A candid look at America in Mahendra Singh's American Candide

Voltaire’s Candide was released four years following the 1744 earthquake in Lisbon Portugal on all saints day. Its subtitle, often translated as “Optimism” or “All For The Best,” draws a connection to the idea of philosopher Gotfried Leibniz which states we live in the best of all possible worlds. This idea becomes a refrain for the titular character. These words provide a comedic commentary of ironic proportion juxtaposed to the tragic events that rapidly accumulate to build the plot. That is how Voltaire used such a subtitle to openly mock how a notion like Leibniz’s could be maintained in a world where war and natural disasters like Lisbon's earthquake can take innocent lives. In American Candide, Mahendra Singh updates Voltaire's classic, putting Candide, Cunegond, Dr. Pangloss and the rest of the cast into the modern world where the mantra of “all for the best” is put into a time where people repeat hashtags and buzzwords.

American Candide reminds us that literature doesn't have to be the kind of high-brow entertainment constructed of emotionally resonate prose that echo through university walls. On the contrary, when the concept of lofty academic ideas comes up, a character remarks, “at least I don’t have an education to confuse me and make me soft in the head like you.” This example of someone contradicting Candide reminds readers that all Candide can really say are words originally spoken by his teacher, Dr. Pangloss, before he starts to think for himself, “it's like I'm plumbing the depths of moron.” Using characters filled with witticisms and insults, Mahendra Singh shows how writers can get their points across by tickling the funny bone of their audience instead of pulling on their heartstrings.

Singh writes with the comic sensibility of a humorist, not a dramatist. It was the balance of the original and so once again, it’s tragedy that the characters are constantly experiencing. But this allegory is built around comedy and the tragic events the characters get in to are balanced with absurd humor. Like the original, the allegorical events and cultural criticism keep readers laughing while our main character sees how long he can hold on to his original beliefs while finding himself in situations that are more and more freighting.

Updating many of the original plot points and characters, this time around Candide is a citizen of Freedonia, the “better than best of all possible nations.” It's this type of change to the original that make American Candide an entertaining allegory of nationalism. Candide is no longer concerned with how we can claim to live in the best of all possible worlds, despite meeting people like the old woman who had half her buttocks removed. Candide is now put into scenarios where he's forced to see his country through the eyes of people from outside Freedonia. After seeing how outsiders view Freedonia, he gains a moment of notoriety for his war efforts. Candide stumbles into an interview for cable tv on the Yeah! Network, but only to later find his words cut to make him sound like an enemy to patriotism. Candide's personal journey changes to one that questions how better than best Freedonia is, and the old woman becomes someone who has lost much more for the sake of comedic effect.

It's the comedic tone that makes American Candide such a good read. Poking fun of everything that the characters encountered was a staple of the original. Now in modern times, Candide and the gang take the gas out of the contemporary political landscape, capitalism, formal education, Hollywood and the news with a sarcastic flare so rich that it’ll probably anger people that just can’t take a joke about why someone would be flattered to be sold for five kilos of cocaine. This actually happens, and it's funny.

These jokes may be hard to swallow because they’re often one-off quips that move at the same fast-pace that drove the original plot. And while it’s easy to call them politically incorrect, it’s this lack of political correctness and sensitivity that make these jokes work. Candide’s ignorance and naïveté function as the set-up and bring him into settings where they turn into jokes when faced against the punch lines of parodied reality. This happens when Candide meets the old woman. After hearing her disastrous life story, he mistakes her history as a victim for sacrifices she’s made on her journey to Freedonia. However, like the original, such misunderstandings result from Candide believing what he was taught, making the joke on him, the idiot that refers to everyone as “dude.” This leaves his chorus of “all for the best” to become synonymous with the absurdities the characters encounter.

American Candide makes fun of modern culture's obsession with money and the calamities politics get us into. At the same time, it reminds us that too often U.S. citizens sanction their actions and values with the over repeated attitude of Americans superiority. And after finishing American Candide during the 2016 United States presidential campaign, it's kind of hard not to see Candide with characteristics of a certain type of American ('Merican?). Voltaire's Candide asks readers to watch a fool in love go on a journey that forced the hero to question what he was raised to believe. Giving that hero a quest full of absurdities, Voltaire used comedy to encourage readers to ask their own questions, abandon theocratic influence that nourished Leibnizian beliefs, and enter the Age of Enlightenment. Transplanting the characters of the past into the world of today, American Candide reminds people they need to continue to ask these questions. “Best of all,” American Candide reminds us that the world hasn't changed so much since the 1740's, no matter what we keep telling our selves.

