Hey, what's a mural? you might be asking right about now (since it's been seventy-'leven years since I did one of these Monday night features). Well, a mural is a series of two or more comic books that, when combined, form a complete scene of greater vista or landscape! (You can also call them a tryptych
Also: a way to get you to buy more comic books to see how they all fit together. Unless, of course, you read this very puppet-town cow blog, because I do it for ya! And what better time of the year than Christmastime for the Man with No Time for Time, The Doctor? or should I say...The Doctors?
Left to right: covers of Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor #5; Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #5;
and Doctor Who: The Twelfth Doctor #3 (The WHO Shop, London variant covers, December 2014), art by Lee Sullivan (Click picture to bigger-on-the-inside-size)
Say, where's Nine? Aw, he's probably off somewhere else in London eating chips with Rose. And I suspect the War Doctor is somewhere in the Who Shop...but when it comes to buying gifts in boxes, he's very indecisive.
Hey, I haven't done one of these in a while, have I? But I can't resist Mike Allred's...shall we say...fantastic portrait of the new FF across the covers of FF #2-5:
Covers of FF (2013 series) #2-5 (February-May 2013), pencils and inks by Michael Allred, colors by Laura Allred
(Click picture to Miss Thing-size)
He has his followers as well as detractors, but I'm a big fan of the comic book artwork of Chris Bachalo. Although I first discovered his work on Sandman and Shade The Changing Man, it's his quirky and distinctive artwork for issues of Generation X that made me a fan.
Two-page splash spread for Generation X #29 (August 1997), script by James Robinson; pencils by Chris Bachalo and Pop Mhan; inks by Al Vey, Eric Cannon, Tim Townsend, and Al Milgrom; colors by Marie Javins; letters by Richard Starkings and Emerson Miranda
Click image to Mondo-size
A quick Bullynote: this issue is pencilled both by Bachalo and by Pop Mhan (Spyboy, Blank). I'm gonna admit it: I can't really tell which pages are specifically by Bachalo or which ones are by Mhan. (Well, this one's definitely by Pop Mhan.) So if the panels and pages I'm pointing to turn out to be Pop Mhan rather than Chris Bachalo...boy, is my fuzzy face red. But just because I'm having trouble distinguishing between two similar manga-styled artists doesn't, I hope, distract from my appreciation for the art.
Bachalo's style had evolved by this time into an exaggerated bigfoot cartoon style that perfectly fit the young adolescents of Generation X: M, Husk, Skin, Chamber and everybody's favorite not-yet-vampiric and the aptly-not-appearing in this issue Jubilee. Big round heads, rubbery faces (and I'm not just talking about Skin), oversized feet—not quite manga, not quite western comic art, but a look that would become more prevalent in superhero comics over the next several years, paving the way for artists like Humberto Ramos and Joe Madureira. Some fans hated it, others lapped it up like chocolate milk. Mmmm, delicious chocolate milk. I'm not a blindly slavish Bachalo fanbull—his adult figures like Emma Frost looked like teenagers as well—but he took the strictly structured world of the X-Men franchises and brought a gleeful, colorful hallucinogenic quality to it. It was no stretch to believe that Howard the Duck or Spider-Ham existed in the world of Generation X. I love the two-page Where's Waldoesque (Where's Waldoish? Waldoiffic?) splash page to ish #29 (above). He's got the title team in there lost among the hurly-burly eccentric circus of Venice Beach, filled with inside jokes (is that Neil Gaiman's Death over there?). It's the kind of landscape and range of human figure we might expect the X-Men and Generation X to exist in...sure, they're mutants and they stand out among us...only, some places, less than others.
What's this got to do with Monday Night or even Thursday Night Murals? The cover's not part of a mural. We're smack-dab in the middle of the "Operation: Zero Tolerance" crossover in the X-books, where Sentinels are tracking down every one of the X-Mutants to totally eliminate and crush them...wait a minute. Just like Kid's Day, isn't every day in the Marvel Universe "Operation: Zero Tolerance"? Except for that time Rogue was flying over the military air show in her Daisy Dukes and a tube top...that was "Operation: A Little Bit of Tolerance."
