ATLAS (SHRUGS) part four: By The Time I Get To...

Concluding a series of reviews of the revived Atlas Comics line...

The question that has to be faced is this: is it possible to give these new Atlas books a fair trial? Maybe it is, for a far younger person than myself, one who has no memory of the originals and who therefore has no expectations. For me, and for anybody else with any experience of the originals, I think it’s near impossible to be objective.

Having said that, the time that’s passed since the first Atlas run has afforded a distancing effect. Reading these first issues has been, for the most part, like picking up a genuinely new range of books, with neither baggage nor anticipation. Or, put another way: it’s not been like picking up the first post-Morrison Doom Patrol or the first post-Moore Miracleman.

It pains me, then, that I’m heading into another less-than-glowing review, this time of Phoenix. But from an objective standpoint, a less-than-glowing review is what the book deserves: it’s another less-than-satisfactory comicbook in a field of millions. There’s substandard crap all over the place now, not just in comics but as an everyday part of life, seemingly to be expected and accepted with a resigned shrug and no hope of seeing anything becoming better.

Maybe the problem is that the originals just got on with it, the way that 70s comics had to do. The first issue of a new series had to encompass an origin, a fight scene, a cliff-hanger to drag you back for the next part. Now, what with decompression and ‘writing for the trade’, a typical comicbook is just one small slice of a longer story and as such has licence to drag on for as long as the book makes money. Sometimes this is a good thing: a story that needs room to breathe and explore its theme or its characters should be allowed to do so. However, the other side of that coin is that far too many comics tend to take that freedom and turn it into a reason to expand what ought to be an eight-page story into a six-issue epic during which a great deal of not-a-lot goes on.

But anyway.

Phoenix is a workmanlike comicbook. It’s written by Jim Kruger and it’s co-written by Brenden Deneen who is one of Atlas’ co-publishers. So if anything, Phoenix should be the book that most reflects the publisher’s ambition for the line.

Well, if that’s the case, I’m bailing right now. All I can see in this book is a story that goes nowhere, tin-ear dialogue, and art, by Dean Zachary, which goes with the word ‘amateurish’ better than William goes with Kate. There are panels in this book where the protagonist seems to have one leg a good ten inches shorter than the other. Characters spout exposition like bad soap opera. Heads and limbs join torsos at anatomically impossible junctions. As mentioned before, the Editor-in-Chief of the Atlas books is Mike Grell. Imagine, then, some of Grell’s work – let’s say The Longbow Hunters – lightboxed or badly copied, then equally badly shaded and painted. That’s what Phoenix looks like.

It's actually Interlac for 'Golf Sale'

And the design, my good lord the design; the original Phoenix get-up wasn’t exactly Tom Ford, but this new… thing…takes what would have been a perfectly serviceable bodysuit which could easily handle a little detailing, and smothers it in half-arsed alien symbols which must be an absolute bastard to draw. it’s straight out of the George Perez School of Over-Designed Costumes (there’s a reason why Perez’s Nightwing design was soon simplified down – all that excessive detailing would drive any other artist batshit in seconds).

I’ll tell you what Phoenix puts me in mind of: it’s the comicbook equivalent of an uninterested shop assistant. It doesn’t say “Good Morning” when you walk in, it doesn’t ask if it can help you (or maintain a discreet distance until you’re ready to be helped).  It doesn’t recommend anything to you. It stands there, it has no interest in you as a consumer, you as a person, you as somebody who ultimately pays its wages. It has no purpose except to get to the end of the working day and pick up its money.

And that’s how the Atlas books feel. They just want to get through their 22 or so pages, with little or no imperative to do anything other fulfil than their most basic job description. They’re just enough material to fill a void. You? You expect entertainment? You expect some form of commitment to you as a reader? No. You’re just in its way. You’re just stopping it from doing what it wants to do, which is to become a multi-media intellectual property.

Good luck with Phoenix in that regard; of all the Atlas books, the Phoenix concept – man gets stuck in alien bodysuit, gains amazing abilities, fights aliens (or crime, injustice, uppity socialists, whatever) – is the one that could most easily be transferred to another medium. Whether Phoenix makes that transfer depends, I suppose, on how successful Green Lantern turns out to be as a movie.