American Candide

Mahendra Singh

Rosarium Publishing

2016-04

194 pages

soft cover

$12.95

S'not Your Average Comic

When Jacques says “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players” in As You Like It, Shakespeare is crafting a metaphor that reminds his readers of mortality and that they're watching a play, but also that the people in the seats next to them are actors in their own personal dramas. This quote questions the sincerity of people, their actions and motivations and goes on to remind us that we're simply humans, despite our ornate costumes and flashy dialogue. While the stage Shakespeare wrote of was a physical construction, todays stage is social media, the tool people use to edit themselves into a finely primmed digital representation. In Snot Girl #1, Bryan Lee O'Malley introduces Lottie Person, a 25 3/4 year old, image-obsessed, fashion blogging millennial. With a picture-perfect life, Lottie gets a painful reminder that her life isn't quite as flawless as she would have the Internet believe when the season changes and her allergies return.

It's the separation between how we represent ourselves on and off the Internet and who we really are that moves the first issue of Snot Girl. Living in Los Angeles, the land of actors and celluloid, Lottie is a well dressed, attractive young woman. She's proud of her years blogging, where she influences people with her tips on fashion: “On my blog, I'm perfect. My nose never runs. Every hair on my head is exactly where it's supposed to be.” She's also proud of being the one that gives people nick names. Perhaps because of this pride, she has problems in the form of an absentee boyfriend and an in-box filled with messages from strangers and non from friends. Added to these problems, her allergies are acting up to make her eyes tear and nose run, which can make it hard to look the part of a fashionista. These frustrations bring her to a panic where she wonders out-loud “Why even bother updating?! Just stop with the maxi-dresses! No one cares!”

With her social and romantic life in turmoil, things start getting better for Lottie when she meets Caroline (aka Coolgirl), another pretty girl that orders coffee the same way. After getting confidence in the form of allergy medicine from a new doctor, Lottie goes to a bar to meet Coolgirl. While waiting, she rethinks her life and decides she's changed. In honor of this step in self discovery, Lottie takes a picture and says to herself, “People can CHANGE! This selfie proves it!”

It's this type of humor that keeps Snot Girl alive. Throughout the book, O'Malley mocks fashionistas and youth culture. While Lottie stalks her boyfriend through social media, the joke turns up when the person tagged in his photo gets written-off for not being as pretty as Lottie. Watching people talk to each other via text messages despite looking at one another through a storefront window, the book goes beyond a simple critique of social media and starts to comment on how technology as a whole is changing the way people interact. Leslie Hung's animerican art style suits a story that makes fun of cutesy young characters. But, when the story starts to get serious, this style downplays the effect of the dramatic direction it takes.

Towards the final pages, Lottie's allergies return while at the bar. In a social setting with her new bff, Lottie needs to excuse herself to the restroom. This is when the story takes a turn. While Lottie locks the door, someone she knows ends up coming in and decides Lottie is the one that needs a nick name. This is when Lottie realizes “I'm a monster that knows it's a monster,” and acts like it. In this scene, the anime influence in the art washes over expressions to leave a trite and bland aesthetic where tension could be present through darker tones and rougher lines.

While the jokes lampooning social media and fashionista culture are funny enough, there isn't much else fueling Snot Girl. The overly polished animerican art style offers nothing new to readers and doesn't make the story much better (though it's a lot better than O'Malley's own). What the book does have going for it is what waits in the plot. It's hard to know where the book is going, or how it got to be where it is by the end. What actually happened in the bathroom and if the pills Lottie's new doctor gave her have anything to do with it are a mystery that will keep some around for more. The only question is how much more can there actually be?

Grant Morrison's Heavy Metal Sex Scene

Let's talk about sex, bunny

The most striking thing in Grant Morrison's first issue of Heavy Metal was the lack of sex, and it was a pleasant surprise. For years, HM greeted comic book readers with covers featuring women covered with slim to nothing. Frank Frazetta paintings of Rubenesque women would be used on some of EC Comics's most famous covers, but they would be used as the template for HM covers and even be used for the November 1990 issue. Beyond the covers, the pages within would all but shy away from sex. While super hero comics were largely male fantasies, it makes sense that the fantasies in HM, “The adult fantasy magazine,” would have a post-pubescent take on the subject and grace covers with seductive images used to draw readers in.