Nope—unlike most of the examples in the Murals category you'll find on this little stuffed blog, I'm gonna show you an internal mural that I'm fascinated by. Here's two facing pages from the same issue, Generation X #29. Now, do I need to set up this clip for you? Gen X is being chased by Prime Sentinels through the streets or Los Angeles. You don't need to know much more than that, So, put on your widescreen glasses to get ready!
Click picture to Sentinel-size
Not a mural either, huh? But the cleverer among you (see how I keep my blog audience by giving them sneaky compliments, huh?) will have noticed that if you take your scissors and cut along here...and then snip this page off and apart like this...and you get your glue stick out and liberally apply here...and here...and then sit in a warm bath for a while so you can get the gluestick out of your fur...you might just wind up with something like this:
Click picture to Generation-size. You might need to click the resulting image to blow it up, too!
The six page-wide panels combine into one ultra-wide adventure chase mural. Unlike most of the murals I spotlight in this feature, this sextuple-wider combines a mural landscape with successive actions in time—in other words, as Scott McCloud would tell ya in his multi-billion selling Understanding Comics, Bachalo is using action moving across panels to show movement in time as well as space. (And without Doctor Who showing up, either!) As we an to the right on the long glued-together mural, the actions in each section are successive, not simultaneous; we see them across a moving landscape but not at one time. To simplify, our eyes are moving from left to right, but not as fast as the Gen X kids and their pursuing Prime Sentinels and the little skateboarding kid caught up in their chase, riding out the explosion like a wave.
I've had to fudge a little bit with pasting together the images: you'll spot that the first and second panels contain the same "no parking" sign at a slight different angle. Theoretically, you might get that same parallax view if you were running more slowly alongside the action from across the street...but I'm gonna guess that Chris Bachalo threw the sign in again to give us a visual clue that the panels were all part of one landscape. I chose to do it this way because pasting one sign on top of another would obscure the graffiti behind it; but between four and five I've cut out the second set of figures of the woman in black and her bald-headed boyfriend (and his punch line) to better preserve the visual continuity of the background. Bachalo's mural design isn't impeccable, but it's inventive and energetic, and I love the way he draws your eye from left to right across each separate panel in our natural reading direction, at the same time moving the characters and action and background in the same fashion. While the physical limitations of the comic book page have prevented him from actually creating a 48-inch wide comic panel—I picture a horizontal version of Vertigo's 2003 Vertical comic book—but Chris Bachalo has certainly done more with his own improvised "widescreen" format than most of the visual artists of the short-lived "Marvelscope" sideways-bound comic experiments like the New X-Men Annual and X-Treme X-Men Annuals of 2001.
And he did it without using the word "Marvelscope."
As we gear up for the greatest holiday of the year*, let's try something a little bit different in the mural department tonight. Let's not look at a cover mural...ah, c'mon, stop with the boos. (I'm too young to drink it!) Instead, feast your oculars upon comics' first four-page interconnected spread, from the mega-mind of Jim Steranko and his ground-breaking and senses-shattering work on the Nick Fury series in Strange Tales:
Four pages from Strange Tales #167 (April 1968), script, pencils, and colors by Jim Steranko, inks by Joe Sinnott, letters by Sam Rosen
(Click picture to secret-volcano-lair-size)
Whoa. My little stuffed mind is officially blown. But let's let Jaunty Jim Steranko (and his pal Stan) explain it all for you:
And how cool is Jolly Jim? So cool that he brings us another two-page spread at the end of the story:
Huh...I'm beginning to suspect that that guy on the left is the same dude who I used to always lose to in Saturday Morning Chess Club. You know, I don't care what he haltingly told me...I don't think that's really Chess Grandmaster Lev Alburt after all!
