El Cazador 2007 (SC TPB) 142 pages
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El Cazador 2007 (SC TPB) 142 pages
Written by Chuck Dixon. Illustrated by Steve Epting.
Colours: Frank D'Amata, Jason Keith. Letters: unbilled.
Reprinting: El Cazador #1-6 (2003-2004 by CrossGen Comics)
Rating: * * * 1/2 (out of 5)
Number of readings: 1
Published by Hyperion Paperbacks
CrossGen Comics was a company that exploded on the scene with some lavishly produced series, sidestepping the super hero-centric style of Marvel and DC with more sci-fi and fantasy based series. But the company stretched too far and too fast and eventually collapsed. One of its last titles, caught in the company's collapse, was El Cazador, which eschewed the fantasy and SF for straight, old fashioned historical adventure about pirates on the high seas (a genre rarely explored in comics...despite the running idea in The Watchmen of an alternate reality where pirate comics were the dominant genre).
Despite leaving its story arc incomplete, the six issues were subsequently collected in a TPB by Hyperion Paperbacks -- an imprint of Disney Enterprises (and given Disney's success with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, one wonders if they were hoping for a similar success).
The story involves a young Spanish maiden whose ship is captured by pirates, and her brother and mother kidnapped by the king pirate, Blackjack Tom. But the woman manages to reclaim her vessel, establishing herself as the captain -- now dubbed Lady Sin by her pirate crew -- and she sets out to track down Blackjack Tom and rescue her kin.
Chuck Dixon is a well regarded writer for his unpretentious action-adventure tales. I've read stuff by Dixon, and often reasonably enjoyed it...even as it rarely makes much impression. As such this is a work where the writing is okay...but bolstered immeasurably by the art, with Steve Epting delivering lush, richly detailed, historically researched panels which evoke a bit of John Buscema's later style -- but eminently more detailed. Yet as good as the art is, this is one time where I suspect the real star is the colourists, as Frank D'Amata and Jason Keith deliver gorgeously rendered pages where the texture and detail, I think, is supplied as much in the hues as Epting's line work. The colours are a little too dark a lot of the time, where even scenes on the high seas under a cloudless sky are a bit sombre.
Still, it's truly gorgeous to look at.
And Dixon certainly has a decent feel for pacing, and the dialogue flows from the characters' tongues well enough.
But overall, there's a certain...blandness.
The back cover quotes a review saying "forget those peg-leg, walk-the-plank melodramas", that Dixon and company are going for "gritty truth". But the comic really does seem like Dixon and company are just trotting out all the cinematic cliches (fire ships, chases through shallow water, a last minute rescue where a noose is severed with a shot -- could 17th Century guns even shoot with enough accuracy to hit a rope?). Oh, there's certainly care given to the proper terminology and I'm sure it's reasonably well researched (though I think Epting, like his Hollywood counterparts, errs on the side of the aesthetic when depicting the pirate ships...'cause I'm pretty sure I read that pirate ships were less majestic vessels).
Obviously, the cliches are part of the fun. But what Dixon fails to do is put any new spin on them. A lot of the action scenes seem lacking in clever strategy...or even logic (I wasn't sure how the blind navigator was supposed to be able to negotiate the shallow water better than a sighted man).
And the characters don't really pick up the slack. Dixon writes in a cinematic way, without thought balloons, so all you see is all you get. Lady Sin's ability to go from a noblewoman to a Pirate Queen isn't given much explanation, nor why the crew is so willing to follow her -- or why we should care about her. Even her driving motivation -- to rescue her mother and brother -- seems more like an abstraction, than an emotional quest. Nor is Dixon interested in exploring any moral dilemmas. I'm reminded of the old Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk must masquerade as his evil self in another dimension...and the inherent drama in the episode was how Kirk could maintain his basic decency while pretending to be a tyrant. But here, there's no sense that Lady Sin sees any contradictions in the life she has suddenly assumed. The supporting cast is defined just enough to keep them from fading into the woodwork...but not so much that they really stand out as personalities.
Dixon does slightly better with Redhand Harry, a privateer Lady Sin crosses swords with, who at least is given hints of a mysterious past (and one suspects Dixon had more interest in him than his nominal leading lady). But even Harry isn't really that compelling.
In a movie, a charismatic actor can make a part come alive -- but in a comic, the writer has to work hharder to create a character.
In these six issues there are escapes and sailing about, and atmospheric ship-to-ship battles that are breathtakingly portrayed (as barques loom out of the fog). Despite being cancelled in mid-series, there are self-contained episodes (Lady Sin thwarting a mutiny). As such, even though it ends in mid-arc, with nothing resolved, it doesn't really end on a cliff hanger, per se, making it not wholly unsatisfying read as an unfinished saga.
But there's a feeling Dixon and company were keen for the milieu of a pirate comic...but had less of a sense of what to do with it, or how to break past the generic cliches.
Still, for all that -- it is a reasonably fun read, benefitting from the breathtaking visuals and the atypicallness of the genre (for a comic) which alone makes it fun to have on the shelf. But as an on going, indefinite series, one rather suspects that even if CrossGen hadn't folded abruptly...El Cazador might well have run aground on its own.
Cover price: $__ CDN./$12.99 USA
Enemy Ace: War Idyll 1990 (HC & SC GN) 128 pages
Written
and painted by George Pratt.
Letters: Willie Schubert. Editor: Andrew Helfer.
Commentaries by Joe Kubert, George Pratt; sketches.