This publishing freedom would allow HM to introduce North American readers to great European artists like Milo Manara and Guido Crepax. Sometimes, the stories toe the line between erotica and illustrated pornography. But that's just part of the artistic statement, right? Not always for the visual thrill, this same editorial indulgence would publish Moebius's use of sex as comedy as easily as his use of sex as stimulation.

In his second issue as Editor-In-Chief, Grant Morrison more than compensates for the lack of tantalizing pages in his first Heavy Metal with issue #281, the Sex Special. The cover sets up the issue with the depiction of an anthropomorphic female rabbit dressed in lite S&M gear centered under the logo. While the cover is cute by today's standards, the inside cover gets a little graphic with Philippe Caza's image of Hathor. Naked, with legs spread, the Egyptian goddess sits in a desert oasis which is being birthed from her, like a waterfall. Knowing Hathor was associated with fertility, joy and motherhood would make it clearer the image is less interested in the naked woman with a cow head as a sex object, and more focused on the symbolism of myth and nature, even if the sexual nature of the image is unavoidable.

Making readers wonder if they're looking at art for smut's sake or smut for art's sake is something HM is known for, and Caza's 1983 “Hathor” is a great way for Morrison to echo the vibes of HM past. In his introduction, Morrison writes “The THROBING, demented hyperzine you now hold in your hands, has been VIGOROUSLY PUMPED so fit to burst with SEX that to include even a single iota of extra SEX here in this editorial would push us over internationally-agreed limits for this sort of thing and contravene the SEX in Sci-Fic Act of 1896 [...]” While his introductions are written with comedy and energy, the sentiment of this issue being stuffed with sex falls flat, by about one third. Roughly 40 of the pages in #281 are given to stories being continued from previous issues. These stories have nothing to do with the topic and undermine the value of #281 as a special. Rewinding the clock to October 1980 issue, HM is seen devoting it's pages to stories about rock music. This left stories from the the September issue to continue in November, making fans of Pierre Christian and Enki Bilal wait an extra month for their next installment of “Progress.”

Why Bilal's “Julia & Roem,” and the other four stories carried or carrying over, can't wait till September this time around is an odd editorial choice that ultimately hinders an otherwise well put together special. “Option 3,” shows that Morrison is on a comedic roll. Mixing sex and jokes together in the fashion he used in The Filth, Morrison brings a group of misfits together to save the day. Simeon Aston's art moves the script with thoughtful design. Focused on the page as an object, Aston turns each one into a fluid space that works with individual panels and overlapping images. Some pages are simple and feel crisp because of how uncrowded they are, but with pages that introduce audiences to aliens, rooms filled with floating brains and space ships, there's never a lack of detail. Aston's balance and timing make the cheesy, sex-based comedy fun to read. The articulate expressions compliment the joys and pains of a group flying through space on a mission that is not so much “make love, not war” as it is “make love, as war.” The story “Space Jizz” continue the idea of sex as joke when Ed Luce's familiar style finds out what happens when a space traveler gets infected with, you guessed, space jizz.” With a simple plot and goofy jokes, the story rides the bigger joke of cartoony drawings doing adult thing.

Black and white, with a green hue, the simple design of “Luv U” works with the four page short. With 12 panels, Edgar Roggenbau and Patricio Delpeche work with two camera-angels in a single room to play with the idea of cybernetic love. Very little changes from panel to panel. What does change functions as hints for a reader to guess at the plot twist ahead. It moves fast but takes no unnecessary time to get to an ending where comedy flirts with what's creepy.

“The Last Romantic Antihero” is the first contribution from Dean Haspiel. First published in Keyhole, The story doesn't focus on sex at all. Instead, it follows Billy Dogma looking for “the new love” in a world plagued by an “epidemic of global narcissism where apathy and indifference held sway.” Much better is “One Such Partner,” written by Stoya and adapted by Haspiel. Describing a scene from the writer's past, the story tells the well written memory of a youthful sexual encounter with fondness. Haspiel turns her prose into captions and turns the characters into humanoid aliens driving through space. Some panels are moments from the story, but the rest are imagined and add an extra layer to a sex story about sentimentality.

The featured painting from the Corey Helford Gallery certainly belong in this special issue. With seductive and playful nudity paired with images of women in coquettish poses, the gallery focuses on Ray Ceaser but includes others and offers and entry from well known Ron English. The interview with Matthew Bone also opens up exposure to paintings with sexual themes. Each featured work of the artist either has a focus on a nude model or pair of parted lips, often eating flowers.

