I read a bunch more stuff but this is what stood out as the best:
DAYTRIPPER #6 of 10 by Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon. This limited series has one recurring gag: Every issue the lead character, a Brazilian obituary writer named Bras, dies at a different point in his life. I thought it would get tiresome after a few issues but instead the message of how completely on the bubble of mortality we all live has come though loud and clear. It’s disturbing to dwell on the fact that any day or moment could be our last, but while reading DAYTRIPPER you are safely detached from that truth, secure in the knowledge that, for a few pages a month at least, some other guy gets it instead of you. Beautiful art and rich characters help draw you into each issue even though we now know how it ends.
REPUGLICANS by Steve Tatham and Pete Von Sholly. This is a guilty pleasure with an emphasis on Pleasure. Basically the artist, Von Sholly, draws demonic caricatures of some of the worst members of the current political far-right and author Tatham writes a brief blurb outlining their offenses against god and man. You learn a little and laugh a lot at people who deserve it. And yes, I would support a similar, equally well-crafted graphic indictment of some of the knaves of the Democratic establishment and its fellow travelers. Sadly, I know of very few humorists on the right with the chops to pull it off and none of them work in comics. Oh well…
Finally, stuff I await eagerly this coming week includes AMERICAN VAMPIRE #3, EX MACHINA #49, THE EXECUTOR graphic novel, GARTH ENNIS BATTLEFIELDS #6, SCALPED, VOL. 6: THE GNAWING in trade paperback, and WALKING DEAD #72.
Some interesting stuff came out last week. Here’s some of it:
ASTRO CITY: THE DARK AGE BOOK FOUR #4 of 4 by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson. Originally conceived as a sequel to the Busiek/Alex Ross hit MARVELS, this hasn’t been my favorite ASTRO CITY arc so far. It feels long and the waits between issues have made it hard to maintain the excitement associated with earlier AC stories. What’s of greatest interest is the fact that Busiek shares a bit of his process in the form of his redacted pitch notes to Marvel. Also it’s the concluding chapter of his longest AC story since the series began. Four books of four issues each, plus a prologue and likely epilogue to come makes this a magnum opus of sorts from a creator whose work always warrants a look.
THE BEATS: A GRAPHIC HISTORY SC by Harvey Pekar and Various Collaborators. This is a softcover edition of Pekar’s graphic exploration of a literary movement that shaped his generation. I honestly haven’t finished it yet, but the first chapter on Jack Kerouac really makes me want to. Hopefully, this will prove more consistent in quality than Pekar’s previous STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY GN.
ELECTRIC ANT #2 of 5 by David Mack and Pascal Alixe. Based on an original story by the legendary Philip K. Dick, this is already one of the most promising sci-fi comics in a long time. The story of a robot who didn’t know he was a robot and found out the hard way. Great art and a familiar Dick theme of figuring out how much we really know about ourselves and what it means to be human. Very trippy stuff blending altered states of awareness with speculative analog technology.
iZOMBIE #1 by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred. The adventures of a grave-robbing, brain-eating girl detective from DC Comics’ Vetigo line. This is set in a more R-rated Buffy-verse sort of reality where a supernatural subculture abounds. It has an advantage over the actual BUFFY comic books in that we have no previous familiarity with the characters from a different medium, in this case TV. Even with the stylized Allred art this first issue is very accessible and inviting. Give it a look if you can stomach the subject. Speaking of which…
PRIDE, PREJUDICE & ZOMBIES GN by Jane Austen, Seth Grahame-Smith, Tony Lee and Cliff Richards. This is the black and white graphic novelization of the gag-hit from 2009. Basically it’s Austen’s original text modified to accommodate a new reality in which the Bennett sisters and Mister Darcy are fearless zombie killers and England is plagued with flesh-eating “unmentionables.” It’s all in fun and a great way to make Austen more palatable to someone like me who loathes the British caste system of then and now, along with all its subtleties and nuance. I suppose it’s satisfying to see a social structure that imposed apparent life or death consequences on its members’ behaviors actually have real life or death consequences. The art by BUFFY veteran Cliff Richard feels sketchy and unfinished, but the story is there with a pace that gives the reader a good zombie battle every time you’re tempted to blow it off like you wanted to in college.
Finally, one from a couple of weeks ago that I only got around to this week:
OTHER LIVES HC written and drawn by Peter Bagge. This is an original GN from the creator of HATE. Whether or not you’re turned off by Bagge’s trademark grotesque art-style, this is a great noir thriller mixed in with a profound meditation on what identity means in the internet age. Are we our avatars? Are our parents and grandparents the same people they were before Ellis Island or after the birth of their kids? Bagge calls our attention to all these things even as we recognize bits of our own identities in each of his screwed up creations. A multi-layered story, ideally suited to the two-dimensional medium.
Very good week for comics last week. Here are the best:
1. Scalped #37 by Jason Aaron and Davide Furno. Part two of the Shunka story, “A Fine Action of an Honorable and Catholic Spaniard.” Older teens and up.
