Quick context: NY library has put Tintin in the Congo, Hergé “troubled” Tintin volume, under lock and key so it’s only viewable upon request. A debate ensues about censorship and racial sensitivity, in which Huck Finn among other things is brought up, as well as Hergé’s mid-career change from casual racist to thoughtful world observer. “Liza” is incensed that “racist” Tintin is getting an action movie made about him, while Huckleberry Finn is several orders of magnitude better than Tintin.

Yours truly:

Liza, I don’t think anyone is proposing a last-man-standing Huckleberry Finn vs. Tintin cage match, where the Southern Scamp and the Belgian Brawler are both given switchblades and forced to throw down like in the “Bad” video. Besides, Tintin has Captain Haddock backing him up, so you know somebody’s gonna get glassed in that fight.

There’s room for both to exist in the world, and while I agree that Congo is irredeemably racist, it’s valuable context for how the Hergé books themselves change from being thoroughly colonialist to well-researched, world-embracing volumes. I don’t think Hergé ever got entirely past his racism — I don’t think anybody does, really — but I find, as an adult having read the Hergé books as a child, and having looked into Hergé’s life story, that the Hergé story of transformation from blithe racist to thoughtful creator is as fascinating and valuable to me as Huckleberry Finn’s journey.

Whether or not that justifies keeping Congo on the shelves — or the equally execrable Tintin In The Land of the Soviets, which exudes Ignorance On Parade just as much as Congo does — is obviously a tough call. Aside from this current library issue, both of those books have a history of being dropped from publication periodically, and brought back in. Personally, I prefer the “stick a note in there if the Introduction doesn’t cover the book’s troubled past” approach.

Given how Hollywood treats such things, I’d imagine you’d be glad that nobody is turning Huckleberry Finn into a “fucking action movie” — it’s eerily plausible to envison Huck Finn (Spackle Culkin, the as-yet-undiscovered Culkin brother) and Disenfranchised Jim (Cedric the Entertainer) rocketing down the Mississippi on their rad steampunk raft, joined by hip con men Duke and King (Johnny Knoxville and Dane Cook), fighting racist Klan robots invented by evil cotton baron Maximillian Sherburn (Al Pacino). In the last five minutes, Huck discovers that racism is caused by an evil giant spider from space (voiced by Nathan Lane, who camps it up maybe a little more than necessary), and a dying Disenfranchised Jim tells Huck that the magic was inside him all along and Huck destroys the spider with a hadouken made from pure American exceptionalism. Racism is solved and nobody speaks of it ever again.

Michael Bay produces, Stephen Sommers directs. Released on the third Monday of January. FINN!

So yeah, I don’t think a Tintin movie is really something to get that outraged about.

Plomb Dans la Tête

I approached this thinking — with an imperfect knowledge of French expressions — that this would translate into English as “Bullet in the Head,” since the word-for-word translation is “Lead in the Head” and it featured burly men with guns on the cover. Looking into that expression, in French, has given me an experience a bit like this graphic novel by Colin Wilson (of Blueberry fame) and Matz did — some preconceptions shattered, some pleasant surprises, and a slow nod of understanding.

The graphic novel starts like something called “Bullet in the Head” should start, anyway. It’s buddy crooks versus buddy cops: two killers, mandated to assassinate a senatory, destined to butt heads with the two policement assigned to the case, with some reporters friendly to one of the officers on the periphery.

And it’s straight-to-DVD, Steven-Seagal-worthy material at first. Matz is, as we’ve seen with Le Tueur, a dab hand at crackling dialogue, and fans of the U.S. series 100 Bullets could do far worse than to track his work down with a translator close at hand. But even the zippy dialogue can’t really put more than a coat of paint over some crippling Central Casting characters and story: the fastidious $2000-shoes killer and his pragmatic associate; the hot-headed cop and his level-headed partner. The killers are killing; the cops are, well, being cops.

Matz, to his credit, keeps a steady hand on the till, delivering a perfectly servicable cops-and-killers story that starts in New York (the prime location for any mediocre cop fiction, especially when written by people from beyond North America — at this point, there must be more fictional New York cops and hoods than there are real New Yorkers) and then traverses to one of the other Great Stereotypes of American-set crime fiction, New Orleans (close rival: Los Angeles).

