Maggie the Cat #1

The Fairer Sex

Maggie the Cat #1

Mike Grell does it again (heck, has he ever NOT done it?)

"Untitled”

Creator, Writer, and Artist – Mike Grell

Letterer – Steve Haynie

Colorist – Carol VanHook and Vanhook Studios

Editor – Mike Gold

January 1996

In 1987 I had no interest in Green Arrow. DC and Marvel both had brash, big talking archers who used trick arrows to fight super criminals. And being a Marvel guy by-and-large, my preference fell on the side of following Clint Barton’s Hawkeye around with his Avenger buddies.

At least until Mike Grell came along.

Realize that the mid-80’s was the point where I became a “serious” collector of comics. And by that I mean that I began looking at the creators and following artists and writers more than characters. I hadn’t truly encounter Mike Grell’s impressive pencils and intriguing storytelling at this point.

All of that would change with the prestige three-issue Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters mini series. The square bound books with their impressive colors turned me into a purveyor of all things Ollie for several years thereafter. Grell took Green Arrow in a direction away from the jokey trick arrows and into Batman-caliber vigilantism. I can still see Ollie threatening one mob boss with his bow cocked and a steel tipped arrow notched, surrounded by the boss’s goon squad aiming guns at Ollie. Green Arrow reminded the gangster that with an arrow all you had to do was let go. Grell made Ollie badass again and that carried him to an ongoing that lasted 80 issues worth of writing credits.

Grell moved on from the title to draw a James Bond adaptation for License to Kill and then do an original story for the British secret agent as both writer and artist Both by Eclipse. He dabbled with a creator concept book called Shaman’s Tears, many of which have shown up in the Crapbox but I’ve been too busy to pull out and read. (Upon closer reading of the afterward, it appears Maggie debuted in issue 12 of that series.) However, after one read through of Maggie the Cat, I’m thinking those are going to get dug out pretty quickly.

Grell shows that he can craft any concept into a great, engaging story. Even something that smacks of the same 90’s flash and sexism that litter so many book titles of this era. Don’t let that hot blonde on the cover fool you, this isn’t an empty-headed tale. Grell has cooked up quite a delicious dish for us. But I should just let you to the table instead of boring you by gushing about it. You’ll see for yourself soon enough.

We begin our tale in sunny Scotland, on the castle grounds of the Greymalkin estate, with the arrival of Ryan James and his weekend guest, one Miss Elanore Hensley. Hensley has been here before, it appears, which is a surprise to James. It appears she know the former Lord Greymalkin. The current Lord of the castle is…

…Lady Margaret, our title character. 

It’s also at this point that I realize that showing you my carved up, slice-and-dice windows into Grell’s stunning page layouts isn’t going to cut it in 99% of the cases for this issue. This is what you get when you give Grell free reign on the page. An organic flow that will not be bound by panel boarders or traditional boxy rectangles.

But unlike most of the other showy books sharing mid-90’s shelf space with Maggie the Cat, Grell’s art is used in service of the story, not to distract from it. Lady Margaret’s stride and poise as she makes her appearance tells us she’s a strong commanding woman, James’ suave good looks and charm are clearly on display, as is his attraction to Maggie show in his appreciation of her backside as she exits the final frame in this sequencing. Also of note is that the arriving couple are ushered into the quaint looking guest house, while Maggie goes to stay in Greymalking Castle, certainly playing up the Lady’s isolation and defensiveness. 

And because I cannot bear to cut any of this out, we next watch Maggie’s manservant bring her a file in her room at the top of the tower. Note all of this is metaphoric as well as atmospheric. Butler Angus represents one of the few people Maggie trusts in any real way. She has locked herself away from human contact in this tower rather than spending more time with her guests. 

It soon becomes apparent why: the necklace that Hensley wore upon meeting the Lady holds some special interest for her. Almost like Hensley was flaunting that she owned it. The brazenness of this action brings up a fire in Maggie to match the one in the hearth and Angus quickly lets her know of the couple’s next destination – Hereford.