2. Walking Dead #61 by Robert Kirkman and Charles Adlard. The latest chapter of the best ongoing zombie comic ever. Amazing final page giving us frightening insight into how much our heroes have changed. Older teens and up. (Congrats to Sina Grace for his first issue as Editor!)
3. Blazing Combat softcover edition, written by Archie Goodwin and illustrated by the best artists ever to draw war comics. Collecting all four issues, plus the original Frazetta covers, of the 60s war magazine that got killed by the Pentagon. Younger teens and up.
4. Wilson hardcover, written and drawn by Daniel Clowes. The latest from the creator of Ghost World. A series of one page strips that add up to a novel. Funny and beautiful. Older teens and up.
5. Instructions hardcover, written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated Charles Vess. Instructions for how to survive an adventure in storybook land. All ages. (My six year-old son was rapt.)
As always, if you read and don’t like any of the above just send it to me with your receipt and I’ll buy it from you. Honest.
Sometimes we need to take a leap of faith if we are to be true to the better angels of our nature.
Not many people know this about me, but I am, by heredity, a Catholic. My father was raised in the Church, but left it after completing his undergraduate studies at Georgetown. He never spoke much about it but those Catholic outlooks and values that had been thrust deeply inside him as a boy were very much a part of the environment in which I grew up.
The loving words of Jesus Christ, as interpreted by the Holy Mother Church, could not help but reach me even if they were never rubbed in my face. And in reaching me through His words, His gospel, I found myself touched in a very private place (not a bad place) that I can only describe as my soul.
I feel as I pass through the midpoint of my life that I am also crossing a Rubicon of sorts, a time in which I must reach certain determinations about where I stand spiritually and what my legacy will be to the beautiful children I have fathered and all the others I have not. I feel a calling to return to the heritage I have ignored for most of my time under Heaven and to do what I can to embrace the many gifts my Creator has bestowed upon me, unworthy though I am.
Toward this end I wish to announce that today, 04-01-10, I am taking the first steps in founding The American Catholic Church, a sect inspired by but not legally a part of the Catholic Church of Rome.
The American Catholic Church will be in practice and appearance very similar to the Church of our fathers, but with some improvements, if I may be so immodest as to call them that. These differences are as follows:
1. Priests and nuns can be married, even to each other if they wish.
2. Divorce, while sad, is okay.
3. Ditto abortion.
4. Pre-marital sex and onanism, also okay.
5. No more spanking, smacking or other behavior harmful to kids.
6. Re-read #5 and really get that through your heads. We are not screwing around on this. Don’t hurt the kids.
7. Since a big chunk of the official Bible is self-contradicting mythological hooey we’ll be using a heavily redacted version, less King James and more Thomas Jefferson if you get the idea.
8. We are still anti-war, anti-death penalty and anti-sin, but we want to clarify the source of all that anti-ness. We are against anything that is low-down or makes life needlessly difficult for people just trying to make it through the day. Ours is the Gospel of Be Nice and our Jeffersonian Bible is just a part of that.
9. All are welcome.
10. The seal of the confessional is still sacred except if you make noises like you’re going to do harm. Especially to kids. If a member or employee of the American Catholic Church leans the slightest degree in that direction we will bring down The Biggest Shit-Hammer in All Creation. In fact, we will study the Biggest Shit-Hammer in All Creation, get some engineers to build an Even Bigger, Heavier, Spiked Version, cover it with Poison and bring it squarely down on your filthy, kiddie-diddling fun-parts. I know this is covered in #5 and 6 but it is central to our foundation and bears repeating.
So thats it. Sign up sheet is below. And God bless.
I’m writing this for me because I need to get all the crap in my head about Andrew out there. I was very far away from him and everyone else who knew him when he died. I talked to friends out here who didn’t know him and to my wife who did, but I wasn’t able to go to Vancouver to look for him or to LA to mourn with his other friends once it was over.
Maybe “over” isn’t the best way to put it. For Andrew it’s over and has been for a little more than a month. For the rest of us the end of Andrew’s life is an on-going matter. I’m not in constant grief and I have laughed and been angry, bored and petty since then but there hasn’t been one day when I haven’t thought of him and how wrong it is that he’s not here anymore.
What I’m going to share are some of the reasons why this guy, who too many people know only as a minor eighties sitcom character or a member of the extended phenomena of “Star Trek,” has inspired so much confusion and despair with his loss.
I’m going to have to break it up into separate entries because there’s a lot to tell and I want to get it right as best I can. That takes time, something I don’t have a lot of with two young kids and a third on the way.
If you don’t like long sad stories about dead friends you should skip it.
If you’re looking to know more about Andrew I can tell you a little bit. Others could tell you more and maybe some day they will.
But I’m limited in what I have to share. I didn’t know him long and I didn’t know him as well as many others. I would not consider myself part of his Inner Circle, if there even was such a thing. I consider this my misfortune and, even after all the soul-searching and absolution, a failure on my part. If I’d been closer to him maybe I could have done something to change how it turned out. That’s irrational, since it turned out nobody was close enough to see it in time. But I know I reached out. If he’d wanted my hand it was there.