*December 23: the birthday of Nick Fury, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.*
*Several Hippopotamuses Impersonating Elephants to Liqudate Dumbo
Deadpool! Man, I lovethat movie! The Marvel Comics character, though...well, your mileage may vary. I find Wade Wilson, like his brother Flip, funny in small doses. That's exactly what Marvel hasn't been giving us for the past couple years, with Marvel Comics publishing one Deadpool comic book while the next one is only halfway finished...therefore they can never turn off the machine! Well, not humanely, at least.
Why, there's so many Deadpool comics that even the prequel to a series gets a series:
Prelude to Deadpool Corps #1-5 (May 2010), art by Dave Johnson and Rico Rensi
(Click picture to killing-the-goose-with-the-golden-egg-size)
What I actually enjoy most about this comic book mural is the background cameos of a whole lotta big names from the rest of the Marvel Universe. Can you name 'em all? Sure, you can!
Hey, it's Thanksgiving week! And I'm off to Mama Bull's for some delicious, delicious turduckenlate. (That's a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken stuffed with chocolate.) So before I dash out the door and dive into bowl of hot oyster stuffing, here's a post-haste Monday Night Mural. Is it really a mural if it's from variant versions of the same comic book? Ehhh, I got pumpkin pie waiting, you think I'm gonna worry about that?
So: I hope your Thanksgiving reunion with your family goes better than these guys':
Hulk #6 regular and variant cover (November 2008), art by Ed McGuinness and Dexter Vines
(Click picture to 22-pound-turkey-size)
I hope you have a good Thanksgiving, too! Don't eat so many brussels srpouts that you turn green, don't eat so much cranberry sauce you turn red. And save room for pie!
I'll be away from the blog the rest of this week, but you can still drop by for a Hank McCoy every day, and there'll be a special Ten of a Kind on Thursday night, if you can waddle over to the computer! I'll be back, more roly-poly than ever, on Sunday, so remember: turkeys don't fly!
(Hey, where did the title of this post come from, you're asking?)
I'm back! (And thanks for your patience while I caught up with posting.) And, so is Batman! As the movie titles say, he not only begins, he also returns!
Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #1-6 (Early July-December 2010), art by Andy Kubert and Brad Anderson
(Click picture to Die Fledermaus-size)
Hoo doggy! I think one of the most fun series of the year is also gonna wind up claiming the title of best interlocking covers of the year, or, as I like to call it, The Mondo Mural Award. Andy Kubert has not taken the easy way out; he's not connected every little particle of art (partarticle?) with each other, but instead opted for a grander, more subtle treatment: the extended symbol of the Bat stretching across the covers, across the centuries. I'm in awe, Mister K. It's beautiful and not obvious at all...a nice visual fit for the intricate and nuanced writing of Grant Morrison.
Let's all take another awe-filled gander at it unadorned: without the typography, huh?
Welcome back, Batman. But hey, dude: send some dang postcards next time, huh?
And, speaking of comic books...here's an unusual comic cover mural:
X-Men Forever v.1 #2-6 (February-June 2001), art by Kevin Maguire, Andrew Pepoy, and Paul Mounts
(Click picture to X-cess-size)
This is X-Men Forever...not the Chris Claremont ret-fest currently going through its second run in the back alleys of continuity over at Marvel, but the original 2001 miniseries intended to capitalize on the success of Avengers Forever, which was a limited series based on pretty straightforward events through the history of Avengers, making them as complicated and twisted as possible. X-Men Forever is based upon X-Men, which naturally has one of the most confusing backstories since Star Wars Episode 3.5: Why is Lord Vader Sitting in His Quarters and Sobbing Uncontrollably?. Really, you explain Widget to me, huh? It was Kitty Pryde all along? I call shenanigans.
