Meanwhile...

Here's a particularly awesome page from Pippi Fixes Everything, in which the title character gives what for to a gang of bullies who were picking on a little boy until she interrupted them, at which point they started making fun on her hair and shoes. And then the above happens. I reviewed the book for Good Comics For Kids earlier this week. I liked it a whole lot, and, as I noted on Twitter the other day, I think it would be of great interest to the More Female Heroines And Creators In Comics, Please crowd on the Internet, given that Pippi is kinda sorta a female superheroine (she has super-strength, dresses outlandishly, fights crime and rescues those in need), and this comic is written by a woman (who created the character), drawn by a woman and even translated by a woman.

Also at GC4K this week, I reviewed The Aerosmurf, the latest volume of Papercutz's reprint program of Peyo's classic comics. It's kinda like the previous 15 volumes of the series, so if you liked those (I did), you'll like this, and if you didn't, you won't.

The most exciting piece I did for GC4K this week, however, is the one that appeared today: An interview with Charise Mericle Harper, the cartoonist responsible for Fashion Kitty and a few of the picture books I've reviewed here before (like The Power of Cute, for example). It's occasioned by the release of Fairy Tale Comics (you may recall I discussed that effort with its editor Chris Duffy already), to which Harper contributed the adaptation of "The Small-Tooth Dog."

And, finally, this week at Robot 6 I once again reviewed (almost) every issue of DC's Villains Month offerings released (now that I do the math, I read and reviewed 48 of the 52 books that DC released).

Here, let's look at a scene from one of them, so as to complain about it (Not the artwork though; that's a damn fine looking comic thanks to Francis Portela and Tomeu Morey). Check this out:

The above images are from the surprisingly good Killer Croc issue. I have no idea who that is under the Robin mask, beyond knowing that it's definitely not Damian.

That's one of the thing that bugs me about the New 52 reboot and the fact that it's costume redesigns affected not only the present, but also the past. That Robin, confronting Croc "three years ago" (Year two of Batman's somehow now only five-year career), is probably most likely Dick Grayson, but he's dressed more like Tim Drake (and, if you condense all of Batman history down into just a few years, it should still be Jason Todd as Robin around the time that Croc shows up, right?).

Well, two things, I guess. First, it doesn't make any goddam sense if you think about it for longer than ten seconds (Was Dick in his twenties when he was Robin? Or is he only like 17 now? Did he ever go to college? If not, why did Batman ever take Jason on as a replacement Dick; was Dick really sick of being Robin after only, what, like 16 months or something?).

Second, as demonstrated here, it is so unimportant who is in the Robin costume that it doesn't even matter if you understand who the character is; he's just a costume, not a character (Note how coy the artwork is in giving clues as to the character's secret identity.

Another very nicely-drawn issue this week was the Bane one, by Graham Nolan. This will also cause a continuity headache if you allow it—"Knightfall" still happened, just totally different than it did in the comic books entitled Knightfall that you can read if you want to—but what struck me most about this visual recap of Bane's origin?

No Osoito.

Sometimes evil is dumb, too.

One of my favorite lines in 1987's Spaceballs comes when Bill Pullman and Rick Moranis are having their climactic schwartz ring fight, and Moranis' Dark Helmet feints a handshake, only to steal his opponent's ring. He intones gravely: "So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb."

I was only 10 at the time, but it struck a chord with me. Most of the popular entertainment I was familiar with at that time dealt in rather broad terms with a good vs. evil narratives—G.I. Joe, Transformers and He-Man cartoons, Star Wars, C.S. Lewis' Narnia novels, The Hobbit—and if the good guys weren't necessarily dumber than the bad guys, they were generally a lot less cool. In fact, in many of those narratives, the chief good guys were generally the least interesting characters (Think Duke or Flint, Optimus Prime and He-Man/Prince Adam vs., like, everyone else on their teams and all of their opponents on the opposite teams).