Rating: * * 1/2 (out of 5)
Number of readings: 1
Published by DC Comics
Enemy Ace: War Idyll is a fully painted graphic novel that resurrects one of DC Comics' more unusual -- and critically acclaimed -- heroes from its war comics (from back when it published titles in that genre). Baron Hans von Hammer, a German (therefore: enemy) World War I air ace. Never as successful as, say, Sgt. Rock, Enemy Ace, as originally written by Robert Kanigher, was a brooding, philosophical character, making him a logical choice for this "serious" graphic novel (moreso than, say, the Creature Commandos). At least, that's my understanding, having only read a couple of short Enemy Ace stories written long after Ace's heyday which was back in the 1960s and early 1970s when he headlined Star-Spangled War Stories (among other comics).
Printed on heavy paper, giving the book a weighty, important feel, with the story itself comprising some 95 pages, War Idyll begins in 1969, with the elderly von Hammer in a West German nursing home being visited by aa American journalist doing stories on old soldiers. The journalist is a Vietnam veteran, haunted by the war, and seeks some perspective on his experiences through learning of von Hammer's. Through flashbacks, von Hammer relates some of his war time experiences, as does the journalist in one chapter.
War Idyll is a moderately interesting, atmospheric story...but not too much more. It got me thinking a little of the whole nature of comics vs. other narrative mediums, of how comics still struggle for mainstream respectability. I'm the first to argue comics shouldn't slavishly seek to mimic other mediums (such as the common trend of eschewing thought balloons and text captions to more seem like a movie). Comics should take pride in being their own animal. With that being said, I couldn't help thinking that if writer/artist George Pratt had proposed this same story as a movie or novel, it wouldn't have been made/published. Even as a short story it seems a tad wanting.
It's well named, since one of the definitions of the word idyll is a poem, and, story wise, that's more what this resembles. There's very little in the way of an actual plot, per se. Von Hammer's reminiscences relate a time when he, an air ace usually above the fray, crashes in no man's land and wanders through the true horrors of war. That's not much of a story, exactly, not in the sense of scenes building on each other, or that questions are presented that need answering, or that we're heading toward anything. Even the relationship between the ageing von Hammer and the journalist never quite evolves into a character drama.
All of those criticisms might seem a tad...crass. After all, what Pratt is trying to do is a brooding reflection on the horrors of war, a serious and worthy treatise to be sure. But that's the same thing you would expect from a movie or novel on the same topic, and yet you would still expect it to be told in the context either of a story, or as a richer character exploration. Or, at least, through more unusual scenes, with Ace's journey perhaps becoming a Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now odyssey (not that I regard Apocalypse Now particularly highly -- an over-inflated music video masquerading as a "serious" movie).
Pratt falls into the conceit demonstrated by other creative types (in all mediums) of seeming to think he's the first person in the world to tackle a subject. Most of what he depicts is pretty standard -- there were few sequences that made me go "Oh my God, I never realized it was like that." Ironically, the scene in the tunnel in Vietnam came close to that, to evoking a sense of nightmarish claustrophobia and terror. That's ironic because Vietnam has been so thoroughly mined by American storytellers, the familiarity of the milieu makes that sequence, overall, less interesting than the W.W. I scenes.
Of course, is all that fair? Perhaps one can assume that a comic -- even an adult-aimed graphic novel -- will touch a different audience, an audience who has previously shied away from gritty war movies. As well, the first world war has, maybe, been less depicted in recent years by Hollywood, so scenes of trench warfare and gas attacks will take on a shocking newness for many readers (being Canadian as I am, and Canada having participated in that war more fully than did the United States, maybe I'm more familiar with it, through school and even movies, than might be this book's main, American audience).
Pratt's dialogue is surprisingly strong, with scenes between von Hammer and the journalist convincing. I use the word surprising because my understanding is that Pratt is first and foremost an artist.
The painted art is both powerful and effective...as well as problematic. Pratt (a painter with work in galleries) paints in, basically, an Impressionistic style. Often it's atmospheric, with a sequence of von Hammer wandering through snowy woods broodingly effective, or even the scenes of von Hammer and the journalist have a haunting ambience. But his style gets so impressionistic, it actually starts to become Expressionistic at times, with panels where I couldn't quite make out what I was supposed to be looking at. I wondered if that was on purpose, the art creating its own subtext by getting more chaotic and confusing as we get more into the thick of conflict...but I don't think so. There isn't enough of a change for me to believe that.
On one hand, through the art, Pratt can accomplish something a movie can't. He can diverge from reality just enough to (perhaps) create a more penetrating reality than a more literal motion picture can (or even a novel). There are striking scenes and images in the book that no movie, no matter the budget, could duplicate. On the other hand, Pratt can also lose the edge, the horror of his setting through the art. Showing a mass grave doesn't necessarily shock as well as it might, when the corpses don't entirely resemble corpses. Far from crystallizing the horrors of war, he can actually soften them.
Of course, even as a philosophical/socio-political essay, War Idyll doesn't have much to say beyond the usual: that War is Hell. Pratt stops short of actually denouncing war, or suggesting alternatives, nor does he delve at all into any of the motives for the wars. Granted, I didn't expect him to and I'm not really criticizing him for the lack of a bigger (and controversial) stance.
And for fans of Enemy Ace, and the whole sub-genre of aviation stories, the fact that much of the story takes place on the ground will be disappointing. But then, Pratt's intention isn't to tell a frivolous adventure.
This is certainly a decent enough read, a brooding look at one of humanity's greatest follies. But it seems undeveloped, needing a stronger plot or character stuff to provide a foundation for the ruminations. In a sense, it reminds me of the later Uncle Sam -- also a fully painted, "ambitious" comics story that believed its worthiness overrode much need for it to meet conventional narrative expectations.
Cover price: $18.95 CDN. / $14.95 USA
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