modified lynx and all the pretty colours and how shiny everything was.

And the changed ending was fine although I'm not convinced it makes sense. (I think it could've worked but they didn't sell me on it).

Then again, I'm not Alan Moore. He'd hate this thing.

Final review: "A" for effort. "B" for entertainment. But "F" for thinking this was artistically do-able. (And also for the lame-o"Forrest Gump" classic rock soundtrack. That really, really sucked. Jimi Hendrix? Simon and Garfunkel? Oh, come on. Been there, seen that, knock it off.)

Recession Hits The Comics

It looks like prairie dog is ahead of its time, again.

Apparently Village Voice Media--the corporation that owns alt weeklies including the Village Voice, Minneapolis' City Paper, Seattle Weekly and many others--has cut way back on comic strips, suspending their publication across the newspaper chain. The Association of Alternative News Weeklies Web site reports syndicated weekly cartoonists Tom Tomorrow (This Modern World) and Matt Bors (Idiot Box) are losing subscribers.

Tom Tomorrow (real name Dan Perkins) says on his blog: "Village Voice Media is hurting in this economy like everyone else, and their corporate response is to “suspend” cartoons and (I think) all other syndicated material across the chain, said suspension to last at least through the rest of the first quarter, and quite possibly beyond."

Of course prairie dog doesn't run any comic strips and never has since I've worked here (although we used to run a one-panel political cartoon by Jack Lefcourt, until he retired it), so once again we're in front of the curve. Arrgh.

Ironically, comics supporters have argued for years that strips are one of the most popular features of newspapers but despite this assertion the daily comic has been in constant decline for, well, most of my life. Remember Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes? Yeah, that's because you're old (I'm old too). You don't see work like that anymore. In fact you don't get much of anything in the dailies, unless it's recycled strips about families or talking pets.

There are a lot of stories behind newspaper comics' decline, but one basic truth: it's a crummy, often unappreciated gig. Over the years comics been allotted less space, they've been subject to censorship (see Doonsbury, The Boondocks) and their creators have been burned out by deadlines and hassles (in Watterson's case, battles with his syndicate over the licensing of his characters, which he was opposed to on principal). The economics almost always stink for cartoonists, the work is time-consuming and labour intensive and it takes years to develop the skills. And the pay is bad.

Basically, nobody in their right mind would ever go into the field--which means there's always a dearth of new cartoonists (not that there isn't first-rate talent out there. There just should be more.)

Anyway, it's a damn shame Voice Media is dumping This Modern World. It's a good strip. Canada needs a comic like it.

Obama! Comix! Hooray!

Apparently I'm not the only funnybook devotee pleased with Barack Obama's shiny new presidency. Here's a link to a series of short essays on the United State's new top dog. One of them is by cartoonist Dan Clowes, a former Chicagan who's the same age as Obama. Clowes, for those not familiar with the man, is the author of the acclaimed graphic novel Ghost World and one of the best cartoonists in the world. Check it out.