COMICS: Various trades

Amelia Rules!: Last year's Free Comics Day sampler got me interested in this title, but the trade was out of stock for a long, long time at my local comics shop. Long time. That's poor planning on the part of the publisher, I'd say -- raise interest in your product, then make it unavailable. I finally got it last week, and I enjoyed it a great deal. It's a great mix of cartoony, over-the-top antics -- one character, Pajamaman, wears pajamas (natch) with a symbol on the front that changes from panel to panel, reflecting his emotions; another character gets squashed literally flat by a medicine ball in gym class -- and the realistic experiences of a child of divorce. It's especially accurate in reflecting the cruelty of kids; when Amelia calls her friend/enemy Rhonda ugly, Rhonda responds with, "You talk a lot for someone whose parents don't even want to be with her." Ouch.

There are nice touches for grown-ups -- the kids attend Joe McCarthy Elementary ("Weeding out the wrong element since 1952"); Santa's naughty list includes Ken Starr -- but it's primarily all-ages fun. The artwork sometimes bugs me -- there are an awful lot of unnecessary computer effects. And damnation! I wish one indie comics creator would use a proofreader. Just one, to show all the others it's not so bad, having words spelled correctly, and punctuation where it belongs. As a whole, though, I enjoyed the heck out of it, and will now be bugging my local comics shop to get the second trade in stock. I'm sure they'll be thrilled.

Legend of Grimjack Volume 1: Man, this is a nice book. Very durable, thick paper -- same thing with the Amelia Rules! trade. The two books were almost heavy enough to tear the handles on the comic store's plastic bag. It's got an all-new eight-page framing story, which I hadn't expected; the art is fantastic, but it's basically one of those, "Oh, I didn't see you come in! Sit down and I'll tell you a story" kinds of things. Not vital (though it's nifty to see how much Tim Truman's art has evolved). But the old stories which are collected here -- those are vital.

It's all the back-up stories from Starslayer, a Mike Grell comic which had been taken over by John Ostrander by the time the Grimjack stories started appearing. It's through Starslayer that we first meet a number of subsequent Grimjack fixtures, actually, like Chris Heyman, and Crayne, and I think even Grimjack's hometown of Cynosure first appeared in Starslayer. (Or maybe it was first in Mars; I know it wasn't invented specifically for Grimjack.)

The stories involve Grimjack battling vampires, and gods (crazy Cynosure, where all dimensions meet; a god in one dimension is a mortal when he crosses to the next), and, as always, his own personal demons. I always loved the depth of this character; you knew he'd had a long, brutal life, and had been hurt by a lot of people, but it took years for that backstory to be revealed.

The trade ends with Grimjack crossing over from his back-up feature into the main Starslayer storyline. I'd imagine it's a little disorienting for new readers to encounter the Starslayer cast and plot for just one issue. But overall, this trade is a better introduction for newbies to the wonders of Grimjack than the new mini-series. It's just tremendous stuff, so different and fascinating, with such great dialogue and art. I'm glad to have it so I can stop reading my old copies of Starslayer to pieces.