RIP LEN WEIN
Len Wein co-created many, many characters. Some of them you
may of heard of. Mockingbird. Amanda Waller. Lucius Fox. The Human Target. Abby
Holland. Madrox The Multiple Man. Colossus. Wolverine. Storm. Swamp Thing. He
wrote comics for decades, a feat that is becoming rarer and rarer as time
marches on and the industry churns through its workhorse writers (with several
exceptions of course). He was, by all accounts, a lovely man. The Kirby 100
instalment of this column had in its video portion a documentary on Jack Kirby
that featured Wein, alongside Marv Wolfman, grinning like the little kid he was
in tales he recounted of hanging out at Jack's house, eating his food, swimming
in his pool, learning at his drawing table. As Kirby was a large block in the
road that made up Wein's early life, so Wein was a block in mine. I was a
flu-ridden ten year old when my Grandpa brought home a Federal Comics reprint
compendium of Wein's Giant Size X-Men
#1 and those early first few Chris Claremont-scripted Uncanny X-Men issues that followed and it blew my mind.
These connections to the past, the real foundation of comics
as we know it, become hazier and hazier as more and more of these guys pass.
Thanks, Len. Some of my favourite characters are your kids.
I dare say anyone reading this will likely say the same.
COMIC OF THE WEEK : LAND OF THE LUSTROUS VOLUME 1
By Haruko Ichikawa
Translated by Alethea Nibley and Athena Nibley
Published By Kodansha
There are times when just the sight of a page or two is argument
enough that a particular comic is for me. Haruko Ichikawa's bizarre and utterly
beautiful Land of The Lustrous is a
perfect example. Here are two particular pages I spotted online a couple of
months back:
Set in as future where the primary lifeforms are a kind of
humanoid, sentient gem-beings called The Lustrous, Ichikawa's weird post-apocalyptic
premise gets weirder with the introduction of her antagonists, The Lunarians,
moon-dwellers who come to the planet's surface to hunt The Lustrous in order to
make decorations of them. Yep, despite looking like avatars of some long lost
ancient peace goddess from Indian mythology, The Lunarians would appear to be
rampant consumers, plundering the world of it's most precious and gleaming
resource.
The Lustrous are quite capable of fighting back against
their jewellery-loving foes, however, and Ichikawa's cast is made up entirely
and exclusively of young female (or beings who have taken on a female form, if
you prefer) members of The Lustrous, each studying to make their way in the
world and to find a singular purpose to their existence. The Lustrous' strength
is graded on the density of their crystalline forms - the more brittle a
Lustrous may be, the less likely she is to be taught to fight and destroy
Lunarians.
Enter: Phospophylite (or Phos for short - let's go with
that), who wants nothing more than to earnestly make a difference to her world
in some important capacity or other. The problem is that she's the most brittle
of her kind, excluding her from fighting, and she's also just not very good at pretty
much anything deemed to be practical. Her sensei has a solution, however, and
tasks Phos with compiling a natural history of their planet to preserve the
present and protect against a future of ever-increasing Lunarian attack. And
here is what could be your possible theme: environmental education in the form
of The Lustrous vs. environmental destruction in the form of Lunarians.
To protect Phos, our fragile gem is partnered with another
misfit of Lustrous society, Bort, a gem who secretes a kind of mercurial oil
slick poison she can shoot and shape that's destructive and poisonous to her
enemies and the environment both. Bort, condemned to live life after dark,
wants nothing more than to be captured and taken away by her foes - perhaps
sensing that her pollution has more in common with the Lunarian way of life
than with her own kind.
I know, the whole thing is kind of ridiculous. But look at
this art!