And so we watch as Hensley goes out for a night on the town in Hereford, leaving behind a very valued necklace and a very determined and skillful Maggie. 

Couple of things here: in watching this sequence it becomes easy to get distracted by the thought that what Grell was meaning to convey was that Maggie was a professional cat burglar before wanting to get back her late husband's rewards to his lovers, and perhaps he was doing just that. However, he clearly setup that this isn’t “just business” for Maggie. There is a personal stake in this related to the history of that necklace and Lady Margaret, that much is clear.

Additionally, ISN’T IT JUST FREAKING GORGEOUS? This is classic, unfettered Grell at his best. Typically I don’t appreciate page after page of wordless action sequences of any type, but Grell’s work always stands out as the exception to that rule. Mainly because he understands visual plotting and his stuff is never boring. This isn’t a few pages of random poses, this shows a natural progression of story in a visual format. What’s astonishing to me is that Grell does such a good job on both writer and artist sides of the table to get sequencing like this just right. It draws you further in to the tale and wondering what Maggie will do next.

Which is get caught by a gun-toting man hanging out the window who knew she was coming. This whole necklace as bait turns out to be a setup to test Maggie’s abilities it seems, because rather than arrest her or even stop her, the military-green clad gentleman just offers a meet-up two days hence to discuss an opportunity that he believes Maggie will find interesting. At this point I’ve pushed all my chips in on wagering this tale is a winner. Great art and a solid story hook has me captured as tightly as Maggie as captured that necklace.

One of the real thrills of Grell’s storytelling abilities is his understanding of how to use wordless panels to establish a setting, convey action sequencing and move a story forward. Not one dialogue box or thought bubble mars this page and yet we get a perfect understanding that this is our meet-up point and this is the mysterious man in green who offered Maggie the chance at an interesting job opportunity. Grell lets his art do all the talking and he has the considerable skill for the message to come through loud and clear.

And when the waiting solider gets jumped by a camouflaged Maggie, again Grell gives more power to his images than any amount of voice over. These scenes sell the book for me and it really is all because the art is fabulous, panel after panel. So our actor friend is also a secret special agent for the British Army? Interesting development.

And with this we follow a little into both Maggie’s background and James too. Grell weaves both stories together as we find the British government doesn’t really care about bringing Maggie in for her many, many crimes, most of which it is interesting to note come with the moral caveat of being jewelry her late husband gave away to his many mistresses it appears. Gotta have a bit that makes Maggie’s morality a tad more on the side of the angels. But now comes the real offer: using Maggie’s many skills in service of the British government. This is like an updated “It Takes a Thief” and I can totally dig it.

And then the sly twist on Maggie surprising James by having James prepared a hidden welcoming committee for the cat burglar in case she didn’t want to play…

Maggie realizes she really doesn’t have any options. James lays out the mission she is to be tasked with and it revolves around stopping one of Hitler’s supporters who has moved on to leading terrorist armies in the wake of WWII. Neat idea for a villain although I’m not too certain that Maggie is the bloodthirsty sort. I’m giving this time to grow into a reasonable story. 

What I’m not doing is excusing the one layout issue that stops this book from being a perfect 10. The bottom left panel is supposed to be read after the top two on the right. Followed by your eyes then returning to the bottom right.  That isn’t a natural flow around the page. I understand why Grell is making the choices he is about dramatic placement of the reveal center page, but I read this wrong the first time through. That’s important because first time read-throughs for me are just for enjoyment. I don’t mark books too review or not until I know what they contain.

Now this isn’t a “throw the book away” kind of mistake, but it needs to be pointed out. It is kind of a design flaw from someone who isn’t known to make design flaws. I get it though: big reveal near center of page and then use a mirroring with focus on the left picture to make up a more dramatic “pull in” effect on the right. Grell really gets how to pack a punch, this one haymaker just went a bit wild in execution.

But next is a blow that connects. After listing off all the places this Hitler-era bad boy might be spending his final days and all the people Blucher has hurt over the years, James accentuates the point he came to make. Namely, that Blucher plans on going out with a bang and taking a lot of innocent lives with him in the process.