The version of Plomb that I’ve been reading is L’Intégral — all three volumes of the series, bound up in 66% format. And thank God for that, because Matz, in a ballsy move, doesn’t pull his Interesting Twist until midway through the second volume. I doubt I would have proceeded past Vol. 1 if I were picking it up normally, and when the sudden swing in the plot comes, it comes fast and furious.

Suddenly, halfway through the second book, things get a lot more interesting.

“Mettre du plomb dans la tête” is, according to my (Quebec) French co-workers, to make somebody more serious — you can also describe somebody who is a bit ditzy as lacking “plomb dans la tête.”

So I think Matz is indulging in some clever punning, there — two of the book’s protagonists are forced to adopt a different and arguably more serious-minded attitude about the way the world works as the story unfolds, and there is no shortage of lead projectiles finding their ways into a variety of craniums.

It seems to be referred to in English as “Headshot,” and has been optioned by Warner Brothers, and there was/is/will be a translated version coming out from Casterman.

The art is… clear. I know that sounds like damning with faint praise, and I don’t mean to, as it’s immaculate and well-rendered and sells everything it needs to sell. But (and Matz needs to absorb some blame here, as he’s a twelve-panel, 1600-word-per-page writer) there’s nothing that stands out here. It’s all good — rock-solid adherence to character, some interesting design ideas (especially for the character of Slide and the *SPOIILER* weirdly clonelike figure that assassinates him), but nothing here goes above and beyond standard fare, and there is a copout on the very last page that annoyed the hell out of me. Whether that sourced from Matz or Wilson, I do not know.

Wilson’s an old pro, and certainly doesn’t need my praise for validation. But compared to, say, Jacomon (Matz’s partner on Tueur) this seems a lot more paint-by-numbers and a lot less interesting.

Recommend it? Heck yes — but now I feel like I’ve oversold the way the story shifts in the middle. It’s not like a Dusk Till Dawn “HOLY CRAP VAMPIRES” turnaround or anything, just some nice spins that accelerate a pretty ho-hum cop thriller (Polar) in an interesting direction.

Solid work, regardless. Well worth checking out.

Those of you with an interest in Franco-Belgian comics (and who doesn’t have such an interest, really?) will want to tune into the latest Exploring Bédé, as Bryan Deemer and I dig into the ins and outs of bringing French comics to the American masses, courtesy of the incredibly intelligent and helpful Erica Jeffrey of Cinebook. Probably my favourite of the podcasts to date!

When you’re establishing an alternate-history steampunk-lavish cross-world series, especially one that bumps up against our-Earth history fairly significantly, you could do worse than to jump in with both feet.

So right off the bat: well played, Hauteville House.

Without a preponderance of spoilers, here goes: back in a slightly steampunkier version of 1884, Napoleon is continuing his goal of world conquest, which includes sending troops to Mexico to break through a dimensional barrier in the basement of an ancient fort/temple into Something Weird, which they seem awfully blasé about doing.

Our heroes, with a 19th-century scruffy James Bond type named Gavroche in the lead, are part of loosely affiliated global underground organizations opposed to Napoleon, with Gavroche’s cell run by what seems to be Victor Hugo. Hauteville House, by the way, was Hugo’s actual residence after his self-exile from Napoleonic France, hence the name of the series.

Getting further into the storyline actually illustrates what’s been bothering me about Duval’s script: the above two paragraphs appear in the order they appear in the book, but not in chronological order. Meaning that the series starts with a fairly complex and elaborate set piece in the Mexican desert, then we flash back to a feat of derring-do on a ship with Gavroche, and then we follow Gavroche forward as he begins to unravel — with the help of his secret organization, which includes the sexy sexy American agent Zelda (whose American team seems to be both working with and concurrently to the French branch, judging from a neat bit of betrayal and counter-betrayal at the end of the book, and who inexplicably for a minor character is the eponymous character for this first H.H. — it’s not a trend that continues for the other books), starts to unravel the plot that we expect will lead us to said Mexican fort-temple and the weird portal to another dimension.

This, then, is the question: why bother?

The flashback plot (or the current plot, if the first pages of the book are a flashforward — you see the problem) is perfectly serviceable. Thrilling spy adventures, dirigibles, secret hideaways, sexy sexy Americans, killer automatons with chaingun arms, and so on. It rips around touching all the standard bases for the introduction to a series. We have our cast of characters: the maverick hero, the true love interest, the sexy sexy American love interest, the bearded man who smokes a pipe and shouts orders, the grizzled veteran that always comes through in the clutch, and the nebbish accountant-type/comedic foil. And they rip around the planet spying and blowing things up. It’s all got a whiff of “been there, done that,” but it’s not a bad thing. It pushes all the buttons and fills all the holes.

