"Muddy Max: The Mystery of Marsh Creek"

I didn't expect much from the graphic novel Muddy Max: The Mystery of Marsh Creek.  Judging from the cover,  a boy/best friend gay subtext disrupted by The Girl.  But it turned out to be quite a bit more queer.

Middle schooler Max has overprotective parents who can't abide the slightest bit of mud.  So why do they live in Marsh Creek, the muddiest place on Earth?

Mom is a soil scientist.  She works with mud all the time.  It doesn't make sense that she would disapprove of Max getting muddy.

And why do Mom and Dad go jogging every day wearing heavy backpacks containing food, water...and scientific textbooks?

And what about the mysterious photo of a baby that Max found in the attic?

Max sleuths out the answers with the help of his buddy Patrick, a stereotypic black nerd with a bit more androgyny in his dress and mannerisms than one would expect.  The two have an unselfconscious physicality; after all, a lot of their experimentation involves applying mud to Max's body and then washing it off again.

Turns out that, due to some mishaps in  his mother's soil science experiments before he was born, Max acquires superheroic speed and strength from applying mud.  But it is also becoming more and more difficult to get the mud off, and he's being drawn to the Marsh, as if he belongs there.

The first two chapters involve Max finding the answers and saving the schoolbus from a mudslide.  In the third, we discover that he has an older brother, Milo, who was also drawn to the Marsh, and finally got stuck there.  His parents tried everything to get him out, but it was no use.  They built him a small mud house (inspired by a real-life Anton Gaudi house), and bring him books and food every day (in the backpacks).  Thus their refusal to leave town.

They were desperate to save Max from suffering a similar fate.  Thus their paranoia about mud.

Discovering that he has a brother, Max wants to reconnect, "hang out."  But his parents forbid it, for fear that the mud will take him.  They even try to separate the two by sending Max away to Death Valley (no mud).  A nice "forbidden love" gay subtext.

The girl (I don't remember her name) is a minor character, mostly an onlooker.   But she adds to the gay subtext by asking Max out twice.  He refuses. Not into girls, Max?

Beefcake:  Max is in middle school, and Milo about five years older, but they both develop chests and biceps when they're covered in mud.

Color Pallette:  All browns and blacks, which isn't as boring as it sounds.  The backgrounds are cleverly applied.

Activities:  This is a book for middle-schoolers, so it contains several pages of factoids and activities that are actually quite interesting. Did you know that 1 acre of mud typically contains 1,000 pounds of earthworms, 15,000 pounds of bacteria, and 2,000 pounds of fungus?  Or that nematodes (ringworms) are the most common form of animal life on the planet?  2 out of every 5 animals is a nematode.

My grade: A.

Kaptara: Will and Grace in Space

I heard that Chip Zdarsky, who wrote the "Jughead" reboot for Archie comics with Jughead as asexual, was doing a new graphic novel series, Kaptara, about a gay space hero, so I bought the first volume.

Expecting a gay action hero cruising through the galaxy.

Instead I got Will and Grace in space.

Keith (left) is a thin, fashion-obsessed, sex-obsessed, limp-wristed, sarcastic queen, the bitchy best friend of a hundred straight women in "chick flick" comedies who somehow got selected for a mission to Mars.

He's also lazy and a major coward.

His ship goes through a space warp.  Separated from the rest of the crew, he ends up in the faux-Medieval kingdom of Endom on the planet Kaptara, where all the men dress like Conan the Barbarian and don't mind being drooled over by screaming queens.

Naturally, Keith doesn't want to leave, but there's a problem: the evil Skullthor plans to use the space warp to travel to Earth and conquer it.  The queen's son Manton, who Keith has a crush on, and Danton, an effeminate muscleman, are going to try to capture Skullthor.  Keith opts out - he doesn't care about anybody back home, so why should he help?  But after looking at a mysterious photo of a heterosexual nuclear family, he decides to join the expedition.

