Criminal

by Wayne Markley

While it may come as surprise to most people outside of the comic book world, and most likely to a number of comic book fans, there are a number of genres of comics aside from superheroes. There are younger readers, there are barbarians, and there is crime, just to name a few. If you are willing to read more than just American comics, there is a whole world of genres, in both European comics and in Manga, where there is almost a book on every subject matter you could imagine. But in this column we are going to look at a handful of genres with books I think are well worth reading and of your time and money.

One of my favorite genres is crime. And there are some excellent crime books out there. Perhaps my favorite is Ed Brubaker’s Criminal. This is a dark and moody book about real people who live in a world I would hope never to visit. It reads like the best of crime novels and Sean Phillips’ artwork creates a stunning film noir epic along the order of Jim Thompson. And there is a beautiful hardcover omnibus collection the first story arc that Marvel released late last year and there are also affordable trade collections if that is more your taste.

Scalped

A second crime book I would highly recommend is Jason Aaron’s Scalped. This is a complex story set on an Indian reservation in the present day. While it is also dark and moody, it is very different than Criminal in that it is more gritty and the cast of characters is much larger. It is still gripping storytelling and moody art though I would not recommend reading this as a monthly book. It reads so much better in the trade form as the stories are complex and compelling and to wait a month between issues is very frustrating. There are five trade collections of this series and I would point out it is important to read these in order as the stories build on each other.

Filthy Rich

The third crime book I would like to mention is not actually a book, but Vertigo’s Crime Line. These are black and white stand-alone hardcover books by different writers and artists. They are good and are getting better. They just released the forth volume in the series, Bronx Kill, which I find to be the best in the series so far. That is largely due to the fact that it is a crime story, with a murder and the consequences of it. The first three volumes were an odd mix, which were crime by a loose definition, but had other aspects that I thought distracted from the crimes. For example, one of the books, Dark Entries, was written by crime novelist Ian Rankin (Inspector Rebus novels) and was a Hellblazer graphic novel shoved into this crime line. It was a good book, but it struck me that it was put in Vertigo Crime more as a marketing trick than a book that truly belonged there. Another example is The Chill by Jason Starr. An excellent book, but its fantasy overtones took away from the crime feeling of it for me. I am a traditionalist in that I like my crime stories set in the real world, not a hybrid of crime and fantasy or science fiction or other genres.

Sky Doll

Speaking of other genres, the next line of books I would like to point out is the Soleil books from Marvel. I have raved about these books before as I complete enjoy them, even when the subject matter is not to my taste. These are collections of miniseries that Marvel has been publishing over the last few years. They range from hardcore science fiction such as Universal War One to action/adventure series such as Spin Angels which is coming in a beautiful hardcover collection to a great fantasy story called Ythaq. Then there is a stunning piece of work called the Scourge of the Gods. This story mixes Greek and Roman gods with science fiction to tell a quick paced story with a ton of twists and turns. They also have a collection called Sky Doll which has some of the most beautiful art I have seen in a science fiction story in years. All of these books are recommended because they are written as books (even though Marvel breaks them up into miniseries) and are not comics written to be collected into a book. Each and every one of them has stunning artwork, which is very different from book to book, but the styles are so suited for the stories being told.

Chronicles of Conan

The final genre I would like to look at is sword and sorcery. Well, not really, what I want to discuss is Conan the Barbarian. Conan stories go back almost a100 years now to the age of pulps and dime fiction. And in comics he goes back to the 1970s when Marvel launched the monthly Conan comic book and Savage Tales magazine. The Marvel comics from almost 40 years ago are a lot of fun and tell rip-roaring adventures, some of which were based on Robert E. Howard’s original stories, and a lot of which were just action stories. They had some beautiful art work by Barry Windsor-Smith and John Buscema. Throughout the series, there was a nice mix of fantasy, action, and pulp style adventure. Marvel also had a companion magazine called Savage Sword of Conan that was a bit more risqué and much more violent. While the comics were suitable for all ages, the magazine was aimed at teens and adults as it had nudity and limbs flying. My one complaint about the books is they are clearly a product of the time, and looking back at them they seem more as men’s adventure type stories than the true Howard feeling of the original stories.

Conan

In contrast to those Marvel stories, the past few years Dark Horse has been doing the Conan comic book and it is fantastic. It has run almost 70 issues so far, with the first 40+ issues by Kurt Busiek and Cary Nord. These are some of the best comics  ever done in this genre. They are beautiful to look at and the stories are faithful adaptation of Howard’s original stories with new stories filling in the gaps in Conan’s history as written by Howard. The second half of the run has been written by Tim Truman, and he has continued the top-notch level of work that Kurt and Cary started. Tomas Giorello took over on the art, and over the last year or so, he has really come into his own. Luckily, Dark Horse has been collecting all of this material, both the Marvel comics, in 18 full color trades called The Chronicles of Conan, and all the Savage Sword of Conan in a series of black and white phone books called Savage Sword of Conan (how convenient). The Dark Horse Conan stories are also collected in a series of full color trades. All of these are worth your time to read. My one complaint about the reprints, and this has nothing to do with Dark Horse, is that any story with Red Sonja from the Marvel series is excluded due to licensing reasons.

New Avengers: Illuminati

That is it for this time. Thank you for reading and for your comments. I hope with all the books discussed this time out you can find something new to try and expand your reading horizons beyond the traditional superheroes. And last but not least, a couple of books I would like to point out quickly are Madame Xanadu by Matt Wagner and New Avengers: Illuminati by Brian Michael Bendis. Both of these books have excellent writing and art and both are excellent example of retroactive continuity which I discussed last time. They take a story from long ago and tweak it with a modern character so that it reads like that is the way the story was originally written, but we just did not know this little fact. Great storytelling with respect to the characters history and continuity.

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