Floppies for Trades: Orcs, Cops, and Cowboys

We love us some monthly funnybooks here on the Dork Forty, but every so often we go for the trade paperbacks, too. Sometimes, it’s just ‘cause we missed somethin’ on the monthly racks, or sometimes it’s ‘cause we ain’t willin’ to pay out full price for the monthly issues. Either way, every once in a while we come late to the funnybook party, and when that happens, it inspires a little thing we like to call… Floppies For Trades.



click to embiggen

Orc Stain vol. 1
by James Stokoe

Orc Stain was one of the more celebrated new books of the last year, and somehow I missed it. Not just the hype, but even the book itself. Til I saw it pop up on a bunch of year’s best lists, I was at best only vaguely aware of its existence. I can only assume that it got swallowed up by the competition on the racks. I mean, it’s possible that I picked an issue up, flipped through it, and tossed it back. My flip-through instincts are pretty reliable, but sometimes…

Sometimes, I just fall asleep at the wheel.

And that seems to be what happened with Orc Stain. Because this book is pure dynamite. How to describe it, though? What words best-capture the Orc Stain experience? Here, let me lay a few on you:

Profane.
Cynical.
Inventive.
Action-packed.
Fun.
Phallocentric.

If I just stopped the review right there, you’d still have a pretty good idea of what to expect when you pick up Orc Stain. But lord knows I can’t stop there. I may be constitutionally incapable of it, in fact…

Floppies for Trades: Two Americas

Captain America: Two Americas
by Ed Brubaker, Luke Ross, and Butch Guice

So THIS is the storyline that got the Tea Party’s panties in a bunch? Seriously? For a movement that’s all about individual freedoms, they’re certainly some thin-skinned SOBs. But as usual, I’m getting ahead of myself…

When the on-going Captain America series went to four bucks a pop earlier this year, I decided it was time to start reading it in trade paperback collections. I found the “Nomad” back-up strip pretty much unreadable, making its “added value” an actual detriment to my enjoyment of the monthly funnybook reading experience. And, since this isn’t a book that really needs my monthly support to keep going anyway… It seemed like a perfect candidate for trade-waiting. So here we are at the first of those trade collections, Two Americas. And, sure enough, it’s a better deal than the monthly. I got five issues of All-American Action and Political Subtext for 15 bucks. Which still seems a little steep, honestly, but which nonetheless feels like a better use of my funnybook dollar.

The story concerns “Bad Cap,” the poor bastard who became Captain America in the 1950s and was driven insane by the knock-off of the Super Soldier Serum they used on him. This character’s been knocking around for years now. Initially an attempt to explain the insane Commie-bashing Cap stories of the early 1950s (in which Our Hero did some decidedly Un-American things in the name of freedom), he’s since become a great doppelganger villain to toss out periodically, and remind everyone of just what the real Cap stands for. He was brought out of mothballs in Brubaker’s big multi-year Red Skull storyline (which name-checked pretty much every great Captain America story ever), and escaped into the American heartland to be dealt with here.

And Brubaker, of course, makes the most of it. Bad Cap returns to his hometown of Boise, Idaho, sees the unemployment and the erosion of American Values, and decides that he’s got to change things. And, since he’s crazy and super-strong and solves most of his problems by hitting things, he decides to form a super-militia. Or, rather… He becomes the leader of one that’s already in place: the Watchdogs. I‘ve never read a story with these guys in it, but they‘ve been kicking around since the 80s. They’re essentially a bunch of right-wing terrorist militia types with high-tech weapons and body armor, a perfect group to use if you want to discuss the current political climate in the guise of a super hero comic.

And this is where they got in hot water with the Tea Party. Upon arrival in Boise, Cap and the Falcon watch a protest rally made up of working class Americans:

Floppies for Trades 3: Hellblazer: Hooked

Hellblazer: Hooked
by Peter Milligan, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Stefano Landini, and Simon Bisley

So I love me some Hellblazer. I was recently shocked to discover how many issues of this book I have in my collection. It’s been so long since I found it worth reading that I guess I just forgot how very good it was for so very long. When current series writer Peter Milligan came on-board, though, I picked it up again for his first story arc. I quite enjoyed it at first, but the bloom came off the rose fast, and I wandered away from the book again.

I came back to the series recently, though, for Milligan’s Ghost of Sid Vicious story, illustrated in fine form by Simon Bisley, and have stuck around since. It’s not the best Hellblazer ever, but its been entertaining, and poses some interesting moral quandaries for Our Bastard Hero. I’ve been enjoying it enough, in fact, that I decided to go back and pick up the stuff I missed. That more or less starts here, with the Hooked collection.

“Hooked” is a story about addiction. Constantine opens the story with two of them: one to some magical goo he got from Julian (a demon who’s currently wearing the form of a 13-year-old schoolgirl), and another to Phoebe, a good lady doctor with a perverse streak and a wicked sense of humor. Poor ol‘ John‘s head over heels in love with her, and they seem a good match… Except that his black magic bullshit inevitably creeps into the lives of anyone he gets involved with. Phoebe can’t handle that, and has broken up with him.

Floppies for Trades 2: Tomb of Dracula

Tomb of Dracula is one of my favorite comics of the 70s. Newsstand distribution being what it was back then, I wasn’t able to get my hands on many issues as a kid, but every one I did manage to find was like a little treasure. A little treasure filled with blood and evil, but hey. That’s how I’ve always rolled.

At any rate. I’ve picked up odd issues of Tomb my whole life, mostly ragged-out copies I stumbled across in dollar boxes. They’re always a hoot, but I’ve never made a concerted effort to collect the series. In bulk, I was afraid, it might lose some of the weird charm it held when reading random issues spread out across the run: Here’s Blade! Here’s a robot with a human brain! Here’s a vampire baby! Here’s that Woody Allen character! None of these issues ever quite made sense to me taken individually, but I loved the macabre chaos of it all. If I had the through line, I thought, if I understood the plotlines, they might cease to be happy nonsense and be revealed as the same sort of shabby crap most 70s comics were.

But I sold off all my old, decaying, headache-inducing copies of Tomb as part of my recent funnybook purge, so when Marvel released the first volume of a new series of color reprints… I decided to take the plunge. Damn the torpedoes, and all that. It was interesting, and somewhat surprising, reading. My memory of the book is that it’s not very good until writer Marv Wolfman comes on in the second year and gets his longer storylines running, at which point it took off and became the batshit masterpiece I remember. I still think that’s the case, mostly, but I was shocked to discover that Wolfman actually came onto the book with issue 7, and that it took a decided downturn in quality when he did.

Floppies for Trades 1: Torso

So I recently did that thing that aging funnybook dorks sometimes do, where I traded in a big chunk of my comics collection and replaced the good stuff with trades. It’s a great deal for the discriminating fan-man (even at pennies-on-the-dollar trade-in value). You rid yourself of a few hundred pounds of unsightly storage boxes filled with staple-bound pamphlets you may never look at again, and replace them with an attractive bookshelf filled with square-bound volumes you can discuss with your snooty literary friends.

Or, you know, at least you can find an old funnybook you wanna re-read without having to move a mountain to get to it…