Haruko Ichikawa produces something visually stunning on
almost every page, often combined with the facility and technical prowess to
move the action all over her page space in clever and playful ways. From the
pages that immediately precede the images I opened with, here's a character
named Goshen shattering a hailstorm of deadly Lunarian arrows and leaping stage
left up and right off panel to attack:
So often in lesser manga, we can criticise artists for using
negative space in really lazy ways, using blank spots in panels or during
talking head sequences to chew through a grinding page count/deadline schedule
in incredibly uninteresting ways. Ichikawa, however, appears determined to use
her page space in clever, artful ways at all times. In fact, some of Land of The Lustrous' best sequences are
the quiet moments where the artist's uncommon grace and real gift for inking
come to the fore with just lovely results:
Thinking critically here, there are some problems. Land of The Lustrous may be one of the
year's most visually gorgeous debuts, but its large cast of young students all
dress and look similarly which can cause some confusion as to who is actually
who. Different hairstyles and hair colours largely identify characters, as we
see from the book covers and the upcoming anime adaptation (see this week's
video), but in a black and white comic this poses a bit of a problem. However,
a moment or two of character confusion is a small issue when considering just
how beautiful this comic is - even pages featuring a giant slug monster about
to swallow Phos whole come off as far more lovely then they do grotesque.
Additionally, I'll take Ichikawa's remarkable black and
white pages over a coloured version of this any day. I'll also forgive several overly
expositional sequences for similar reasons; this book's sophistication lies not
in its scripting but the visual execution of its off-the-wall concept. For a
book about gleaming gem-beings, Ichikawa is unafraid to go dark. Stripped of
the shortcuts colour would provide, she embraces the "limitations" of
ink and grey tones, giving her Lustrous cast moments to really pop off the
blackness and shine as much as they are able.
If you really love just tumbling headlong into a page of
comics, there's nothing quite like Land
of The Lustrous right now, particularly in black and white. Powered by an
expansive imagination and some really striking technical artistry, it's one to
read and re-read and flip through over and over. My own copy is beginning to
show the debilitating effects of re-reading of a much older book in my
collection. Running, I believe, only six volumes in total, Land of The Lustrous is also a comparatively bite-sized manga
commitment in page count, but not in scope.
Highly recommended.
WEBCOMIC OF THE WEEK : THIS CRAZY CONCEPT ART IS FOR A FANTASY SAMURAI MOVIE MADE
WITH PUPPETS
Okay, so not a webcomic this week but who cares when there's
Guy Davis concept art to share?
The Haunted Swordsman
is a crowdfunded attempt at bringing the tale of a lone samurai and his
severed-head companion to life using 90cm bunraku
puppets. The best part of all this could well be Davis' excellent
Japanese-inspired beasties all of which would interact with flesh and blood
members of the cast. Let's face it, if there's one thing that could make this
world a better place it's Guy Davis monster puppets.
The whole thing looks and sounds pretty incredible so pop on
over to Gizmodo for a look.
COMICS VIDEO OF THE WEEK : HOSEKI NO KUNI - NEW PROMOTIONAL VIDEO
If you're going to add colour to Land of The Lustrous you might as well go all out. Jettisoning the
swaths of both black and white that Haruko Ichikawa employs in her manga is
this new anime adaptation set to debut early October. It's an odd thing to see something
simultaneously so recognisable to the source material and yet so foreign. On
the plus side, the occasional confusion over which character is which that
happens reading the manga appears utterly absent thanks to the gleaming
colourful hairstyles of our favourite gem-ladies. The saturated colours also
lend Ichikawa's fairly psychedelic concept some extra lysergic pop - this
surely has the potential to be a kind of tripper's cult classic in years to
come.
The downside is, of course, we lose the grace and poise of
Ichikawa's expertly constructed pages and her masterful use of black and white.
That, ultimately, is what we have the manga for though, I suppose. Anyway,
check this out - it looks like a can't miss.
Cameron Ashley spends a lot of time writing comics and other things you'll likely never read. He's the chief editor and co-publisher of Crime Factory (www.thecrimefactory.com). You can reach him @cjamesashley on Twitter.
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