En route they join forces with She-La, famed tracker and hunter; Melvon the Wizard, who lives in the Unchanted Forest; and Laurette from the original crew, who has become an insect-person.

They never get around to finding Skullthor, at least not in the first volume, but they have lots of picaresque adventures on the strange alien planet.

As you can tell, it's rather tongue-in-cheek, parodying The Lord of the Rings and Masters of the Universe far more than science fiction stories. The visuals are creative.  And everyone on Kaptara being nonchalant about gay people is a step forward.

But I would prefer a gay hero who isn't a throwback to the screaming queens of yesteryear.

Neil Gaiman's Sandman: The Goal of Every Journey

You know my history with graphic novels -- growing up with comic books, I keep wanting to like them, but they always turn out to be the depressing angst-ridden memoirs of Millennials, and immensely heterosexist, with The Girl as the goal of every journey.  

But I've heard so much about the Sandman series, by Neil Gaiman -- it's complex, woven in with mythologies, philosophical, cool -- “Expansive and atmospheric, jammed with brainy, contemplative moments and dry humor...stunning, gorgeous artwork."

And Joseph Gordon-Levitt is scheduled to play the Sandman in the movie version.

So when the "Overture" of the series came out recently, I bought it, figuring it would be a good introduction, plus something stunningly great.  So I forked over my $15.00, got the hardcover, read the cover blurbs: "Gorgeous from start to finish": "A sweeping and extravagant prequel."

And opened it.

Remember, I have almost a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature.  I speak three languages.  I've read James Joyce, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot.  I know all about Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard.

I'm really, really smart.

So I opened it...and...

WTF?????

Terrible is not the right word.  Terrible implies that there's something to evaluate.  There's nothing here to read.   I can't make out the meaning of a single one of the images --- and there are hundreds of every page.  Or the self-important purple prose.

1. A planet full of sentient plants that never dream start dreaming of death.

2. In London in 1815, a businessman named Ian Stuart receives a mysterious visitor who tells him that he brings news, but not about his brother.

3. Destiny of the Endless (that's his name) gets a visit from his sister,  who is worried about Dream, a hundred galaxies away.

4. George Portcullis, who has a portcullis instead of a face, gets a mysterious visitor, the Corinthian, who he sends to see the Master, who tells him that he won't get a trial.

5. Sigmund Freud talks to a pumpkin-headed man.

6. Lucien is pulled "halfway across the universe in the one fraction of forever."  A group of people and a giant cat, who are all him, ask "What kept you."

And that's just the first ten pages.  It goes on like that.

All I can figure out is, something bad is happening in the universe.

And the goal of every journey is Hugging Naked Ladies.

The Dream of the Endless, and a giant cat who is also the Dream of the Endless, plus the daughter of a dead blue guy, go on a journey to...somewhere.  

Dream hugs and kisses a lady, whose name is Delight, and "makes a world" for another lady, who is also Delight.

Then a chapter happens with people talking.

Then Dream hugs another lady, named Dusk.

Then the giant cat talks to a giant bird lady.

And another lady, who is probably Desire and Delight and Dusk, discovers that "in the grand dance of creation and destruction, the worlds are ending and she is there for all of them."

Dream gets naked to roll around in agony in the endless night:  rather skinny, with a good sized penis.

Then "there is nothing but the circle and the dark"

And a grey alien lies "deep beneath the ground, in a room lit by candles," and "it begins."

WTF?????

I'd rather read a 60-year old Tarzan comic.

Or James Joyce.

Contemporary Graphic Novels: Heterosexism, Homophobia, and Gore

I grew up on comic books -- all of the Gold Key jungle adventures, Uncle Scrooge, Little Lulu, the Harvey ghosts and witches, Archie, an occasional Batman or Superman.

And comic strips -- Peanuts, B.C., the Wizard of Id, Beetle Bailey, Doonesbury.  More recently I've been buying complete runs of classic comic strips like Popeye, Li'l Abner, and Pogo.