Possibly the best entry in this special is Jamaica Dyer's “Her First Time.” Without any dialogue, this story uses captions and water colors to introduces two women destined to be lovers. Dyers begins with a spaceship traveling through space and the narration, “She hears the call from across the stars.” The last panel on that page has the ship docking into an opening bay with the caption, “This is it… her first time.” That first page shows how symbolism will play a role in this story of sex and space. With finger painting and space-age strap-ons, sex is shown as the creation of passion, ritual, life and destruction. In what's set up as a role in the characters destiny, the two work through a sexual awakening that evolves into something much bigger than the two of them while pages filled with nudity always seem to stay on the side of the erotic and away from the pornographic.

Even though there is a nice amount of good in Heavy Metal #281, it's not very satisfying. Between the 40 pages given to recurring stories, and the Haspiel story that's really about romantic love (and a decade old), it's kind of easy to feel cheated with this issue. It's also easy to see an absence of male objectification in this issue. Aside from the problems, the good in this issue is really good, and allowing stories from previous issue to carry over means the end of the god-awful “49^th Key.”

Beyond The Mask & Over The Hill

Reboots are everywhere. They come in the form of sequels and prequels in the theaters. On television and Netflix, they come with the same cast members eager (willing?) to reprise former roles. And in comics they come with new number one issues. But, what if a comic wanted to pick up where it left off, with the characters having aged, retired, divorced, gone through rehab? This is the question The Not So Golden Age asks and answers with its first issue. Now that many characters from the golden age of comics (the late '30s to early '50s) are now in public domain, writer Phil Buck and illustrator Joseph Freistuhler took the opportunity to work with some. Resuscitating Deathless Brain, Phantasmo, Gay Desperado, Black Angel, Green Mask, Joe Simon's Blue Bolt and others, the creative team behind The Not So Golden Age brings back golden age characters to see what's happened now that they've hung up their capes.

When Alan Moore based his Watchmen characters on golden age heroes, he did so to make a serious love letter to golden age super hero comics which analyzed them, allowing Moore to break them down in order to build them back up in front of his audience. That element of seriousness is completely absent in The Not So Golden Age. More Golden Girls than golden age, the book moves with the comic beat of set-ups and punch-lines. Like The Tick, the characters being heroes and villains only give the writer something to parody. Some jokes pay homage to golden age characters and what they represented while some are as silly as having Gay Desperado lament his choice of a name after being teased over it.

The Not So Golden Age takes place outside of Reno, in The Golden Age trailer park, a place many one-time-heroes and villains call home. With his glory days behind him, superintendent Fred Parrish, better known as Blue Bolt, fills his time taking on clogged toilets and owed back rent until the day Green Mask finds Big John Collins dead on the toilet. While the characters may have retired, they never took off their costumes, literally. Once the coroner's report comes back with signs of a strangling, the heroes come out of their trailers to see what they can do and, of course, argue with each other.

It's Blue Bolt who pacifies everyone by playing the role of the adult. With Blue Bolt acting as den mother to a group of dysfunctional super heroes, TNSGA sets up a situation that can play with popular contrivances and devices to tell a good series of stories. This is what happens when Blue Bolt moves the book from its version of the typical team argument into detective mode in order to solve the mystery. With the help of Deathless Brain, an alcoholic mobilized brain in a vat, and Black Angel, a cat lady with a perpetual cocktail, the first issue moves forward with the off beat comedy of old super heroes trying to be normal people in modern times.

Modernizing old characters and ideas helps Phil Buck's sense of humor build a good story that roasts and toasts the golden age. In terms of the art, Joseph Freistuhler creates a design and color palate that antiquates the visual aesthetic. These colors riff with fine lines to give TNSGA a visual appearance that resembles comics from that time. This classic feel makes each page a treat to look at, and each joke that much funnier. Even if these characters are new to readers, the visual design of the golden age sets up a familiar context that plays a perfect counterpoint to the realistic actions and dialogue of people with capes and consternation.

Like Wacky Raceland, a comic that takes undefined cartoon characters to create a story from a loose idea, The Not So Golden Age digs through the long boxes and pulls out abandoned heroes to give them a new set of problems and history while cracking jokes along the way. What stories will a drunk Black Angel tell at a friendly game of poker? What post WWII antics did the Deathless Brain get into before he wound up at a trailer park? Will Phantasmo ever put on pants? These heroes weren't given enough pages to answer any of these questions in their time, but that may change now that they're in new hands. Many remakes and reboots work there way into pop culture to give audiences the same meal on a different plate, but books like The Not So Golden Age and Wacky Raceland prove that if creatives are given what may seem to be enough rope to hang themselves, they may just show you something new a rope can be used for.

