27 january 2002

I neither know nor care about manga. I have nothing against it, but it does not interest me in the slightest.

The Marvel Mangaverse books are, obviously, aimed at people who do know something about manga. If you are such a person and you were able to identify a redeeming feature in MARVEL MANGAVERSE: X-MEN, please let me know.

I don't really understand what the concept of the Mangaverse books is supposed to be. Of course, on one level it's obvious - the idea is to do Marvel characters in the style of manga books. But I don't get why that's supposed to be entertaining. I mean, seriously, I don't get it at all. I could write an X-Men story in the style of an Inland Revenue tax leaflet if I wanted to, but that wouldn't make it an automatically good idea. Writing one character in the style of another is a parlour game, and like most parlour games, it has little inherent entertainment value unless you're absolutely plastered.

So I'm going to take the charitable assumption here, which is that if I did know something, anything, about manga, I would be able to identify a very good reason why this whole exercise was being done in the first place. In reality, I haven't got a fucking clue what the point is meant to be. (And this is after having read three of the books, by the way.) But I'll be charitable. Maybe there's some really good idea in here which would make sense if I knew anything about manga.

This is called "the benefit of the doubt."

And to be fair, in the Fantastic Four and Punisher books, I can at least see that there's some kind of sub-genre parody going on. I don't find it particularly entertaining, of course, because I don't know the source material and so I don't get half the jokes. But I can kind of, very vaguely, see what the idea is.

X-Men? Fuck knows.

Even as someone who was expecting not to enjoy the book, I was surprised by just how bad this issue was.

Judged as a one-shot gimmick joke book, this fails on the most elemental level: it doesn't establish what the concept of its version of the X-Men is. There's some vague muttering about mutants, nothing about how the X-Men feel about it. Am I meant to take it as read that it's the same basic idea, even though the other Mangaverse books pretty much ignore their own original concepts? I haven't a clue. This book gives absolutely no idea of what its X-Men are for, what they're trying to achieve, or, even in the most vague, general terms, what the idea is meant to be.

Now, if I don't get the jokes, fair enough, I don't get the jokes. If I can't even work out what the point of the issue is, we have a problem. And I am fortified in my suspicion that this is just an astonishingly bad comic by the fact that writer CB Cebulski doesn't even manage to get around to naming his entire cast. Moonstar is only identifiable by reference to the solicitations or the press release. I have yet to encounter anyone who recognised her from the published story alone.

The plot is the usual generic nonsense in one-shots of this sort, which serves no function other than as a hook to hang the idea on. Except, of course, there is no idea. So it's like staring at an empty coathook for twenty-two pages.

Art comes from Jeff Matsuda, who you may remember as the guy who drew all those outsize feet in X-Factor before moving on to draw just plain deformed feet in Kaboom. Last I'd heard, he was working in animation. This issue is not drawn in Matsuda's normal style, nor in anything I particularly associate with his animation work. Perhaps it's meant to be a pastiche of the style of some Japanese artist I've never heard of. I don't know. What I can tell you is that it looks flat, awkward and frequently rather amateurish. Matsuda can do much better than this, which is why I lean towards the pastiche theory. If this isn't meant to be a parody of some sort, then god knows what he's thinking, because it looks awful.

It is just about conceivable that this issue may be packed with complicated manga-homage gags which are flying so far over my head that I can't even see them, let alone get them. I welcome explanations from anyone who can tell me what in the name of christ this god-awful book is supposed to be doing.

One of the worst comics I've read in a while. It fails on the conceptual level, because it doesn't have a concept. It fails on the entertainment level, because the story is meaningless dross. It fails on the visual level, because it's ugly. And it fails as comedy because it's not remotely funny - if indeed it's meant to be.

Avoid.

On paper, HOWARD THE DUCK shouldn't work.

It's difficult to even explain the plot without making it sound crap. A satirical story about boy bands. And, you see, they're a literally manufactured pop group because they've been grown in vats. You see, what he's done there, is he's taken the word "manufactured" literally and... oh, forget it.

Yes, on paper that's a really obvious joke. But stick with me.