So I want to like modern graphic novels.  I really do.

I keep buying them off Amazon, after careful researching plot summaries and reviews.  They must have a male protagonist, no wife or girlfriend mentioned, and no "homophobia" in any keyword search.  I also search for "gay" and the author's name, to see if there are any casually homophobic comments.

I rejected The Goon because the muscular lug believes that he's too ugly for "any woman" to want him,  The Sandman because Morpheus, the God of Sleep, goes to the underworld to rescue a woman he once loved, and Stormboy because the cover had a naked woman on the cover.

Still, after all that research, I'm usually disappointment.  Heterosexist boy-gets-girl plotlines are everywhere, just not mentioned in plot summaries, and homophobic comments are more common than in 1980s Brat Pack movies.

My latest haul:

1. Kill Shakespeare, by Connor McCreary and Anthony Del Col.

"A fantastic concept, cleverly executed with style and smarts"
"Lke the best of Shakespeare himself."

In a weird fantasy world where all of Shakespeare's characters are alive and co-existing, Hamlet joins Falstaff and Juliet to seek out their Creator.  Othello and Iago have a bit of a subtext, but Falstaff wenches outrageously, and Hamlet falls in love with...you guessed it.

2.Deadly Class, by Rick Remender and Wes Craig.

"Enough good things cannot be said about Deadly Class.  It' a book that can make people fall in love with comics."

 A homeless boy enrolls in a private school for teenage assassins, and learns the art of murder, in dialogue peppered with homophobic statements, including a liberal assortment of "fags" and "c*ksuckers."  Oh, and he has sex with an assortment of naked ladies.

3. Chew, by John Layman and Rob Guillory

"Overflowing with big imaginative ideas."
"An entertaining and surprisingly compelling bit of storytelling that almost defies description."

In a future dystopia, detective Tony Chu is cibopathic: when he eats meat, he can see the animal's final moments.  Good with murder investigation, if you don't mind eating parts of a human corpse. He has a partner, who is killed before any buddy-bonding can occur.  And -- wait for it -- he falls in love with a woman.

4. Billy the Kid's Old Timey Oddities, by Eric Powell and Kyle Hotz.

"Six-shootin' satisfaction."
"This is one crazy book -- well-written and worthy of your hard-earned cash."

Billy the Kid joins a traveling "freak" show to search for a mystical object called "the Golem's Heart."  It turns out to be the Heart of Frankenstein.   On the way, he litters his speech with homophobic epithets, from "sissy" to "daisy pickin', knob-polishing', pickle-swallowing, effeminate sack of mule crap."

I'll admit, that is one of the more colorful ways that someone has expressed how much they hate gay people.

5. Manifest Destiny, by Chris Dingess, Matthew Roberts, and Owen Gieni.

"The monsters of the western frontier in the adventure of a lifetime."

In 1804, Lewis and Clark set out to find the Northwest Passage.  But their real task is to find monsters.  They do: Buffalo minotaurs, fairies, a telepathnic carnivorous flower, and disgusting plant-zombies.

Still, sure fire buddy bonding, right?

Wrong.  They meet any number of shapely young ladies, dream of them nude, and discuss the special characteristics of Native American women's pubic hair.  Nauseating.

Well, we'll keep on keeping on.  I just ordered:

1. Incidents in the Night, by B. David.  The hero goes on a tour of Parisian bookshops and uncovers a plot to change history.

2. Birthright, by Joshua Williamson.  When a boy is swept away to a parallel universe, his father must join forces with a man from the world to save him.

3. Battling Boy, by Paul Pope.  A boy is swept away to a crazy alien world, where he is hailed as a superhero.

4. Top 10, by Alan Moore. A cop patrols the streets of Neopolis, inhabited entirely by superheroes.

5. Age of Bronze, by Eric Shanower.  A graphic novel retelling of the Trojan War.  How can you go wrong with half-naked Greek heroes?