You can buy a copy of The Not So Golden Age through etsy, or read it for free on the web. If you're interested in more public domain comics, check out The Digital Comic Museum, a great source for all types of golden age comics.

Hannah-Barbera: Beyond Thunderdome

A Post-Apocalyptic Hannah-Barbera sees what classic characters do now that they're being written to think and act like adults.

Marvel and DC comics have been restructuring their universes by putting new characters in old costumes, changing continuity, re-imagining origins and undoing everything for a long time now. This might be why DC thought they were good enough to do it with someone else's universe, the Hannah-Barbera universe. With Scooby-Doo, Johnny Quest, The Flintstones, and Wacky Races, DC have potentially eased up on irritating super-heroes fans to see how cartoon fans react when their beloved characters are taken out of their familiar context.

With a short run on television, Wacky Races brought a technicolor group of characters together to drive to the finish line in a series of races full of slapstick comedy, pop culture references and cars with funky designs. In Wacky Raceland, the same characters now live in a post-apocalyptic world where the narrator now approaches them at a moment of need to give them a fresh racing suit to wear and make their car sentient. Instead of gags to make the audience laugh, the characters now have back stories and problems.

Beginning outside the Armageddon Bar, parked cars flirt with one another and complain about their drivers while a man vomits. This sets the tone for the type of comic that goes on to introduce us to its characters, a groups that argues with one another on and off the race track. It's in the bar where the audience learns about the group dynamic of Dick Dastardly, Penelope Pitstop, Peter Perfect, Lazy Luke and the rest of the gang, as they start a bar fight. That is the present.

The rest of the story is told with flashbacks. Going back to the race from earlier in the day, Penelope Pitstop's charterer takes a lot of focus in the first issue. She's shown to be a strong character with the ability to think on her feet. After saving a fellow driver from sandtipedes (giant worm-like beasts that come from underground), she uses one to bring her and her car across the finish line, like Paul riding a sandworm in Dune.

It's another flashback focusing on Penelope that gives readers the first idea of what kind of world this story takes place in. Escaping from an island while it begins to flood, Pitstop and her car get saved by an unidentified narrator that confesses, “I've been watching you both for a while.” She's given a new suit and her car is given the ability to talk. The driver/car team have also been given the opportunity to be let into Utopia, “a heaven away from the hell” in a world entering its unexplained end times.

Telling the story in flashbacks that cut in and out, the story takes on a mysterious quality that is only emphasized by Leonardo Manco's art work. The pages are drawn in a way that balance action with information. Drawing scenes that takes place on a race track, it's important that the artist can take the action and pacing of the track and finesse panels that momentarily slow things down to get a look into the characters and the details of their cars. Manco does this with ease and takes on bigger pages that need the audience to be shown and not told, as with the back story to Luke and Blubber bear. Manco also shows off his ability to build pages with details that guide the eyes across the page fluidly.

The story goes back and forth between the race on the Überpass and the fight at the Armegeddon Bar to introduce who the drivers are. This helps give a little insight to who Dick Dastardly is. He drives dirty on the course and talks dirty off it (to Penelope), but there isn't much else told about him, other than he still has Muttley. But these traits and the as-of-yet lack of a back story make him the kind of character some will love to hate and secretly want to see win, even if just for a minute.

If there's a true villain in this story, it's uncertain. It's uncertain who any of these characters are now that Ken Pontac has written them into a Mad Max world. Dick still has tricks up his sleeves, but Penelope has some depth to her character and Lazy Luke and Blubber Bear are given a back story that begins to unravel when they're offered the same deal that saved Penelope from drowning. If the narrator is the villain, if Utopia is real, if this is just another parallel universe for DC to tie into its continuity, and if anyone but the readers are watching these races, no one knows.

This isn't the first time Hannah-Barbera characters have been used outside their milieu. Cartoon Network aired fresh creative visions of Hannah-Barbera characters with Adult Swim shows Space Ghost Coast to Coast and Harvey Bird, Attorney at Law. However bizarre and violent this story gets, it's done with the kind of comic timing, character development and pacing that makes it compelling enough to return to for answers. And if you ever got to watch the original cartoon, there's the added element of satisfaction in seeing what these classic characters will do now that they're being written to think and act like adults.