X-Men Forever is probably best remembered as the limited series where some of the supporting characters in the X-Families were visually tweaked to look more like their counterparts in the X-Men movie. Because that gives the later X-artists a chance to tweak up the blue filter over glamour photos of salad heiress Rebecca Romjin. For example: as seen in this expertly retouched photograph of Ms. Romjin with some comic book geek or another:
And then there's this curious cover mural. You can't argue that the cover artist is a powerhouse: Kevin Maguire, one of the great visual artists of today's comics world (and those digs at comics tracers were not pointed at you, Mr. M.) did the interiors and covers of the series, but I'm baffled at the covers. It's clearly supposed to be a mural of the main characters standing against a giant "X" (rented from X-World, your local headquarters for giant Xs, just behind the Long John SIlver's off of Route 22 in Berwyn). Forgive the doesn't-quite-fit-together matching of the covers (it's likely explained by tighter trimming of the cover images than Maguire expected), but where the Sam Scratch is the cover to issue #1?
I've looked up and down, through internet and outer, through longbox and short, and I've been unable to find a matching corner of that mural for ish #1. Here's what all the databases tell us is the sole direct edition cover of X-Men Forever #1:
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And here's an alternate Dynamic Forces cover by J. H. Williams, also unrelated to the mural:
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...annnnnnnd...that's about it. Theoretically there should be an upper left alternate cover that completes the mural, but if there is, I've never seen it. So it must be lost to time and consciousness, X-Men Forever.
It kind of makes sense that there isn't a first issue mural puzzle piece: there's five main characters in the series, each of whom's represented on the subsequent five issue covers. So unless the first issue would be Wolverine saying "Hey, bub! I do not appear in this series!", there really isn't another character to put on a theoretical first issue cover to match the others. It probably doesn't exist.
But: if it does exist you've got it, why not take a photo or scan of it and send it in? And in the meantime, may I humbly offer my proposal for a mural-completing cover to X-Men Forever #1?:
Let's do a modest, quick, simple mural tonight so tired post-Comic-Con partying-me can go to bed early!
One of my favorite types of comic book images is the good guys and the bad guys rushing towards each other. What are they gonna do when they meet in the middle? Fight? Swing dance? kiss? I dunno, but hoo hah, I love that! As perhaps best exemplified by the final few seconds of this:
By the way, "banded together from remote galaxies"? Let's see...Luthor's from Smallville/Metropolis, the Riddler's from Gotham, Apache Chief's from San Carlos, Arizona...heck, Solomon Grundy is from Louisiana. (I guar-ran-tay it!) Remote galaxies, my fuzzy butt. Okay, sure, Superman's from Krypton, Sinestro's from Space Sector 1417, Hawkman might be from Thanagar...and really, that's about it. Oh wait, Black Vulcan is from the planet Black Vulcan. That's where Spock goes for soul food, but he tries not to make a big thing about it so to be politically correct.
Anyway, my love of onrushing superguys is why, despite the fact that the once great, originally Morrison-flavored JLA book was getting a bit long in the tooth and was not long for this earth-1 in 2005, I still like the covers of these two comics, with the JLA and the CSA rushing towards each other for...I dunno, a picnic or something.
JLA #107-108 (December 2004-January 2005), art by Ron Garney and David Baron
(Click picture to Uber-size)
You may quibble that it might technically not be a mural because the earthy bits don't line up...it sort of forms a football shape rather than a globe. What, like you've never heard of Earth-Egg?
Hey, look, it's Donna Troy! Or, as Speedy knows her, Wonder Chick. You know, fans bicker about Wonder Woman recently changing her costume from bathing suit to work-out clothes, but nobody pays attention to how many times her baby sister goes for an all-new fashion. Pick a look and stick with it, Donna!
The Titans #23-25 (January-March 2001), art by Phil Jimenez, Richard Horie, and Tanya Horie
(Click picture to mythologi-size)
Yep, that's pretty much the entire convoluted history of Donna Madonna Troy in three interconnecting covers right there—even including Captain Nazi-Helmet, Kole "Cannon Fodder" Weathers, and creepy ex-husband Terry Long, who was voted only the second most loathsome Terry Long out of all the Terry Longs there are.