I don't think Dark Helmet's proclamation was on the money, however, as he failed to triumph in his own movie, and good always won out in just about everything I watched or read up until that point in my life. Also, sometimes evil is even dumber than good.

Take Gargamel snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in this scene from the sixteenth volume of Papercutz's Smurfs collection, The Aerosmurf, for example:

I remember watching the cartoon as a child, but I don't have very many specific memories of my thoughts or feelings about it at the time, beyond remembering it was a Saturday morning cartoon I'd watch between ones I liked better.

But reading these stories as an adult, I've developed quite a bit of sympathy for Gargamel. Maybe it was simply because he's a human being, or that he's essentially a lonely, bald, poor, middle-aged cat lady of a man whose wicked acts are so transparently born of relatable frustration with his lot in the world, or that he's outnumbered something like 100-to-one in most of his conflicts, or simply how savagely the Smurfs occasionally beat him, but whatever—sometimes I kind of feel for the guy.

Like, in that above example, where Jokey Smurf is able to escape his grasp by offering him a present. How eager must Gargamel be for a gift, a gesture of kindness from another sentient being, that he convinced himself the Smurf in his clutches was actually going to present him with a present?

But then, there's another scene in this volume where he's in a dogfight with the Flying Smurf and has the upper-hand, only to fall for it again:

And, when he gets to the heart of Smurf village and is on a rampage, he's foiled once more by the offer of a gift in mid-battle:

Three times! In the same volume! (Which contains six stories, so, in 50% of these stories, Gargamel is defeated by the offer of a gift that turns out to be a lie).

It's kinda hard to feel sorry for the guy after all that. As a wise man once said, "There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on...shame on you. [Long, uncomfortable pause] Fool me--you can't get fooled again."

Meanwhile, at Good Comics For Kids...

This week I reviewed Sabrina The Teenage Witch: The Magic Within Vol. 1, the first digest-sized black-and-white collection of Tania del Rio's reinvention of Archie's witch as a manga style heroine, for Good Comics For Kids.

I liked it an awful lot, but by far my favorite story was the final one in the collection, "Model Behavior," in which Sabrina's one-time love interest, Japanese pretty-boy warlock Shinji, is discovered and becomes a model...right about the time that Josie and The Pussycats are coming to town.

If you ever wondered what Josie and The Pussycats might look like manga style and/or as drawn by Del Rio, this comic answers that question (see above). Alan, Alexander and Alexandra are all absent, denying readers a Salem and Sebastian meeting.

The title page shows the cats and Shinji chibi style, while the giant heads of Sabrina (right) and her best friend (and Shinji's girlfriend) Llandra look on:

And here's a montage from Shinji and the Pussycats' photo session:

Please note that while Josie is hanging on Shinji in the first image, it's just a shoot, and she has no romantic interest in Shinji. Melody, on the other hand, does, and even asks him out on a date, but he declines, much to the relief of Sabrina and Llandra, who were jealously spying on Shinji the whole time.

If you want to see Del Rio's version of The Pussycats in color, though, you'll have to look at the cover of Sabrina #67, from which the story is taken (but which doesn't actually appear in the collection):

Speaking of color, the other thing that I wrote for a place on the Internet that is not Every Day Is Like Wednesday? A short-ish piece on the new The Smurfs Anthology Vol. 1, Papercutz's bigger hardcover collection of Peyo's Smurfs material seemingly geared toward adults, for Robot 6.

It's a nicely designed package of some great comics, presented in a very eyeball-friendly format, but is noteworthy for keeping the Purple Smurfs purple instead of turning them back to black.

The Black Smurfs had as much to do with black people as the Black Lanterns in Blackest Night had to with black people, so keeping 'em kid-friendly purple in this volume seems an odd choice to me, but whatever; some Peyo always trumps no Peyo.

Meanwhile...

Today at Robot 6 I have a review of Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, a YA original graphic novel by newcomer Prudence Shen and already-here-er Faith Erin Hicks. It's really good.