Good music moves people. It moves people out of their seat and on to the dance floor, and it moves people to reinterpret the world around them. Sometimes it can do both at the same time, which is exactly what Lakuta does with their new single, “Bata Boy,” released by Tru Thoughts.

The nine member group comes from Brighton with members that originate from Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Malaysia, Spain, the UK and describe themselves as afro jazz soul funk. The global diversity extends past the genres they cross and members to build a socially conscious message in “Bata Boy.” The song is built around a lively drum beat, noodley guitar riff and saxophone lines that introduce the chorus, “We will not stand for this/We will say yes no more,” and follow it with it's own verse.

The song addresses discrimination against gays to point out its nature as a global problem, Africa, Asia, Europe too/Think that they have a right to/Tell him how to live his life/All this trouble, all this strife/Just because he don't want a wife.” Taking the focus from the global issue of the discrimination of gay people, the song move its attention to the largely Africa-based issue of female genital mutilation, addressing it as something done “All in the name of beauty/All in the name of culture,” before rhetorically asking “Is this what we call civilized?”

“Bata Boy” is certainly not the first song to be political. It's not the first to offer an anthem like message and chorus. What makes it special is that it's one of few that get away with mentioning divisive topics, criticizing cultures all around the world and doing it with a dance beat that can't be refused. The single also includes two remixes, and instrumental and A Capella versions. The name Lakuta comes from Swahili and means “to find, meet, share or feel full,” and “Bata Boy” is a great dance track with an important message that should meet ears and be shared but only leaves a listener hungry for the LP to come.

Anthologies of Serial Exposure

They come and go, get canceled without notice, sometimes only get released once a year, and move to digital publication. This is the way of serial comic anthologies.

Serial comic book anthologies used to be the most popular comic books on news stands. Publishers like Marvel and DC would use them to introduce new characters and gauge fan response to those characters. Collecting stories linked by genres such as horror, crime, talking animals and action, publishers like EC Comics specialized in anthologies filled with short stories created by legends such as Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman and Joe Orlando. Despite being so popular, these anthologies began to dwindle in production after Dr. Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, a book that included comics in the blame for juvenile delinquency.

Werthem's book prompted the creation of the Comics Code Authority, an organization that began policing comics with its own sense of acceptable standards in 1954. These standards eventually made it impossible for publishers like EC to continue publishing anthologies with so much violence, partial nudity, and blood. Another reason anthologies seemed to go away is because many of them turned their covers over to the most popular character featured in its pages. Even with the CCA seal of approval on it's cover, Marvel's Tales of Suspense would become Captain America and Tales to Astonish would become The Incredible Hulk. This change would leave characters with story-lines in those books to either get their own titles –if they were popular enough– or stay in the cannon for safe keeping.

By the mid 1960's, comics had became focused mainly on the exploits of a single character or the adventures of a team, regardless of genre. But, underground comics of the 1960's and 1970's were just around the corner. This new-wave of comics would bring together short stories by the likes of R. Crumb, Diane Noonin, Kim Deitch and Spain with popular anthologies and their publishers, Print Mint, Last Gasp and Rip-Off Press would make several printings of them.

By the 1980's, the underground comics movement would shift into something focusing on creator driven comics like Love and Rockets and Cerebus. Still, the serial comic anthology survived. Dark Horse Presents, Papercutters, Negative Burn, Kramers Ergot, 2000 AD, and dozens of others kept anthologies on shelves while single-story comics and graphic novels grew to become the big draw for  readers. Now, in the 2010's, serialized comic anthologies may be making a come back with Heavy Metal (published since 1977), Amazing Forest and Island offering some of the best variety in comics.   

Now eight issues in, Island has tied together a wide range of artists, genres, styles and ideas to create an anthology with a focus on new and underground talent. These forces come together to question the idea of what belongs in a modern anthology comic. Most issues open with either splash pages or short stories to introduce readers to a new world. Sometimes a city, sometimes a landscape, mostly wordless, these new environments start off each issue by bringing reader into an unfamiliar world. This sense of the unexplored plays on the title of the book and the way it doesn't always contain what readers would expect from a mainstream comic.

Though it's sold in comic shops, Island comes with prose stories including sparse illustrations. Some stories come in the style of classic zine articles, with handwritten text and black and white images with a xeroxed appearance. Add occasional photography, interviews and essays, and you have something that distances itself from traditional comics. This is all part of Island's charm; it doesn't limit itself to just being a comic or publishing stories that necessarily fit together. It doesn't try to make thematic issues, though the theme of world-building does seem to reappear. It simply gives an audience whatever Brandon Graham and Emma Rios think deserves a spotlight.