Steve Gerber's Howard the Duck was one of the more bizarre comics of the 1970s, and arguably one of the first comics from a major publisher to be plainly targeted at an adult audience. It's satire, it's often surreal, and it's generally very funny. I picked up most of the run in back issues last year. It suffers to an extent from topical gags which modern audiences are unlikely to understand (parodies of 1970s Killraven stories, for example), but the Essential Howard the Duck reprint is well worth your time in picking up. Howard running for President is still a great story today.

Gerber subsequently had some litigation issues with Marvel over ownership of the character, which settled out of court. He's written the occasional Howard the Duck story since then, perhaps the clearest example being his She-Hulk run (which Gerber claims no longer to regard as part of the Howard canon, but it's still a passable indication of the sort of thing we're talking about). This is the first time Gerber has written Howard the Duck in his own book in over twenty years, though. And it's nice to have him back.

Unfortunately for Gerber, in his absence Marvel struck a deal with Disney, the gist of which is that Howard mustn't look like Donald Duck and therefore must wear trousers at all times. The "no trousers" issue is a big deal for Gerber, and one of the purposes of bringing in the biotech vats is to give him a good excuse to sidestep the entire issue by changing the character design altogether. For the rest of the story, he has Howard working on a scrapheap, giving him an excuse to wear a boilersuit and sidestep the issue again.

Anyhow. Howard and long-time interspecies girlfriend Beverly Switzler have been reduced to living on the scrapheap of Hist(or)y, when Beverly manages to get a job with a marketing firm willing to take her on at an inordinately high salary considering that she has no clue what the job involves or how to do it. Cue the bizarre, clonal boy-band related material. Which isn't as narrow or obvious a focus as it seems, because (aside from providing that all-important body-reshaping subplot) Gerber uses it as a way into the book's whole worldview, tying in with his wider political themes.

Art comes from Phil Winslade, who quite rightly takes the same route as the original series and plays it pretty much straight. It's a tricky balance to hit, because on the one hand Howard needs to look like a bizarrely misplaced cartoon duck in an otherwise "real" world, but on the other hand he shouldn't look like he's being drawn in a different art style altogether. Winslade hits the nail on the head.

It's genuinely funny, it's intelligent, and even if it does wheel out some 1970s storylines to nudge the plot along, that shouldn't bother you too much. (You really don't need to know the details.) It's a great book. This is the sort of thing I'm looking for from the Max imprint.

PUNCH AND JUDY. There is a strand of thought which says that this is a wonderful, bizarre and downright fascinating story. In Britain, at least, there is also a strand of thought which associates it with the kind of god-forsaken holidays in Cromer that nobody goes on any more, because a fortnight's excessive drinking in Spain is plainly vastly more entertaining than riding a decrepit donkey on a rain-soaked beach.

My initial sympathies are much more in the second camp, to be honest. Tradition or otherwise, I'm quite happy for the damn puppet show to be consigned to the dustbin along with the "Kiss Me Quick" hat and the career of Russ Abbot.

Nonetheless, the underlying story is absolutely bizarre and demented, and when you drag it out of its puppet show context it makes for much more interesting reading. This is an adaptation of the story by Christopher Reilly and Darron Laessig, which is apparently the first such adaptation in comics. (Not to be confused with the Gaiman/McKean graphic novel - that was merely inspired by the original story, it wasn't an adaptation.)

Punch and Judy is a warped story at the best of times, and the heavy stylised approach which the creators take here - complete with stagey dialogue and shamelessly irrational plot turns - is the best way to make it work. You absolutely cannot play this kind of story in a naturalistic style - it'd be unbearably dark and not remotely funny. Instead, the book has a skewed reality of its own.

Quite how this story ever ended up being considered as children's entertainment is beyond me. Faced by a variety of minor provocations, Punch deals with them in the way we'd all basically like to, by bludgeoning the offender with a club. The forces of authority come in to try and punish him for it... and fail, because he kills them all as well, through a skilful combination of bludgeoning and other comedy murdering. Evil goes majestically unpunished and the story ends. Well, that just screams kiddie fodder, doesn't it?

It's a surprisingly entertaining adaptation of a story I've never particularly liked, with some wonderfully demented artwork from Laessig. The back cover claims to see a Bill Sienkiewicz influence there, and I'm not quite sure where they're getting that from. When they mention Kyle Baker, on the other hand, I can see their point.

Thoroughly odd, but well worth a look.