Of course, you already know the tale of Donna Troy, right? Well, maybe not. These days, you can stop someone on the street and demand that they tell you who Donna Troy is, and pretty much everyone will punch you in the face. But we all forget the days when millions thrilled to Fess Parker's melodious "The Ballad of Donna Troy" and kids excitedly ran around in their red leotards—the era when Wonder Girl totally ruled, man. Remember? Remember? Remember? ember ember ember
Once upon a time, in the days of legends, comic book writers of olde searched for new stories with which to entertain ye kiddes. And lo, they did look upon the summit of Mount Weisinger, and they did spy yonder "Superboye," wither...oh, heck, I can't talk like this the whole post. They copied their successful Superboy feature and introduced tales of Wonder Woman when she was still attending Themyscira High, home of the Fightin' Femizons: the teenage Diana, Wonder Girl!:
So successful were these tales of Wonder Woman 90210, DC immediately introduced the next natural character: Wonder Tot! Or, as I like to call her, Jim Henson's Wonder Baby. And then, in either a nod or a blatant rip-off of the Superman's office's "Imaginary Tales" (or, as Mort Weisinger liked to call them "Swan! Draw me a cover with Jimmy Olsen as a Viking and Superman wearing a gingham dress!"), the Double-W staff dreamed up their "Impossible Stories": comic books where...no, really, get this: Wonder Woman's mom made magic super 8 films in which Wonder Woman met, and teamed up with, herself at different ages. Years later, Marty McFly would hit upon the same money-making scheme, but it was too late, and not acrobatic enough:
The youngest member of this titanic trio of...um...tootsies...was the language-challenged Wonder Tot, three times voted America's Favorite Tot until losing in '65 to the Tater. With her cute pudgy toddler body and endearing failure to understand how pronouns worked, Wonder Tot surfed her way in our hearts. Until she was killed in Vietnam. Naw, just pullin' yer chain, there. She never made it past the military physical.
She and her Hulk-like diction soon starred their way towards solo stories of "the saucy Amazon babe." Um, okay, thank you, comics.
Also, there was Gloop, who now stars in an entire licensed line of comics and graphic novels produced by DC. Who can forget last year's multi-billion-dollar grossing Gloop: The Motion Picture or his surprise guest appearance on TV's CSI: Central City?
Not long after this, Robert Kanigher killed them all off and introduced a giant talking egg. Which only goes to show.
But you can't keep a good Wonder down. Wonder Girl, now called "Donna," soon popped up again as a member of of the all-hip, all-with-it Teen Titans, DC's first all-non-driving-licensed, unable to step into a bar, can't see Midnight Cowboy-action team. The story goes that Titans creator Bob Haney didn't realize Wonder Girl was supposed to be Wonder Woman and assumed she was Wonder Woman's teenage sidekick. Which means that the origin of W.G. has been much-discussed for decades because technically she doesn't exist. As opposed, of course, to all the real people that really exist in the real universe, like Batman and Metamorpho and Julius Schwartz.
As the first of Wonder Girl's many costumes, it was a classic look, and it remains part of her retro history to this day. Even though yes, it does look like pajamas.
But you know, those girls...they can't go without changing their outfits every twenty minutes. (Like, I can understand how Veronica has so many different outfits, but how come you don't see Betty wearing the same clothes twice?) Anyways, welcome the all-new, all-different, all-leotarded new Wonder Girl, now with poster-bustin' action!
The red leotard with gold stars is a look Donna would rock for years, altho' with some evolution. The W.G. of Earth-16-Going-on-17 introduced Cartoon Wonder Girl, complete with miniskirt and ponytail:
The classic red and gold look is how Donna busted burst back onto the scene in 1980's New Teen Titans, the comic book that put DC back in the big leagues by selling one bazillion jillion copies, by taking these classic characters and putting them in new, exciting, up-to-date adventures that mirrored the modern complex world, and popularizing a team of superheroes which include a green guy, the daughter of the devil, a girl in a metal bikini, and a teenager who still ran around in green spandex shorts. Among such a team of dynamic heroes Wonder Girl had to snazz herself up a little bit. So she unzipped her leotard down to there.
This was the outfit that Wonder Girl wore, fought in, and never popped out of for most of the run of New Teen Titans, with one short side trip to wear a different outfit to marry Young Marv Wolfman.