In issue six, Onta's “Badge of Pride” takes the lion's share of the pages to tell a furry story dealing with a character figuring out his own sexual identity. In the same issue, there is a splash page where one fashionably dressed woman is reaching to strangle another fashionably dressed woman wielding a knife. This scene is by Katie Skelly (Nurse Nurse) and does a great job at parodying photography ads with a list of merchandise used in the photo along with the prices of the items.

With plenty of one-off stories, Island also takes on long-form stories that get split up between issues. Published in the first two issues is “I.D.” from Emma Rios. Creating the story of a groups of people that swap bodies for various reasons, Rios hits on topics of gender politics, race, personal identity and bigotry in an Orwellian future that is written as well as it is drawn. While the story is based around a science fiction concept, it uses its genre well to take on serious topics without being undermined by usual tropes in a way similar to “Badge of Pride.”

The way Island blends together genres, styles and photography make it an exciting roll of the dice when you pick up each issue. The looseness of the comic also makes it possible to pair those types of stories with what someone might expect from Brandon Graham after reading his work. In “Habitat,” Graham collaborator Simon Roy uses robots, class war, mutiny and ancient forces to play with ideas of what it means to be on the right side and what the right side is. Taking place on a green planet filled with technology, stone houses and Aztec-like ruins, readers meet Cho, a new recruit. After Cho finds a mysterious object, he is set on and adventure that will change the history of his people. Though Graham's own contribution continues his work in the Multiple Warheads universe, something similar to “Habitat” happens as both stories are very much concerned with adventure and taking readers through the imagination and excitement of exotic spaces.

Six months after Island hit the stands, Amazing Forest, an anthology published by IDW, came out. Six issues in, this monthly title contains short stories written by the creative team of Erik Freitas and Ulises Farinas. Unlike Island, with it's water color introductions and photography, Amazing Forest has has nothing so art-housey found between the covers. What makes this anthology unique is the creative process where the team of writers handle all scripts and assign different illustrator to each story. By giving over the scripts to a different artist, the writers not only get more hands to put the book together on time, they get to create stories that take on different visual tones. This variety gives the audience an introduction to a range of artists and self contained stories while turning each issue into its own independent document.

With each month's different set of stories and artists, the issues go in and out of genres like fantasy, science fiction, and fairy-tales. This open form gives the writers the opportunity for a humorous homage to Fletcher Hanks's super hero, Stardust. Each issue's different roster of illustrators creates a diversity that leaves readers not knowing what they're getting into when picking up the next issue. And this is a good thing! The covers may have one story being reflected on it, but when you're dealing with characters you've never seen before, it's difficult to know exactly what it's foreshadowing.

In issue three, Job Yamen's fine lines and water colors form the world of “Ben Franklin, Dragon Hunter,” a story that portrays Ben Franklin as an immortal dragon hunter. This lush but gritty alternative reality gives a short history of dragon hunters and explains Franklin's connection to it. While the story works well, ending in time to make the reader's mind continue to turn with its own theories, "Ben Franklin, Dragon Hunter” could only be better if it went on for more pages. “Edith And The Murderbot,” from issue four, is another example of the writing team pairing a great artist with the right script. Using Jelena Djordevic's expressive faces and masterful crosshatching, the story creates an uncomfortably paced story with an equally eerie plot twist to makes for a great macabre suspense story.

The two writers even go into super hero territory. In “Villain's Friend,” Jack Forbes uses a Miracleman-esque character to answer the question: what would happen if a villain beat all the heroes? In a world where the last living super hero is enslaved, Freitas and Farinas get the chance to make jokes about super heroes. With a villain ruling the planet, tropes get flipped on their heads to make belly laughs and show people what would happen in a world where all the heroes lost.

It's not just occasional jokes that lighten up the stories in Amazing Forest. With a good amount of humor coming from the writers, the stories don't always take themselves too seriously. On these occasions, the artists chosen tend to have more of a cartoony aesthetic, which showcase the creators ability to use good judgment and find good talent to create a fresh take on serial comics anthologies.