The second part of this knock out is that British Intelligence knows where Blucher keeps his most prized possession: a priceless Vermeer painting presented to him by Hitler himself. The mission for Maggie is to steal it so that it can be presented at auction…and intelligence can follow the painting right back to Blucher’s doorstep.

And this story’s James Bondian twist would not be complete without a little nod to the Q Branch (duly noted in the narrative) with a gizmo that will make Maggie the most cat-like cat burglar ever. That bottom panel framing sequence is amazing, specifically showing how it might be James that is really caught in Maggie’s claws with some subtle positioning. 

The book ends on a gorgeous double page spread of Maggie parachuting in to “rescue” the Vermeer,… 

…followed by a single page of her landing taking down a guard.

Amazing stuff.

And the crying shame of it all? Two issues. Yes, a book this good gets two issues.

There’s something wrong with comics from the 90’s, I tell ya. The good stuff got buried then forgotten and the fans instead stuck around for weeks waiting for books that were so below average that they show up in multiple copies in the Crapbox all the time. What were they smoking back then?

If you see these in the bins (or those Shaman’s Tears, or Green Arrows from the mid-80’s, or anything that Mike Grell even glanced at), my sound advice is to GRAB ‘EM.

You’ll be glad you did.

Gene-E #1

The Fairer Sex

Gene-E #1

Wishing won’t help this small press title

"Untitled”

Created and Illustrated – Patrick John Rodriguez

Story Consultant – Peter Corless

Color Assist – Navdeep Jhimb

Marketing – Kimberly Rodriguez

2003

You have to love small press publishers and their pluckiness. No matter the odds stacked against them or the lack of discernable talent, nothing prevents these books from being made, ignored, and then pulled into the heavy gravity of the Crapbox. I plucked this guy out of a Half Price 50 cent bin and even at that price I feel rooked. Some of that may be because the book itself lacks a price tag of any kind and this seems like a story you'd have to give away to get people interested in.

It only takes one look at the back cover to see what I mean by this. There is a certain crudity to the art that makes you feel it is too clean or symmetrical. This image is rendered in a joyless manner, even though it depicts a desperate escape from powerful red armored cybernetic humanoids (who look a bit goofy). The picture invokes those teenage drawings on notebook covers that convey an image, but in a passionless, static way. No chance this is going to rise up to even my low Crapbox expectations is my guess going in.

Our host on this outing serves as writer and artist, so we will be heaping all the blame for this one to Patrick John Rodgiguez’s way. He gets assists on story, coloring, and marketing this title, but all of it does little good. What is presented between the two covers is a bit bland on the art side and features a story with a morally questionable protagonist that really doesn’t get going until the very last page. That’s a frustrating development, or non-development or however you want to quantify it.

The big problem I have with Gene-E is that Rodriguez has chosen to tell his story in chronological order, with the entirety of this issue being a historical prologue. All except the last page, which looks like it will be introducing new characters. Those new characters don’t even get a chance to speak before we realize the book is over.

And the comic tale is so historical that our story takes place over a century ago and then jumps forward to the present day. I expect that none of the characters we encounter in the front piece of the book will play a significant role in events over 100 years later. It is fifteen pages of story that would have been better told in a flashback AFTER the author establishes some characters we like that will be around long-term. While the actions here may impact what comes later, because they are disposed of on the last page I see little reason to care about where this story will go next. For that I would need a likable protagonist who will be in the next book.

Instead, we start here: a tiny village outside of Barcelona, Spain, in spring of 1895 and we look in on this couple and their newborn.

I’ll admit that the angle of that bottom panel gave me a fair amount of hope that I’d misjudge the art skills that would be on display. The image isn’t astounding or anything, but it shows a fresh approach to framing and a more competent skill level than that back panel.

Story-wise, we have a couple in love, a newborn baby girl, an injured husband, and a wife who is going to market for her man-on-the-mend. I’m not dissing anything yet, and the book is doing a bit to win me back over.

