Johnny Red:
Falcons’ First Flight
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Wars are complicated. They are messy and the conflicts always have many sides and many different perspectives. They are tragic for everyone involved, whether it’s the winning or the losing side.

Johnny Red: Falcons’ First Flight (Titan Books, 2011) is none of those things. This is about as uncomplicated as it gets. Nazis are bad. Russians are maybe not great, but they’re better than Nazis. Lots of stuff blows up and our hero survives impossibly ridiculous odds.

There is a delightful “what’s next?” quality to this book. Our hero, Johnny, has little personality. His notable qualities is that he’s an amazing pilot, if a little hot-headed. But that’s insignificant when there’s another explosion. Once I realized that I wasn’t particularly going to care about any of the characters or really, why any of this was happening — it actually became fun.

Joe Colquhoun’s art is complicated and expressive. His airplanes and other machines are more defined than his characters (other than Johnny, everyone feels pretty interchangeable), but Colquhoun does pack the panels with plenty of action. The layouts are also surprisingly dynamic, featuring other shapes than the basic rectangle and multiple small images packed into a page.

Tom Tully’s writing has a breathless quality. Everything is high drama all the time. While I realize this is a war story, there is very little downtime. Something is always happening. Johnny’s airplanes or weaponry malfunctions countless times and yet he always escapes. It tends to border on the ridiculous, but I get the feeling that’s kind of point.

This book is lovingly presented by Titan Books. It features an introduction by Garth Ennis and some historical context from Jeremy Briggs. The oversized format also showcases the artwork well.

Ultimately, while I don’t think Johnny Red is really to my particular taste, I do admire it as a piece of comics history and I was surprised at how much fun I found it to be. In the end, though, I don’t think I need more of it.

Review copy provided by Titan Books.

Lenore: Cooties
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Roman Dirge‘s Lenore is about a dead 10-year-old girl. Which is to say, Lenore will basically be a dead 10-year-old girl forever. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by her longevity.

I don’t actually remember when I first knew about Lenore. I knew about the comic although I never really read it, but I do remember watching the animated shorts made for Sony’s Screenblast (you can view them on Dirge’s site). Still, Dirge’s comic, along with Jhonen Vasquez’s Johnny the Homicidal Maniac did a lot to bring in non-comics readers to comics, partially due to their sale at mall stores like Hot Topic as well as the two creator’s association with Invader ZIM.

I’m happy Lenore has found at home at Titan Books and Lenore: Cooties (2010, Titan Books) is the third and final volume of Dirge’s original run of Lenore.

This isn’t for everyone. A comic about a dead 10-year-old, her ex-vampire friend who is now in the form of a ragdoll and her obsessive suitor/stalker Mr. Gosh is going to have pretty limited appeal, after all. And then you combine that with all kinds of gross-out humor and gore, and well, this definitely becomes the sort of thing teenagers enjoy giggling over and hiding from their parents.

It’s self-consciously subversive, obviously, but what Dirge is doing here is actually playful. It’s certainly twisted and pretty sick, but it never feels overly cruel. I don’t feel there is a compassion underneath all the comedic gore — that’s not the point of this, after all — but Dirge is obviously having fun seeing what he’ll let himself get away with. It’s hard to not feel a bit charmed by that, even if this isn’t for you.

Dirge’s art has a kind of make-it-up-as-he-goes-along feel to it, with his trademark thick black outlines and handwritten word balloons that threaten to take over some panels. Still, he has a good sense of comedic timing, even when his punchlines are disgusting, and I enjoyed how much it kept throwing the unexpected at me.

(And if the “real life” strip of Dirge’s father scaring him as a child by doing things like hiding under his bed to grab his ankle and hiding in his closet are to be believed, Dirge has obviously come by this perspective naturally.)

The washed-out colors (except for the deep bloody reds) in this edition are a nice addition to the original black-and-white artwork. Also featured is an art gallery, bonus strips, and a foreword by none other than Neil Gaiman, who praises Lenore as his favorite little dead girl in all of literature.

I will say, at this point, you will probably know if Lenore is for you. If it is, you really can’t do any better. For me, it doesn’t quite match up with my sensibilities at this point in my life, but I was more entertained than I expected to be.

Review copy provided by Titan Books.