In the meantime, Phoenix just sits there, lacking any interest or anything of interest. Well, I expect more. I demand more.  And until I can see that something more, I’ll be leaving Phoenix – and the rest of the Atlas line - well alone. 

ATLAS (SHRUGS): part two: It's Grim, and not just Up North

Full disclosure: one of the three co-publishers of the new Atlas line, also its letterer and designer, is an old friend of mine. Not a ‘round each other’s houses’ friend, but certainly a ‘stop when we see each other and catch up on life’ friend.

Which doesn’t mean his books are getting an easy ride. Or a hard one. I have my integrity.

I’ll give them this; Atlas have spent a few quid on these new books. Not exactly Fillet Steak and Cristal money, but certainly a bit more than Double Cheeseburger Value Meal money. There’s nice heavy covers on the outsides and nice glossy paper on the insides. And there are recognisable creative names in the credits. Again, not Morrison or Johns or the other heavy hitters of today, but men who have a steady body of work behind them. The Editor-In-Chief is Mike Grell, for pete’s sake.

So how have they done?

Not all that well, to be honest.

I mean, a round of applause to them for even attempting to launch an entire new line in these straightened times when even the major publishers have trouble keeping a single new title alive for more than six months. Unfortunately, the quality of the new Atlas books isn’t of a high enough level to keep readers on board. That’s a depressing thing to have to say, but it’s how things are in the modern market, a market where below-par books (and more than a few above-par books) disappear quicker than an unwary stroller across Morecambe Bay.

Let's start with:

The Grim Ghost 1:  I’ll admit I had no idea who Stephen Susco is, but a quick Google told me he’s a scriptwriter who wrote the Grudge films which starred Sarah Michelle Gellar. Tony Isabella wrote the original Grim Ghost series, so between them they should be able to turn out a half-decent comicbook. And yes, this is the best of the three launch titles as far as writing goes; the premise isn’t a radical re-tooling of the original but instead adds to it in order to update. We have a POV character – Michael - who enables the handy first-person captions which in turn enable enormous amounts of exposition to be put across without the requirement of a character standing there spouting it and slowing things down.

Unfortunately, Michael’s captions come over as lifeless (which may for all I know be a deliberate choice, given that the character is dead) and over-expository. There’s no idea that he’s in any way involved in the events; given that he’s new to the ‘being dead’ game you’d expect him to be more skittish, more gobsmacked at what goes on. Instead, he just drones on about what Matthew (the eponymous Ghost) said and what Matthew did and wow Matthew's just soooo great, with the additions of a little bit of whining about himself and a brief interlude with an old man which just sits there, taking up a page. Maybe it’ll be important later in the story. Certainly doesn’t seem to be now.

Speech is pretty much old-style comicbook dialogue (“My name is Matthew Dunsinane and I hate to break it to you… but you’re dead!” Damn, does that mean I’m going to miss next week’s Glee? “Can you believe it, Amy? A baby girl! We’re parents!” Does she not know this? Was she comatose during the entire pregnancy and labour? Or are you just incredibly patronising - more so than I am?).

The biggest question is: What the hell happened to Kelley Jones? His art style has always been a little unusual, with its exaggerated drapery and dramatic compositions, and let’s not forget that Jones was the man who put yard-long ears on Batman’s mask and gave us the Amazing Anorexic Deadman. But here, it seems that any quirks have been knocked out of the art - presumably by a heavy-handed art director -  and if it’s the case that the house style is considered to carry more weight than individual style, why give the job to someone with such a distinct look to their work?

It’s still recognisably Jones’ art, all dark shadows and off-kilter figurework, though it looks dangerously as if it was knocked out overnight or reworked heavily by an art department. Every female figure in the book seems to have been pasted in after being drawn by an entirely different – and entirely inferior – artist. This is especially jarring on a double-page spread towards the front of the book, where the female figure stands out by virtue of being the only brightly-coloured thing on the page, which emphasises the stylistic dichotomy.