Re-winding.
As is the case when you’re talking about someone with a measure of fame, I knew of Andrew before he knew me.
I first encountered him when I was in high school and I was reading a book of short stories by Harlan Ellison. This would have been anywhere between 1978 and 1981. Andrew’s name was Josh back then and Ellison credited him with inspiring his great and tragic short story “Jeffty is Five” from his collection “Shatterday.” I’ll quote Ellison below on the subject of where he got the idea:
“My friends Walter and Judy Koenig invited me to a party. I don’t like parties. I do like Walter and Judy. I also like their kids. I went to the party.
“Mostly I sat near the fireplace, friendly but not ebullient. Mostly I talked to Walter and Judy’s son, Josh, who is remarkable beyond the telling. And then I overheard a snatch of conversation. An actor named Jack Danon said — I thought he said — something like this — ‘Jeff is five, he’s always five.’ No, not really. He didn’t say anything like that at all. What he probably said was, ‘Jeff is fine, he’s always fine.’ Or perhaps it was something completely different.
“But I had been awed and delighted by Josh Koenig, and I instantly thought of just such a child who was arrested in time at the age of five. Jeffty, in no small measure, is Josh: the sweetness of Josh, the intelligence of Josh, the questioning nature of Josh.
“Thus, from admiration of one wise and innocent child, and from a misheard remark, the process that not even Aristotle could codify was triggered.”
What can I tell you? Andrew/Josh had that effect on people.
So I first “met” Andrew when I was not older than 17 and he was not older than 12.
Flash forward 22 years or so. It’s 2003 and I’m working part-time at Hi-De-Ho Comics in Santa Monica and there’s talk of a Batman flick getting made, re-booting the franchise, and one of the fanboys hijacks me in the parking lot telling me I’ve got to see this thing on his portable video player. ”These are the guys who should be making the movie!” he tells me. ”They understand!” And I watch an impressive live-action short called “Batman: Dead End” in which Batman dukes it out with James Cameron’s Aliens, a Predator and the creepiest, most impossible-looking Joker I’ve ever seen. Played, unknown to me at the time, by an actor named Andrew Koenig, who I would not meet in person for another three years.
Flash forward another three years to August 2006. I’d been doing a sketch show called “Big News” at the IO West in Hollywood for about three and a half years. A lot of people had been in and out of the group by then and we were advised it was time to deepen our bench. We’d had auditions and gotten some good talent added to the roster. But the group’s founder, Michael McCarthy, was moving to Chicago for a radio job and we were scrambling to figure out how to keep the show moving forward. A few of the other actor/writers and I were taking the lead in organizing stuff week to week and somehow I ended up being one of the people who slotted in the new guys for their try-out shows. Our audition dates had passed when, if memory serves, I got an e-mail from Andrew or maybe one of the other Newsies suggesting him for the show.
I had no idea who “Andrew Koenig” was.
I remember a phone call with my castmate and Impressionist-in-Chief Phillip Wilburn in which I asked for some detail about this mystery man and Phillip replied that he had done some stuff with him and he was good. Phillip also said Andrew had played Boner on “Growing Pains.” This meant nothing to me since I truly had never seen the show. In fact the thought of a sitcom actor may have even been a negative in my mind. Then Phillip dropped the other shoe: “And he’s the son of Commander Pavel Chekov from “Star Trek.”"
“Oh well, then he’s definitely in!”, I replied without hesitation. I was being facetious but having any association with “Star Trek” is automatically a big plus with me. I’m easy that way.
In all seriousness though, I was protective of what quality we had managed to give the show at that point and was mentally preparing to deflect Andrew and any of the other new guys who might not pan out. We’d had a couple of real problem children over the years and I didn’t want to screw around with any more of them. As it turned out with Andrew it wasn’t an issue. The guy was good.
I don’t remember for sure the first time I spoke with him. I think it was on the phone, me calling him and inviting him to play with us. Or I might have e-mailed him. Either way, I remember I approached by saying Phillip Wilburn had said he was funny and that was good enough for me. No mention of “Star Trek”, “Growing Pains” or Harlan Ellison was made and Andrew came in and became One Of Us.
I’m pretty sure the first time I saw him in person was during a day rehearsal in the IO West bar. My initial impression was that he was friendly, unassuming, charming and a good-looking guy. I specifically thought that Walter Koenig must have done a rock star thing and married a model so that all his kids would be as good or better looking than he was. Andrew was a guy who had a lot going for him right from the jump.
And that’s how I met Andrew Koenig. In my next entry I’ll talk about working with him and getting to know him. Those are good stories.
Andrew Koenig as The Joker in "Batman: Dead End" 2003
I useful operating principle I adopted later in life than I should have is to not worry about things beyond my control. The inevitability of Death, most of the behavior of other people, the turning of the Earth, things like that.
My friend’s suicide is defying my philosophy. He is both too much with me and not enough. I am angry at him and wanting to console him when both are now pointless and impossible.
