A tremendous comic book, Red Wolf, just finished a six-issue run. That Marvel cancelled the series speaks poorly of its corporate leadership. This comic book had everything -- excellent writing, superb art, a riveting narrative of a noble hero who, from the 1872 title (part of the recent Secret Wars crossover event), suddenly finds himself transported to present-day small-city New Mexico on the verge of a big-business drug-trade takeover.
Red Wolf is a Luddite manifesto. Scribe Nathan Edmondson champions a "whole earth" noble savage gestalt. Red Wolf fights gun-totting criminals barehanded, with the exception of an occasional mighty toss of a stone or an empty beer bottle, relying on pure athleticism and an understanding of the natural world, both flora and fauna, to best his foes.
Red Wolf is a true hero, no easy achievement these days, and for this Edmondson and penciler Dalibor Talajic deserve praise. Red Wolf offers a primer on how to be a good man. Do what you know. Be honest. Don't be afraid. It brought me to tears (a weakness of mine, this tendency to start weeping while reading comics books) in the 14 scans below:
Yesterday I woke up at before 2 AM and couldn't fall back asleep. So I got up and did a couple loads of laundry and cropped the scans I had made last week of Master of Kung Fu #2, a delightful Shang-Chi yarn that is part of Marvel's Secret Wars reboot. Master of Kung Fu is written by Haden Blackman (who did a great job on Elektra) with superb art supplied by Dalibor Talajic, another talented Croatian penciller.
The main reason there has been a drop-off in comic posts on this page is that scanning requires a fair amount of labor. When I was posting weekly on comic books I had trained myself to scan on Friday night and then edit the scans and upload them to the blog first thing the following morning. But things have been topsy-turvy lately. The hundred-plus year-old apartment building I live in is experiencing upgrades this summer: painting of the entire exterior has just been completed, and now I'm due to get new kitchen plumbing and a sink.
Both the painting and the plumbing work to be done have also required work on the tenant's part. The exterior painting required masking all the windows from the inside to prevent water and debris from blowing into the apartment from outside pressuring washing; -- the plumbing, relocation of the contents -- clothes and comic books -- of my main closet so that the plumbers can gain access to the new tie-in point.
On top of the apartment upgrades, another distraction is that I seemed to have come down with a case of tennis elbow. It hasn't progressed to the point of disability, but it is painful and bothersome. I think it is primarily caused by the way I lean on my right arm while holding the mouse as I navigate the wonderful World Wide Web. Subsequently, on the weekends, I am trying to spend as much time away from the laptop as possible.
Last Saturday I watched a DVD of Marlowe(1969), the MGM version of Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister (1949) which happens to be Bruce Lee's major Hollywood feature film debut.
Last month on the 4th of July after spending a delightful 45 minutes running square laps around the artificial soccer turf of Miller Playfield I jogged over to Lake View Cemetery to pay respect to Bruce and Brandon Lee. I do this periodically.
I got there before 9 AM and no one seemed to be around. But as I was just about to walk down the path that leads to the grave site of the father and son martial-arts legends I noticed a barefoot guy about my age dressed in grey sweats and a white v-neck t-shirt drinking coffee out of a ceramic mug.
So I said hello and we proceeded to shoot the shit for about 20 minutes. A good guy, a fireman stationed in the tony Madison Park neighborhood (Howard Schultz's home base), he grew up on Capitol Hill; his grandmother is buried in Lake View Cemetery. On that July 4th morning he was there to visit her, as well as kill time until his daughter, who is a homeowner on a street that runs parallel to the graveyard's northern boundary, woke up.
My acquaintance remembers as a kid being in the cemetery when Bruce Lee was buried in 1973. I got the sense the event confused him. He speculated about the suspicious nature of Brandon Lee's death. Then we got talking about retirement, life, Seattle and politics. Next thing I knew it was time to go. I had a lot of reading to do. So I thanked him for the chat and excused myself. In the interim another well-wisher had arrived at the Lee graves. I jogged home without actually visiting the graves.
Of course, Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu, was Marvel's attempt to cash in on Bruce Lee at the zenith of his popularity, as well as the popularity of the David Carradine television series Kung Fu. For some reason, whenever I think of the Bruce Lee early '70s of my childhood I always hear Al Green songs from his Willie Mitchell-produced Hi Records of the same period, songs like "Love and Happiness":
Below you will find ten scans from Master of Kung #2:
Last Sunday I hit a stride and read somewhere around ten issues of Jonathan Hickman's New Avengers. For almost two years now Hickman has been plotting the story of the extinction of all life, not just in our universe but in universes throughout all dimensions, the multiverse. This multidimensional pan-universal extinction is triggered when one Earth from one dimension collides with another Earth from another dimension at an incursion point.
Most of the action in the title to date has been superheroes, the Illuminati, rushing around weighted down with the moral quandary of having to commit genocide by destroying the intruding, non-Earth-616 planet before it collapses both.
On this day, the day that Hillary Clinton announces her candidacy for President of the United States, collapse is an appropriate topic. The Democrats are in a state of denial so extreme it approaches brain death. Most deep-blue Democrats when pushed will acknowledge that Hillary is not the best candidate -- Elizabeth Warren is most often sited as a preference -- but they don't see a way around Hillary's name recognition and deep pockets. So Democrats plan to sit tight and hope for the best. In the meantime, the tune that is being whistled as the Democratic Party drives past the graveyard is that Hillary will be able to mobilize and deliver to the polls the "Obama coalition" -- blacks, youth, Latinos.
That's not going to happen. The only thing that might save Hillary's bacon, assuming a dark horse like Jim Webb doesn't get traction and trounce her in the primaries, as Barack Hussein did in 2008, is if the Republican primary is so chaotic and vicious with billionaire funders engaged in mutually assured destruction that it deliveries up a terminally wounded standard bearer, a la Mitt Romney in 2012.
Right now let's assume that both the Ted Cruz clown car and the Marco Rubio daydream don't survive long after Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina -- granted, this is a large assumption -- and the race for the GOP nomination boils down to Scott Walker vs. Jeb Bush. I think either one beats Hillary.
Then what are we looking at? I think if it is Walker we'll see the repeal of Davis-Bacon. And with the loss of federal prevailing wage, there will be an even more pronounced spike in income inequality. Labor unions will become an almost non-factor in national politics. Union density is already so low, around 11%, one has to go all the way back to before the U.S. entered World War One to find a similar level.
Historians will tell you: When inequality spikes, societies fracture and collapse. That is what Hillary's candidacy augurs.
And we haven't even discussed the rapid disappearance of the Earth's ice. The April Harper's had a terrific and terrifying story by Gretel Ehrlich, "Rotten Ice: Traveling by dogsled in the melting Arctic." The Greenland Inuit are finding it increasingly difficult to hunt because so much of the ice is weak and in retreat. Many subsistence hunters are committing suicide.
So Hickman's New Avengers tale of collapse, genocide and extinction is timely and should find a receptive audience. What I particularly like about issue #30 is the art of Dalibor Talajic. (You will find eight scans below. Alan Davis is the cover artist, found in the scan at the top of the post.)
Talajic's work reminds me of the great Wally Wood and the work he did on the early Daredevil, withits heavy inks of the horror comics of the 1950s but in a superhero setting -- very appropriate for Hickman's epic of the death of the multiverse.