But the times they were a-changing, and the sales they were a-falling, so Donna Troy jettisoned the old red spandex and got out her waitressing outfit from Hercules' All-You-Can-Eat-BBQ-Hog-Pit to become the superheroine with the name that no one would be able to figure out her secret identity with: Troia! Also, she was still fightin' mad at posters.
But don't treat poor fashion-challenged Donna Troy too harshly, huh? It was the eighties...we all dressed like that. And by "we all" I mean Dick Greyson...
...whose outfit which has been charming exactly once in its history:
Eventually Donna joined...I dunno, izzat the Red Lanterns? The Blackhawks? The Superfreaks? Ah, heck, these were the days when DC published eighteen Lobo books a month, so basically anything went, even a red spandex outfit with a giant flying carrot on it. Thus she became a member of...The Vegetable Force!
How confusing were all these many identities and rewritten origins stories? So confusing that even John Byrne couldn't keep them straight. So, he did what anyone else would do in the same circumstance: called in the Donna Troy Squadron! (Motto: "When you've got trouble with a Donna Troy, call the Donna Troy Squadron and we'll definitely do something about it, or her, as the case may be.")
Eventually and sadly Donna Troy died of complications from a confusing origin, tragically too late for anyone, even Dr. Grant Morrison, to perform a crisisectomy on her. Immediately, of course, she came back from the dead. Which makes me wonder: what's the big deal with Christianity in the DC and Marvel Universes? Heck, if you live there, your mailman comes back from the dead, and you're not living by his scripture.
Donna Reborn was rockin' that Demolition Girl outfit you see above for a few issues, but later reverted to her now-current, basic and iconic "it's full of stars" costume. She made one small change only. Can you spot the difference in this "before and after" picture?
And, what the heck, at that point, you probably oughta hang around for Act Three, huh?
Also, Wonder Girl? Was Debra Winger.
So there ya go: the complete and unexpurgated history of Wonder Woman's sidekick, sister, younger self, and wife of Terry Long. Perhaps we haven't discovered who was Donna Troy, Wonder Girl, Troia, and Miss Carrot of Space Sector 2814, but we sure have gotten a good look at her many costumes, with the possible exception of the Hulkbuster Donna Armor, Wonder Girl Red and Blue, and Alien Symbiote Donna Troy, all available in action figure form now from DC Direct. DC Direct! Where 75% of our action figures are Superman and Batman!
What's this got to do with Monday Night or even Thursday Night Murals? The cover's not part of a mural. We're smack-dab in the middle of the "Operation: Zero Tolerance" crossover in the X-books, where Sentinels are tracking down every one of the X-Mutants to totally eliminate and crush them...wait a minute. Just like Kid's Day, isn't every day in the Marvel Universe "Operation: Zero Tolerance"? Except for that time Rogue was flying over the military air show in her Daisy Dukes and a tube top...that was "Operation: A Little Bit of Tolerance."
I've had to fudge a little bit with pasting together the images: you'll spot that the first and second panels contain the same "no parking" sign at a slight different angle. Theoretically, you might get that same parallax view if you were running more slowly alongside the action from across the street...but I'm gonna guess that Chris Bachalo threw the sign in again to give us a visual clue that the panels were all part of one landscape. I chose to do it this way because pasting one sign on top of another would obscure the graffiti behind it; but between four and five I've cut out the second set of figures of the woman in black and her bald-headed boyfriend (and his punch line) to better preserve the visual continuity of the background. Bachalo's mural design isn't impeccable, but it's inventive and energetic, and I love the way he draws your eye from left to right across each separate panel in our natural reading direction, at the same time moving the characters and action and background in the same fashion. While the physical limitations of the comic book page have prevented him from actually creating a 48-inch wide comic panel—I picture a horizontal version of Vertigo's 2003 Vertical comic book—but Chris Bachalo has certainly done more with his own improvised "widescreen" format than most of the visual artists of the short-lived "Marvelscope" sideways-bound comic experiments like the New X-Men Annual and X-Treme X-Men Annuals of 2001.
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