Then page 2 happens and many things go wrong at once. First the art takes on a that same weird manikin-like look to posing the characters. The faces come off looking like badly rendered video game cutscenes, where a smile can have no warmth, no emotion behind it. 

Combine this with the HUGELY HUGE exposition dump that our main character Cassandra decides to lay on us. She is an interdimensional runaway from the world of Thanos (Marvel lawyers take note) which is many leagues ahead of humanity when it comes to technology. Her husband Eduardo appears to be an Earther who knows of her origins and loves her anyway. I suppose I should count myself lucky that the author didn’t choose to go back to show Cassandra’s escape from Thanos (tm Marvel, 1960-something) and instead started us here. But here isn’t the story he is telling, I believe. 

I believe that because…well, you’ll see.

As Cassandra enters the village general store, three red armor wearing aliens (who are definitely not stormtroopers) surround our interdimensional grocery shopper and demand she surrender herself. Appears Thanos (the planet, not the dude) doesn’t allow people to break its prime directive against helping low technology cultures that might be too warlike or primitive to use the power responsibly. All well and good. 

Cassandra seems to think that there is an ulterior motive at play here by some high ranking official she made mad. Even if there was, that doesn’t mean she isn’t breaking a Star Trek episode’s worth of rules (Next Gen, not TOS. TOS didn’t have rules. Just “things we like to state until it is convenient to ignore them”). So the guards prepare to take her by force.

Okay, so the art take s this sliding scale all the way back down. Thick inked lines, no shading at all, rooms that look draftsman straight. This is barely art. It is more like an architech’s mock-up with some colorforms stuck to it. I find it goofy and ugly.

Even when something like the spring Cassandra does in these two panels makes me lighten my stance a bit…

…as does the bursting through the roof effect. Still, shouldn’t the red guard dudes be prepared for such a maneuver? I mean, they are of the same race, so they knew she could do that, right?

And the guards prove that they knew her powers included something like this because they easily follow her. As she wings through the air on weird electric Christmas tinsel, the guard dudes are hot on her trail using mumbo jumbo science terms and military tactics but at no point do they act surprised by Cassandra’s method of flight. 

Who is surprised by all this? Cassandra’s fellow villagers, who are presented by the author/artist with his first attempts at shading. It becomes evident why none of the preceding pages show the least bit of crosshatching because Rodriguez clearly doesn’t know how to create shadow or texture using this technique. What he does know how to do is make a picture look…odd.

It’s like someone hit this guy in the face with an oily rag and then smeared it all over one side of his neck. And that over the shoulder shot makes his head look like he has one unhealed, stitched up gash across his skull. I get now why we have such sterile panels before this. Rodriguez was clearly playing to his strengths of not creating shadows in prior panels and keeping the art childishly simple. It doesn’t excuse it, but it does make it more understandable.

As we get more townspeople’s reaction shots, we also get this guard flying over the rooftops doing that dance move where you hold your leg bent at the knee and pump it back and forth…

…at least that’s what I think Rodriguez was going for.

Within a few moments the guards have her pinned down behind a two-dimensional representation of a chimney…while panic ensues below, as exemplified by this woman and her two kids.

…and whatever is going on with this old dude who was riding through town in his carriage.

Maybe he had a stroke prior to appearing in this comic? Who can say.

What we can say is that chimney or no, Cassandra is now surrounded by guards…again and they are going shoot beams at her that force her back to the villain from Infinity War. Or something.

The NOT Imperial Guards issue the ultimatum once more…which is redundant, since she isn’t coming along peacefully, and they have every right to just force beam her back for her interference. Instead they threaten her husband’s right to have limbs. Cassandra notices they don’t mention her daughter, hoping that they know nothing about the newborn.

She then incites the town to attack the red fellows whom she terms to be demons. Seems like the townsfolk should also stone her as a supernatural creature for flying over their rooftops recently. No such luck though.

Nope, they start lobbing rocks at the armored interdimensional police. One gets a lucky strike in, and then they all turn on their Christmas tinsel force fields. 

