Spent
Drawn and Quarterly
Two-first-named cartoonist Joe Matt creates comics about his own life starring himself, and he makes cantankerous crank Harvey Pekar and pathetic, laughably lovelorn Jeffrey Brown seem like two of the most well-adjusted individuals you’ve ever read about.
Matt is a chronic masturbator addicted to porn. How chronic, you ask, and how addicted? Well, he pleasures himself at least 10 times a day, and even hits a personal record of 20 in one scene in this book (hence the title). And as for porn, he borrows tapes from a friend and, using two VCRs, laboriously edits hundreds of hours of pornography into highlight tapes that cut out all of the story, all of the men’s faces and asses, leaving only the good parts, which he can use for future inspiration.
Spent spans eight years in Matt’s life, which is exactly how long it took to create the book. We first meet him talking with fellow cartoonist Seth, and later he has lunch with Seth and another cartoonist, Chester. They’ll look, sound and act awfully familiar to anyone who’s read Seth’s brilliant It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, in which the pair also both appear.
The book actually bears quite a strong resemblance to Seth’s; the two cartoonists have a very similar style in terms of their thick lines and sparse details, and both use black-and-white washed with a single color.
Matt’s tale is a lot more wincingly, shudder-inducingly revelatory than Seth’s ... or just about anyone else’s, actually. Matt (or at least his comics avatar) seems like a bit of a psycho, and that’s what gives the book punch beyond its visual appeal. No matter how much you might shake your head at the star and his behavior (and his porn habit is hardly the worst of it), there will come a point where you’ll see some of yourself in him.
Batman: Ego and Other Tails
DC Comics
Don’t let the terrible joke in the title scare you away from this beautiful hardcover collection of writer/artist Darwyn Cooke’s Batman and Catwoman stories. (See, Catwoman is named after a cat, right? And cats have “tails!” Get it?)
Cooke worked on the animated Batman and Superman series before breaking into comics, and has since gone on to great acclaim with New Frontier and The Spirit. In these earlier Bat- and Cat-stories, he transplanted the Batman: The Animated Series aesthetic to paper, making it his own and coming up with a cartoon-noir visual style and spirit that’s perfectly suited for the characters.
In addition to Batman: Ego, a melodrama in which Bruce Wayne sits down to have a long, hard talk with the Batman, the book includes “Selina’s Big Score,” a graphic novella crime story featuring a plainclothes Catwoman, plus several short stories either written, drawn or written and drawn by Cooke.
While there’s always been a lot of crossover between the fields of animation and comics, I’m hard-pressed to think of another talent who’s been able to consistently create comics stories that seem just as vibrant and alive as animated ones as Cooke has.
New Avengers/Transformers No. 1
Marvel/IDW
While I was watching the new Transformers movie, I found myself thinking about John McClane in Live Free or Die Hard a lot, perhaps because that big, stupid summer action movie was so much more intelligible and graceful in its mayhem than the one that I was watching. I distinctly remember thinking at one point how much cooler Transformers would be if Bruce Willis’ McClane were in it. I mean, he was just a streetwise cop, and he defeated a helicopter and a jet all by himself; surely he could have taken down half the Decepticons himself.
New Avengers/Transformers proves I wasn’t alone in imagining the leads of summer blockbusters meeting, seeing as how Spider-Man is one of the half-dozen Marvel heroes on the New Avengers (along with Wolverine, Captain America and a handful of B- to D-listers).
There’s not much to recommend this four-issue miniseries beyond the novelty of the two incongruous franchises mixing. The creators do decent but unexceptional work, following the almost 50-year-old Marvel hero team-up formula, but if you’ve ever wondered whether Captain America could take Optimus Prime in a fight or not, the answer is on its way.