But this starting set piece in the (relative) future doesn’t really add anything to the equation. We know that the clues our heroes are putting together will bring them to the weird Mexican dig, where they will presumably stop whatever it is that the Napoleonic folks are trying to do. But the flashforward isn’t one of particularly high stakes. Folks are workin’ away at a dimensional thingy. There’s gonna be a fight. That’s about the size of it.

So why not tell the story in order? That way we get the satisfaction of discovering things as our heroes do, with no guarantee they’ll even make it to the right place at the right time. The dimensional dig will seem weirder and more spectacular on reveal because we’ll be invested in its discovery, rather than just having the Big Secret dropped in our laps in the first five pages.

It seems like an odd and mildly lazy storytelling choice: I can’t be arsed to make all of the clue-chasing compelling, so I’ll just put the destination up front and that way if the clues are weak nobody will get bored or confused.

As far as the art goes, I keep vaguely hoping Phil Foglio will suddenly appear and take over. It’s more than adequate ranging all the way up to “quite good,” especially with the book’s setpieces: the lethal chaingun-wielding automatons near the end are particularly delightful. It’s hard, though, to shake the feeling that everything between the book’s three or four Big Moments has been kind of dashed off and slapped together; with a little more coherence of intent it could hit either of two sweet spots, one being Folio steampunk whimsy, and the other something more rooted in the mundane, with enough gravity to keep those sketchy lines from wandering off the page. I’m slamming harder than intended: I can’t say enough that the book is perfectly serviceable as is, but there’s nothing to it artwise that really gives me pause to admire.
Well, “chaingun-armed steam-powered lethal robot lady” was amazingly cool, but then again, how could it not be?

I’m being unnecessarily harsh on Hauteville House, in that it’s not a painful read or anything. I’m looking forward to the rest of the books in the series to date as a way to while away some evenings to come. But this seems like one of those cases where the series hype is more hat than cattle; the whole thing is fine without ever reaching beyond any of the standard parameters of a steampunk book into excellent.* Neither the story nor the art really pushes outside the standards: a few dropped names for alt-history relevance, a few zeppelins and steam-powered doodads for the steampunk quotient, a sexy sexy American for the fanboys, and it’s all just kind of there.

Maybe I’m in for a pleasant surprise and the rest of the series will start to move outside the envelope. For now, it gets marks for being solidly adequate, but nothing new under the steam-powered sun.

*I’m aware that having a working knowledge of the “standard parameters” for steampunk bédé puts me firmly in the realms of the damned.

Bryan and I chat about The Scorpion, a Glénat series (IIRC) that he’s read a bit of in English, and I’ve read a whole lot more of in French. The conversation evolves into general chat about what makes Franco-Belgian comics so great, and the “three trees” theory of international comics art that’s been percolating in my head for a while.

Check it out here.

I mean “bolded.” I emphasized don’t emphasized mean emphasized every emphasized second emphasized word emphasized is emphasized emphasized emphasized.

Wondering in passing if I’m getting lazy about it, though — that better writing would mean I wouldn’t need to use so much word-emphasis to stress tone and metre when the words themselves should carry intent without me needing to stress things.

And yes, I did it in the above sentence.

Links to most of what I’ve been talking about are here on this blog!

So Something Finally Happens, and it’s really well-written and well-handled, and surprisingly affecting.

Of course, it happens hundreds of miles away from the zoo.

I’m prepared to accept that I am denser than the average bear — even if that average bear happens to be held captive by a teenage sexpot who likes to sleep on his stomach — but this series baffles me. There may be some massive, brilliant, underlying metaphor at work here. I suspect there isn’t, and the writer had a Generic People Caught Up In War story, the artist really wanted to draw a zoo, and the zoo was a convenient hook to hang the Generic War Story on. I could, again, be wrong.

I’m going to re-read this series in more depth for a full review in the future, at which point I’ll try to come up with some sort of compelling reason for, well, the zoo. Gorgeous as always, and the writing is perfectly fine, but the rich promise of this series’ premise leaves me blinking heavy-lidded at the eventual execution.