Once rocks prove ineffective, they start shooting at them, which causes the troops to “dissipate into gelatinous electrically charged currents” which reform after a few moments. And once they reform, they are finally done playing around, as evidenced by the weapon they now level at Cassandra. A weapon they could have fired pages and pages ago. 

As for the villagers, they give up on acting against the armored demons and start to pray. I pray too. Pray that the book will be over soon. It will, but first we have to show that Cassandra really ISN’T in the right here.

I have to agree with the faceless Thanosian guard: Cassandra has used these villagers to her own ends heedless to the pain the poor primatives might have inflicted on them by vastly superior technology wielded by people who were not their enemies…all just so that she could escape. She isn’t the hero of this story, she’s the villain.

A villain who clearly doesn’t know she is using people for her own gain. Check out that weird “one eye bigger than the other” stare she gives the guard...

And then they send her back to Thanos (for a quick finger snap, I imagine). The guards then vanish and the town is left to wonder what happened. We don’t see the husband again, nor Cassandra’s little girl. 

No entiendo, indeed.

Last page…skip forward to the present day as three people ride an airplane into Barcelona. They are a mother and father with their teenage daughter (apparently teenage. Might be younger. Hard to tell from one shot). The mother has a journal containing clippings of old newspaper articles showing the events that occurred back in 1895. 

The End.

Could this be Cassandra’s…great granddaughter? I mean, it is over a hundred years later, and it is likely Cassandra’s kid is long dead.

Well, you ain’t going to find out bucko! This is the last page of the book, in its entirety. These characters don’t even get to SPEAK before the issue ends. Big problem with this.

What an awful waste of time on characters we won’t see again. Perhaps Cassandra comes back in the next issue. Seems unlikely since she would be over 100 years old, but who am I to know the aging patterns of interdimensional beings. And perhaps the woman is Cassandra’s child, who also has longevity as one of her attributes. Or the guy is Cassandra’s grandson or great grandson.

And that’s the problem here: the story ends in such a way that you have no idea where it is trying to go and no reason to come back to it. You have ZERO investment in these three. What little investment you had in the prior “protagonist” appears wasted, as she has been written out of the story.

And let’s discuss that for a moment. Cassandra was the villain of this piece. She broke several of her own culture’s laws in coming to our dimension. And while laws may not be just in all cases, she was demonstrably unconcerned about using her superior technological knowledge to make life on Earth easier for herself and her husband, just waiting for the chance to do so in a way that wouldn’t attract attention. That’s kind of selfish.

But the straw breaking this camel’s back has to be using the villagers as pawns in the battle against the soldiers who have come to take her back. She had to know how ineffective their weapons would be against them. In fact, there was really no reason to bring the villagers into the fight at all as they didn’t provide enough of a distraction for her to escape.

I get that she found “true love” on Earth or whatever, but that was AFTER she left her home dimension, not before. It wasn’t her reason for escaping, which makes it unconvincing as an argument as to why she had to break her people’s laws about not affecting other cultures with their dimension-hopping. She did that because she was bored.

Not having a good protagonist to root for is another of the book’s weaknesses. To compound that with removing all of the characters right before the last page kind of kills it though. Why pick up the next issue?

I can’t find info about the book anywhere. I did find the publisher’s site www.legendlab.com, which serves as author/illustrator Patrick Rodriguez’s business development site. Appears he went into computer graphic design and has been getting steady work doing Visualization and Previsualization animations for the Marvel movies. With those mile-long lists of credits after each one, I can’t say that I’ve seen his name there, but it is probably true.

He doesn’t mention Gene-E anywhere on his site, but does show sample pages of two comic stories called Gravitons, which involves five space-football cheerleaders whose spaceship crashlands on a planet filled with robo-zombies and giant monsters. I’m making that sound more appealing than it is. From the pages that are displayed, Rodriguez doesn’t appear to have grown much as an artist, although I do detect him using the color pallet for shading his very bland, almost photo-traced character faces. Judge for yourself though by checking out his link.

As for Gene-E? It's a book that appeared out of a rub of the Crapbox that I wish wouldn't have.