I don’t want to damn this book out of hand. It has possibilities, especially in the Fringe, its not-Heaven, not-Hell setting, reflecting the real world in both physicality and in how its residents interact with others. There’s a good idea in there, and it’d be nice to see it built upon.

This is the real world, though, where Grim Ghost gets the same chance of making an impression as every other book hitting the shelves, and on this showing that chance has been wasted.

But it does have a very nice cover logo.



Next: Phoenix. Or Wulf.

ATLAS (SHRUGS): part one

Some of us are old enough to have been part of the original Atlas Comics readership and frankly, some of us have got rose-tinted lenses in our see-behind glasses.

   

There’s no arguing that the original Atlas line had some superb creative talent working for it – Ditko, Wood and Chaykin are only the first three that come to mind – but there’s also no arguing that a great deal of the line, in common with a great deal of every other publisher’s line in the 1970s, was pretty much dross.

For all the talent that was toiling away at it, the Atlas line was incredibly restricted in its scope. Editorial mandates no doubt had a lot to do with this – we all know why the line was set up and how important it was to the man in charge that every item published had to be more Marvel than Marvel, and given how Marvel even Marvel was at that time (and how Marvel DC was), it really wasn’t a surprise that the public very quickly decided that having an extra helping of trite superheroics in their comics was a bit like having an extra helping of vomit in their ice cream.

 

So, the Atlas line went away, and in time it gained the same rosy glow that nostalgia gives to many other slightly sub-par but time-lost things, like Aztec Bars, or Little and Large, or rickets. Grown men waxed lyrical about the merits of Thrilling Adventure Stories and The Destructor, forgetting that these were just two more me-too products at a time when the originals they were aping weren’t exactly breaking new ground either.

For some reason though – probably the fact that those who’d enjoyed the original Atlas line were now well into middle age and therefore getting misty-eyed about everything that, through virtue of not being alive, hadn’t got as paunchy and balding as they had – those old comics started popping up all over the place in the last few years.

The original Grim Ghost
 also had a sideline
modelling knitware

I think the first real blip on the modern radar was an issue of Comic Book Artist that led on the Atlas line. I’ll be honest, I’m not over-fond of CBA. It does a good enough job of dragging up the past and it does spotlight some creators who may not get the due they’re due these days, but on the whole I find it rather superficial and fanboyish in its uncritical yowzering over any old dross that happens to have hit print thirty years ago. Also, its editor’s habit of referring to himself as ‘Ye Ed’ gets right on my tits.

The Atlas issue of CBA wasn’t entirely bad despite its desperate need to remain inoffensive. It featured some quite decent pieces of art which were only improved from being in black and white rather than having garish 70s colours slapped all over them, and it carried a history of the company that revealed what it was really like to work for a comics publisher back then, a history that was only improved by the contributors’ knowledge that as the company was no longer extant they wouldn’t be burning any freelancer bridges by telling the world the unvarnished truth about what went on.

The original Phoenix had
 absolutely no problem with
wearing a light blue jockstrap

Since then, whenever I’ve spent a decent length of time in a comicbook store – by which I mean time measured in weeks rather than hours, time spent actually being a small businessman, which is what I occasionally do when called to do so – I’ve noticed that when copies of Atlas titles turn up, they pretty soon go out again. There’s a demand for them; not a huge one, but it's there. It’s the old ‘buying your youth back’ thing that men (and women) of a certain age do. Atlas comics are bought in the same way that CD reissues of dreadful old prog rock albums are; nobody actively wants to hear an Amon Duul album but owning a copy to replace the one lost in the divorce, or scratched to buggery by inquisitive toddlers, turns the clock back and makes the razorcut pain of impending mortality just a little duller.

It’s inevitable then that somebody should have revived the Atlas characters. It’s also inevitable that one of the resurrection men picking over this particular body should be Richard Emms, and it’s so bloody inevitable you could set your watch by it that Richard should shove copies of the first three new Atlas books into my hands at the last London Comic Mart and say “Here you go Shippy, write a review of those.” 

And that's precisely what I'm going to do.

Next time.