The above page is probably my favorite of the book, in which head cheerleader Holly's hatred for Nate is so powerful that he can feel it emanating out of her head and reaching over and touching him. I'm fairly certain the project began its life as a prose novel, and its scenes like the one above that make me curious about how exactly they would have been written, given how well they work in the purely visual narrative structure that comics allow.

This is maybe my second favorite page, featuring Charlie and Nate:

In other Caleb-writing-about-comics links, this week at Good Comics For Kids I reviewed the latest of Papercutz' Smurfs reprints, The Smurflings, and their first volume of a new series reprinting another of Peyo's comics, Benny Breakiron: The Red Taxis. They're both good; the latter a bit more interesting just because it's Peyo doing non-Smurf work, and it's fun to see his style applied to human and automobiles and modern buildings and so on.

Insmurfious Rex...?

So what do you think the chances are that Submariner Smurf is exactly what I imagine when I see the name "Submariner Smurf"...?

The other day I came home from work to find this mysterious package in front of my apartment door.

It was about nine inches by 12 inches, and about four and a half inches deep.

The address label, trimmed in blue and white, bore the signature "Peyo."
And what's this...?

A coupla stamps reading "Belgique," which, I believe, is Belgian for "Belgium." And Belgium is, of course, the country that Pierre "Peyo" Cuilliford hailed from.

Oh my God! You could rather comfortable sit three or four things that are three apples high in a box of this size, provided they were laying down!

Did...did Peyo personally air mail me some real, live Smurfs?! Wouldn't that be awesome? Why--Oh wait, hold up. I don't see any air holes in this box at all. So now I sincerely hope it isn't full of real, live Smurfs, because by the time that package shipped from Belgium to Ohio, they would probably be real dead Smurfs.

...

Okay, actually there were some Smurfs comics inside, as well as the first volume of Papercutz's Benny Breakiron, the Smurfs publisher's translated and repackaged version of another series of Peyo comics.

Meanwhile...

That's a page from Philippe Coudray's Benjamin Bear in Fuzzy Thinking, one of the three books I discussed in the latest installment of Robot 6's "What Are You Reading?" column, which you can read here.

Also at Robot 6 this week, I reviewed Age of Ultron; you can read that piece here.

And over at Good Comics For Kids this week, I have a review of The Baby Smurf here and an interview with Joey Weiser about his recently released Mermin Vol 1: Out of Water here.

The Smurfs refute the word of God...

...in Smurfs Vol. 8: The Apprentice Smurf.


Meanwhile, a Harley-Davidson ad in Daredevil #4 takes a difference stance than Jesus on the Sermon on the Mount:

I'm sure it's nothing they haven't seen before.

(That panel's from The Smurfs Vol. 6: The Smurfs and The Howlibird, which, like the five previous volumes, is awfully good)

Meanwhile, at Blog@Newsarama...

This week's Blog@ review is of the fourth volume of Papercutz' excellent Smurfs series, the bizarrely he-man, woman-hating The Smurfette. You can read it here.

Also, there's this.

My favorite page from The Smurfs and The Magic Flute:

Click on the image to make it bigger than three apples high. I felt like Peewit looks in panel 12 throughout the one semester of college in which I took Chinese.

My attempt to get blurbed on a future volume of Papercutz's Smurfs collections:

"These are, without a doubt, the Smurfiest comics of all time!"

—J. Caleb Mozzocco, Every Day Is Like Wednesday

Ha ha ha, you see because the Smurfs, they say the word "smurf" in place of regular, English words? And so by saying-- Oh, oh you got it already? And you don't need me to explain it to you? Oh. Okay.

At any rate, if you're curious about Papercutz's Smurfs reprints, I have a post kinda sorta reviewing them up on Blog@Newsarama today, which you can go read if you like.

I bet Johan's just saying that because his last name's "Oilycreep"...

(Panel from Papercutz's The Smurfs and The Magic Flute, by Peyo)

There are probably worse ways to go, but not many