In publication for the better part of 40 years (more if you count the magazine it was originally translated from), Heavy Metal isn't new at all. For quite a while it has specialized in rounding up and serializing some of the best European and American comics artists working with fantasy, barely clothed people, science fiction, erotica, sword and sorcery adventures, horror, and did I mention sex? Heavy Metal has been showcasing selections from artist portfolios, taking chances on new talent, and exposing North America to the great comics scene in Europe since before publishers like Catalan Communications made it their goal to collect and translate great works from across the Atlantic. The only difference is that Heavy Metal is still around while Catalan Communications sadly became defunct. What is new about Heavy Metal is the presence of Grant Morrison as the Editor-In-Chief.

With most serialized stories from previous issues almost wrapped up, Heavy Metal #280 shows the taste and talent of Grant Morrison building the index of the institutional publication with the following course:

“This, out rebirth issue, features my first gleaning from the bulging Heavy Metal submissions drawer. Presented with hundreds of stories – I mean literally, honestly, hundreds or more, possibly thousands, or millions, or even fifteen, who can take the time to count these days? - I started the selection process with this lot.”

If that's the true way he went about picking stories or not, Morrison manages to put together one of the most diverse collections out there. The nudity in this issue either plays to a story where the characters are savages, shooting arrows in a bizarre loop of unrequited love (Massimiliano Frezzato's wordless “The Key”), or in a naked, not nude, representation that works with the uncomfortable nature of memories, trauma and what happens in the mind's eye in Anna Laurine Kornum's “Mind Bomb.” With Kornum's story, dark colors surround characters with big black eyes. The nameless main character takes readers through her childhood, where she was obsessed with the atomic bomb and visited by what she thinks is an angel of death. The dark eyes and way Kornum plays with bright whites and dark shades makes powerful visuals that compliment a story that concerns itself with how mental health is effected by suppressed memories that can explode at any moment.

Aside from the continued stories of Erike Lewis, J.K. Woodward and Enki Bilal, the newest issue of Heavy Metal shows it will go on to show contributions with the familiar Heavy Metal feel. “Goddess,” by Ryan Ferrier & Hugo Petrus is one of these stories. When a mysterious girl is found, she is invited into a town of very friendly people that want to help and feed her. The only problem is that the girl is constantly seeing images of animals being slaughtered… and that she isn't really a little girl at all. In “Goddess,” fine lines, attention to detail and a green palate use a style of realism that echoes Heavy Metal stories of the past and compliments the pastoral story of Flidias, an Irish goddess that protects animals and nature. Another staple that remains is the art section. Century Guild art Gallery selects some of its favorite art nouveau silent film posters and oil paintings for issue 280. One of them is Gail Potockiose's beautiful “Botanical No. 23,” which is also used as an an alternative cover.

Filling his debut issue with stories that go through genres of horror, fantasy and lore, Morrison finds room for comedy with Aladin Saad's absurd “Boring Sequential Story.” References to Batman, Tintin and Little Nemo build a typo-ridden, self-aware misadventure of Galileo and his enchanted telescope. While it's hard to actually read through its typos and broken grammar, Saad's goal is to disregard rules of storytelling as he breaks the fourth wall to mix pastiche and irreverence. The other good laugh in Heavy Metal is Morrison's own contribution, the first part of “Beachhead,” a tongue-in-cheek story about violent aliens taking over the galaxy told with a 2000 AD visual look.

Morrison's most interesting and nontraditional picks is the story “Salsa Invertabraxa,” a six part story that will run through his first year. With hyper-detailed digital panels depicting the world of insects, artist Mozchops narrates the habitats and life-styles of invertebrates. In “Salsa Invertabraxa,” each panel is paired with a simple rhyme scheme narrative caption. By uses this poetic device, Mozchop makes his comic sometimes come off as a children's book, something more Eric Carle than Erik Larsen. Using a story with a form as quirky as “Salsa Invertabraxa,” Morrison starts to challenge the idea of what a comic is. He also keeps his readers on their toes wondering what he'll throw at them next.

Anthologies of the past and some of the present have a tendency to bunch together a type of story, whether it be books of the golden age that grouped stories by genre, or the annual collections of today that build books on independent artists or autobiographical stories. With Heavy Metal, Amazing Forest, and Island, three different types of books are being published. Each has a different vision and creative focus. Each brings together and uses different talent in a different way to build a title. But what they do the same is what makes them something to look forward to every month. They all mix it up. Most importantly, they ask you to trust to the editors. Trusting the people that put these books together is one of the few ways to get exposure to new and foreign talent that are asking what comics are and challenge the possibilities of what they can be.