Advance notice to all Luxury Comics retailers re: PROFESSOR MONSTER #1
To all our trusted LUXURY COMICS retailers,
From day one, you have been vital parts of the LUXURY COMICS ecosystem. As part of our groundbreaking "All Other Stores Are Run By And For Total Chumps" program, you have been participating in a revolution in comics retail of unprecedented size and scope. Once more, we at LUXURY COMICS would like to thank all but five of our 127 retail partners for keeping to the 7 sacred mantras of LUXURY COMICS, which ensure that every new LUXURY COMICS release is a once-in-a-lifetime event for all of our readers. (The five remaining retail partners know what they've done, and they are to be forever shunned. Attached to your next order will be a poster with the names and addresses of the people working at these shops, along with instructions on what kind of death threats your customers are to anonymously address to them. Failure to display the poster WILL be seen as a breach of the 7 sacred mantras, and will have the offending shops forever shunned as well.)
Now, as part of our effort to help the industry recover from the unprecedented crisis created by the COVID-19 epidemic, we have announced the launch of a new book, PROFESSOR MONSTER VS. THE UNDEAD ARMY OF GENERAL PANNETONE #1, shipped to you free of charge, in matching numbers to your orders for COMPU-COCK #1. To keep this launch as cool and special as our other LUXURY COMICS launches, we will be introducing an extra set of LUXURY COMICS SACRED MANTRAS that you are to follow in addition to the 7 sacred mantras set in your LUXURY COMICS SEXY AND COOL RETAILER CONTRACT.
The new mantras are as follows:
- PROFESSOR MONSTER #1 IS ONLY TO BE SOLD ON WEDNESDAY, MAY 12TH, 2021, BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 10:00 AND 10:03 LOCAL TIME; all unsold product is to be sent back to us IMMEDIATELY; if your product arrives in the afternoon, you are to send it all back to us IMMEDIATELY. This is to communicate to your customers that Cool And Sexy LUXURY COMICS Retailers are too cool and too sexy to sell comics to just any little punk from off the streets; Cool and Sexy LUXURY COMICS Retailers don't even care about selling comics; they could be in bands, one time someone from the local radio said their tape was "pretty good but we're running more of a top 40 pop market".
- PROFESSOR MONSTER #1 IS NEVER TO BE SOLD TO MY BITCH EX-WIFE MAUREEN OR MY TWO SHITTY SONS WHO PICKED HER OVER ME; be very careful, they could be trying to pull some shit, I know them, they picked Maureen because fuckin' DALE keeps acting like he's so great, d'you know the latest? He gave these two little shits that new iPhone! Yeah! Dale can just flash that kind of cash, I GUESS. Anyway, they WILL show up and try to get "that shitty comic my dad works on" because all I'm good for now is to be their fuckin' punchline while DALE laughs it up. Well I'm not laughing it up, AND NONE OF THE COOL AND SEXY LUXURY COMICS RETAILERS are to laugh it up.
- IN ORDER TO PURCHASE A COPY OF PROFESSOR MONSTER #1, CUSTOMERS MUST ANSWER THE THREE RIDDLES OF BASILIO, WHOSE DOMAIN LIES BENEATH THE OLD APPLE ORCHARD; Basilio was VERY insistent on the riddle part, and I will not dare cross him, especially since he's the only one of my old family friends that kept in touch after the divorce. Now, I don't know what kind of shit Basilio will try to pull with the riddles, but you're allowed to tell your customers that usually he makes the second riddle about his old apple orchard, or that, if you don't wanna do the riddle, he will accept the gift of your finest cider.
- PROFESSOR MONSTER #1 IS ONLY TO BE SOLD AT ITS COVER PRICE OF "ONE NEWBORN CHILD"; again that's Basilio asking, he says it doesn't have to be YOUR newborn child but it has to be ONE newborn child. Look, Basilio took point on that whole "Professor Monster" thing, it's kind of his baby, I'm just writing the e-mails because Basilio says he's "afraid of your human magicks".
I must stress, once again, that failure to follow these and any other LUXURY COMICS SACRED MANTRAS will be a breach of your contract, leading to all penalties outlined therein, including the aforementioned total shunning.
If you need any clarification, feel free to join Basilio, by leaving a lovely red apple alongside your query on your front porch.
Looking forward to the launch,
The LUXURY COMICS team.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: WE'RE NOT EXCLUSIVE, JUST UNPOPULAR
I've written extensively about the series before, so excuse me if, for once, my review of Rorschach #8 runs a little bit shorter. It's a frustrating issue, by design, that obfuscates its insights by way of a setup that is as capital-P Pulp as it gets. Allow me to run it for you: there's a detective, a co-conspirator, and a room with a table for the two to sit across; time is running out, the danger might be lurking out there, and so the players will push one another to their limits until an answer is reached. It's a story you've read at least once before. But here, it's a story told three times, and the way it calls attention to that fact is indicative of something bigger at play. The story here is the story itself, the why and the how of its telling.
In their most formally ambitious gambit yet, Fornes, King, and Stewart run the three stories parallel to one another, each one running in their own color-coded third of the page, and all playing off of the same four by six grid structure. On a page to page basis, it is designed to give the impression of forward momentum; the detective goes somewhere, the story zooms in on particular details shared across the three testimonies, and it should all build to a moment of elucidation. But the final reveal, which puts together the actual chronology of it all, shows that it's all a ruse, a version of the events very carefully curated so as to give nothing away but what Rorschach wanted given away.
Under that light, Fornes' layout work takes on a whole new importance. The choices he makes in the paneling, the shapes of the panels, where and how he deploys the negative space that's getting filled by Clayton Cowles' letters, it becomes an identifier. Our three co-conspirators might have different takes on the same pieces of the story, but when it comes to the important parts, they are as one, united in their plot and in their visuals. It's all very clever. It will remind you of David Mazzucchelli. Still, it's a frustrating comic about being taken for a ride, and it is very good at making you feel exactly like that. Which doesn't leave much else to say.
I just don't know how to make sense of Future State: Gotham #1. It is a Bat-family centric continuation of Future State, which we are still slowly building to in the other Batman books. It has no business being this bold, or taking this many swings. And yet: here is a full-on black and white cyberpunk action comic that's completely open about its manga aspirations, from the giant robots to the oversized future motorbikes, from the big flashy spreads to the omnipresent action lines, with the sound effects penciled in and the streets just about ready to E X P L O D E.
The references to Katsuhiro Otomo and his magnum opus are many, but do not get it twisted: Culver, Milonogiannis and Williamson are very much doing their own thing, with Milonogiannis in particular taking most of his cues from the 40s noir aesthetic of Batman The Animated Series. The skyscrapers are towering, the night is omnipresent, and people ponder looking at the world looking through venetian blinds. If you still don't believe me, compare and contrast that story with the actual Katsuhiro Otomo reprint also featured in the issue at no additional cost. (And holy shit that one really is an all-timer) So, yeah, there's three point bike drifts. There's also intrigue aplenty, and dudes in the sewers sitting on a throne built from human remains? It's a great time.
But while we're in the market for good future shock stories, let's make a stop at Time Before Time #1, which introduces itself as a proud evolution of the British strain of satirical speculative science-fiction with a high-octane action twist. It's 2140, and the future sucks in exactly the way you think it's going to suck. It's crisis after crisis, and the people at the bottom rung are too beaten down by the the jobs they hold to pay their debts to do anything about it. The twist is: time travel is now possible, and this underclass of overexploited workers are now time truckers, taking anyone and anything from anytime to anytime in hopes for a better future in the past.
This first issue is an oversized prelude to the action, in which Joe Palmer and Chris O'Halloran, on art and colors respectively, give us stylish vignettes of time-travelling urban life, from the neon soaked mid 1980s to 22nd century urban decay. Smartly, McConville and Shanley keep the focus on the working class experience of it all, from the very physical strain the work puts on you, to the patronizing gaze of bosses who obviously don't get it, and all the small indignities in-between. But then, guns get drawn out, we jump into the unknown and it's a blast of catharsis. It's cool, it's fun, and I want to see more of it.
Finally, this. It's been a constant in the past five years: DC Comics have been killing it with their anthologies, and DC Festival of Heroes: The Asian Superhero Celebration #1, released for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, is no exception. It is as fun and as joyful as any of these anthologies get, which in itself is already an achievement. But in the context that surrounds it, at a time when anti-Asian racism has once more reached its most violent extremes, it feels outright vital to not only celebrate Asian superheroes, but to celebrate Asian creators.
Editors Jessica Chen and Andrea Shea have put together an incredible lineup of talent, wide-reaching in styles, stories and interests, and all united in a spirit of love, solidarity, and cooperation. But even better than the stories themselves (and the stories are very good, I'm going out of my way not to spoil them), is the fact that a number of them, including the introduction of the Journey-To-The-West-inspired Monkey Prince, end on the promise of more stories to come in the mainline DC books. Loudly and proudly, it is a book dedicated to inclusion, and that is a project that can only make comics better in the long run. That's worth celebrating.
And don't that feel good? Dang, it does feel good to just do a wacky newsletter about comics for once. Maybe I should keep doing it! Tell you what, you subscribe and tell your friends to do the same, you pass this around in any way you can, and I'll be here, every Thursday on a deadline, with that good good hookup. In the mean while, you keep being cool, and, always, you HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS.