Teddy KristiansenCritiques

This one was really cool. I started with the Re[a]d Diary side, and I'm glad I did, but I don't really know if that's the side I was supposed to read first. I don't think it matters which order you choose. I do recommend reading the notes at the end of Re[a]d Diary at some point, unless you already know the deal with this book, which I didn't. I don't think I would have enjoyed it so much without knowing the idea behind splitting it the way they did. Good stuff.

Read the first part years ago. Still holds up. Now it's like someone sprung a leak from it and it deflated to nothing. Oh well.

I think I would have appreciated the artwork more if the subject matter wasn't bad. I can stomach a lot but, if you're going to write about child abuse then the storyline needs to be good, and it can't feel like exploitation. This seemed like torture porn. I don't know the purpose of the plot and I don't care to read more about "Grendel" to find out.

James Robinson’s WitchCraft collects issues 1-3 of the 1994 limited series featuring art from Teddy Kristiansen, Peter Snejbjerg, Michael Zulli, and Steve Yeowell with colors by Daniel Vozzo, letters by Starkings, and cover art by Michael Kaluta. The series features the Three Witches of Thessaly/the Fates/the Hecatae from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman series. The story begins with the brutal death of one of their worshippers in ancient Londinium, inspiring the Hecate to offer the chance for vengeance by allowing their devotee and her killer to be reborn. In keeping with the cyclical nature of the Three Witches, the first two attempts fail as their supplicant is reborn as a young woman and a middle-aged man. The story also moves through time, beginning in 133 A.D. before moving on to 1342, 1842, and the 1990s. Each artist takes a different time period, with Snejbjerg’s depiction of the Middle Ages evoking the style of similar fantasy art, such as Hal Foster’s work. Similarly, Zulli portrays the grit of Victorian London, in which class struggle and industrialization leave their mark upon the world. Yeowell’s portrayal of the 1990s uses cleaner lines and straightforward designs to give the illusion of a modern world without magic, thereby belying the true nature of things. The overall effect is a work that complements the portrayal of the Hecate in The Sandman and builds upon the magical world Gaiman created. The series continued with a second three-issue mini-series in 1998, WitchCraft: La Terreur.

You have to see the big picture to build a sand castle... But you have to appreciate the small picture to understand the sand.'

Genius is a graphic novel masterwork when the proper lenses are worn. I read it years ago and again last week. Both times, my heart hurt afterward, but the first time, my head space was not the same. It was a 'good not great' offering which I enjoyed but had no need to discuss. My life was less complicated and I was closer to my Big idea years.

Now I have children and global fears that live in the spaces of my heart where I once held invincibility and cast iron resolve. I understand the narrative of Genius so much better than I really want to.

I never wrote a review before because I was only seeing the sand castle, not the components that allow the castle to exist.. Hats off to Steven Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen for this amazing graphic novel.

Details matter, so here are a few.

Ted was always 'Smart'. The terms brilliant and genius were tossed around and his parents skipped him grades to ensure he would not get bored. When school was over and he was adequately debased by his older peers, his genius presented itself as unique ideas and perspectives. He landed in a think tank to take on concepts which would advance humanity through the evolution and revolution of our culture states.

Quantum Physics... Big ideas, Big sand castles, Big impact.

As Ted watches his career falter, he watches his worth be replaced by younger fresher minds. He learns something which will change his world and provide laser focus on the small picture, the sand itself.

His ailing father in law tells him he knows a secret. Francis, was a body guard for Albert Einstein, and over the years they would chat to pass the time. Albert shared with hime a secret that he could no longer bottle up, sharing it instead with a man who could never understand it and would never disclose it.

Over the years, Ted himself has evolved. He evolved from single to married, childless to fatherhood. As he ages and his life becomes more complex, the creative faucet turns off and Ted's Big ideas become fragile. They crumble and fall apart, or never arrive at all.

Perhaps this secret could change everything.

--

Disclosure: This Graphic Novel was provided to me by the publisher for review purposes. Recieved in 2013 but didn't write a review till 2017.. Sorry about that, but resonance matters and no resonance existed. Had it continued to 'not click', the missing review would continue to exist rather than the non missing review which replaced the nothingness. So kudos, this review is unofficially metaphysical.

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

About two years ago, I read Foundation, the collection of the first five issues of the 1990s revival of House of Secrets. At the time, the omnibus of all 25 issues plus assorted extras had recently come out but I was unable to source it via interlibrary loan, but on this pass back through Sandman tie-ins I was able to finally secure it. It's a mammoth work: at 733 pages of story, plus unnumbered behind-the-scenes pages, you could really do damage to someone else with this book. Or to yourself if you carry it around in a backpack.

There's a lot to take in here, so probably this review will spiral out of control; I'll begin by not reviewing the opening arc Foundation again, since I already have. (Click on the link in the first paragraph if you care.) I should note that the issues are reordered from publication order here, apparently hitting some kind of ideal reading order, and I read them in the order they're placed here. As a result, book opens not with Foundation, but with what was originally issue #7, "Blueprint: Elevation A," which chronicles the building of the house that eventually became the House of Secrets, intertwining tales of the architect who designed the house, the actual builder of the house and the owner's wife, the House itself, an Indian tribe who used to own the land it was built on, and the blueprint. As you might imagine if you've ever read a 1990s Vertigo comic, they're all dark stories that end in tragedy, but they entertain in a sort of macabre Twilight Zone fashion.

Foundation is followed by The Book of Law, a six-part story that fills in the backstories of the dead souls who make up Rain Harper's fellow members of the Juris, the mysterious court in the House's pantry who judge people for the secrets they hold. These are Digol, a Babylonian warlord-turned-court-official; Ruby, a black woman from the 1960s South who gets involved with a white man; Pfaultz, a Middle Ages charlatan who exploits fears of the plague to get money and sex; NiAn, the wife of a dead Japanese warlord suspected of his murder; Clius, a young Roman who gets sexually involved with the Emperor; and the concept of the number five. I liked most of these stories on their own merits-- each draws a nice, one-issue tragedy, some about sweet characters (Ruby) and some about genuinely awful ones (Pfaultz). Though Teddy Kristiansen drew most issues of House of Secrets, The Book of Law lets some guest artists step in to enhance each story with its own distinctive tone, most successfully, Guy Davis (of Sandman Mystery Theatre fame) on Ruby's story. But it was a little weird for the narrative to swerve into covering five side characters after only five issues of the series's regular characters. I think these would have worked better interspersed throughout the series (like the "Times Past" segments of Starman) as opposed to all at once.

I found the story of the number five frustratingly obscure (as opposed to engagingly obscure), but I did like its rendition of page 5 itself, which made me think of the "page 13" that used to run in the old House of Mystery comics. Wrong series, but nice thought.

Next comes The Road to You: Getting There, about an impromptu road trip that Rain takes to San Francisco with Traci, her only real friend in Seattle, and Ben, the boy she has unresolved sexual tension with; meanwhile, a private detective is crossing America trying to find Rain and documenting all the criminal mishaps she's been caught up in over the years. I love a good road trip story, and this one is great, mostly because it involves time travel: Rain ends up in San Francisco of 1903, where her and doppelgangers of Traci and Ben work at a resort hotel, and she has to stop an attempted political assassination. It's kind of like those tv shows where someone travels through time, but the main cast all play characters in the past. Anyway, it's a fun tale that reveals some information about our main characters, especially Ben, and also introduces some enjoyable side characters, the Amazing Zandar, a gay psychic, and Axel Eiger, a boxing dwarf. A big part of it, though, is that Rain has to make a promise to the malevolent Pfaultz in order to save the lives of her friends and the President.

The San Francisco adventures continue in The Road to You: Being There and Leaving There, where Traci runs off from her friends. She was raped in Foundations, and the aftereffects of that rear up here. Rain and Ben have to work together to track her down, Ben has to overcome his surprise that his best friend from high school is gay, and Rain pretends to be Traci's psychiatrist so she can get past the police to talk Traci into not jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. It all has very little to do with the House of Secrets set-up, but it is an engaging story: Seagle and Kristiansen have made you care for these characters pretty quickly. When they return to Seattle, the private detective (who has meanwhile fallen in love with and gotten engaged to a prostitute) is waiting for them, and captures Rain, bringing her to her father.

I'd been enjoying the detective subplot, and this raises it to its height, and then totally destroys it. The detective has interpreted everything Rain has done wrong, because his profession means he sees everyone as a wrongdoer: he's convinced she's been a prostitute, a scammer, and a murderer, and he even has the evidence to prove it. The secrets we imagine others hold are often nothing like the ones they do hold. But then we learn that the guy we think is Rain's dad is actually her brother Ryan, who hired the detective on Rain's behalf to document the trip, and that's it. What!? Why!? How bizarre.

After this comes Basement, which deals with Rain's unrequited love for Ben, which is a subplot I found dull and uninteresting. At one point, Rain comments to herself that it's all a bit high school (Rain sets up Ben with a girl, who she then proceeds to be jealous of), and lampshading that it's cliche doesn't stop it from being cliche. Basement is actually pretty coolly told, as Rain jumps back and forth across the events of a couple days that concern a trip she took into Hell as well as the emergence of a demon into the House of Secrets during a party there, interwoven with more mundane events concerning the ongoing relationship drama. There's some cool Jimmy Corriganesque stuff where Rain imagines things going one way, only for them to go another, and I liked how each issue ended on a revelation that took place earlier than most of the events of the issue and put them into a new context. But the actual story being told in this interesting way is so-so: Rain's love doesn't interest me, and Rain needing to talk to her (dead) mother to move on with her life never quite has the impact that it ought to. This story also introduces a number of magical objects whose properties are never really clear: a rock, a gavel, and a mirror.

"Attic" follows, contrasting Rain's trip into Hell with a brief jaunt into Heaven that follows what may or may not be a suicide attempt on her part. Rain narrates this story, but instead of the usual style she employs, her head floats above the action and comments vociferously, a lot like the witches and other hosts in the old DC horror comics. This feeling is enhanced by the issue being divided into three sub-stories, "The House on Haunted Hill!", "Panic in the Attic!", and "The Girl Who Walked Between Two Worlds!"

The next and last big story is Façade, where Rain, Ben, and Traci travel to Rain's home in Massachusetts. This provides an ending of sorts to the series: even on the opposite coast, Rain finds the House of Secrets, and we're introduced to a whole new circle of friends that Rain left behind, each with their own secrets. Also Rain and Ben are together now, I guess? What happened to his girlfriend is not made clear until much later. Teddy Kristiansen paints this story instead of penciling and inking it, and though it's attractive to look at, it was hard for me to keep the slew of new characters clear. The promise Pfaultz extracted from Rain in Getting There has hung over all the intervening stories and finally comes to a head here, but the mechanics of the Juris and the House of Secrets and the magical objects (the gavel makes a comeback) are so ill-defined that the ending, where Rain tells her friends' secrets before the House can get hold of them, seems arbitrary. And then she hugs it out with her dad.

This is followed by a few short stories, "Other Rooms: Meeting," about an alcoholic whose trip into the House of Secrets ends up saving his marriage; "Other Rooms: Bath," where a charlatan medium comes into the House to do an exorcism; "Other Rooms: Gallery," a frame story from a Vertigo anthology designed to set up a number of other stories (from Desire of the Endless, The Minx, Sandman Mystery Theatre, Cain and Abel, Hellblazer, Nevada, The Books of Magic, and The Invisibles); and "Blueprint: Elevation B," which mirrors the first story in the volume by rotating through a few different tales of the House of Secrets, most notably Rain's time spent in the hospital after her suicide attempt and Ben's adventures meanwhile.

They're all good stories, but they're oddly placed. "Bath" and "Gallery" introduce some of the elements that confused me in Basement, and so clearly should have preceded it; "Elevation B" bridges the gap between Basement and Façade in a number of important ways. I get the structural appeal in having the book begin with "Elevation A" and end in "Elevation B," both of which use the same format, but "Elevation B" is an odd fit at the very end.

Overall, I'm glad to have read House of Secrets in its entirety, but it was a frustrating series taken as a whole. I liked the characters and their dynamics for the most part, but the Rain/Ben thing was never interesting; once they're romantically united in Façade, Ben fades in importance, and he may as well not be there most of the time. The supernatural plot started out very interesting, but Pfaultz's deal with Rain was never clear enough to be a driver of the series, and I felt like the Juris never really delivered on its potential: it seemed like it could have been used to tell more interesting stories than it was telling. But many of the individual stories in the series were solid: Foundation, Getting There, Leaving There, "Attic," "Meeting," and "Gallery" were all very enjoyable. And though I always like Teddy Kristiansen, this is probably the story most suited to his talents I've ever read aside from Sandman Midnight Theatre. A worthy but very different successor to the original House of Secrets.

The Houses of Mystery and Secrets: « Previous in sequence

So DC Comics got innovative for a change, and invited various highly-respected writer/artists to submit one-shot graphic stories, some of which feature established DC characters, some not. It's a sumptuous collection of stories, a few excellent, most very good, one or two clunkers. The artists I'm familiar with include Tim Sale, Richard Corben, Howard Chaykin, Darwyn Cooke, and (pleasant shock) Sergio Aragones. There are several others whose names I didn't know, most of them quite good. Tim Sale and Darwyn Cooke are my favorites here, but Sergio Aragones is a real hoot. The genres include Super-heroes, Horror, Romance, Suspense, Western, and probably just about any other genre that the comic book medium has treated. Quite a fascinating compilation.

Phenomenal! Glad I read the Omnibus version as every part was vital to the whole story.

Like most people I think the collection overall was fairly impressive although somewhat inconsistent. I think the work would have benefited from some kind of overarching theme to tie it all together. I hope they give this idea another shot. I was very excited to see a couple of my favorite artists and to see a couple of artists from Spain.

Like most people I think the collection overall was fairly impressive although somewhat inconsistent. I think the work would have benefited from some kind of overarching theme to tie it all together. I hope they give this idea another shot. I was very excited to see a couple of my favorite artists and to see a couple of artists from Spain.

Like most people I think the collection overall was fairly impressive although somewhat inconsistent. I think the work would have benefited from some kind of overarching theme to tie it all together. I hope they give this idea another shot. I was very excited to see a couple of my favorite artists and to see a couple of artists from Spain.

Like most people I think the collection overall was fairly impressive although somewhat inconsistent. I think the work would have benefited from some kind of overarching theme to tie it all together. I hope they give this idea another shot. I was very excited to see a couple of my favorite artists and to see a couple of artists from Spain.

Quantum phyiscist Ted Marx is overwhelmed by the demands of his job but then discovers that his wife's father once knew Einstein and claims that Einstein entrusted to him a final, devastating secret, and Ted tries convince his father-in-law to tell him what Einstein had to say.

From 1996 to 1999, DC revived the House of Secrets for 25 issues. I tried to get the House of Secrets Omnibus, but ILL couldn't procure it, so I had to settle for this, which collects just the first five issues. It's a very different House of Secrets than we've seen before (and since); the House is located in Seattle, and it attracts to it those who possess "secrets," who are tried by a group of ancient ghosts. Into all this enters Rain, a damaged, defensive young woman who ends up serving as the court's "witness." What could easily be a cliche character is really quite interesting-- her hard edges feel real, not like stock traits, as she's genuinely hurtful sometimes. The prose and dialogue are great, and this is probably the best artwork of Teddy Kristiansen's (considerable) career. There's something of a self-contained story here, but I'm disappointed I'll never know what happens to these guys next.

The Houses of Mystery and Secrets: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »

Failing to live up to the promise he brought to the Think Tank as a graduate student and weighted with the responsibility of providing for his teens and ailing wife, Ted clings to fantasized conversations with Einstein in the hopes of coming up with something big enough to keep his job.

Ted Marx is a genius. Not like when your mom says that your baby brother is a genius cause he figured out how to work the iPad at the age of three, but a real one. He skipped grades in school and he's a quantum physicist at a think tank. But lately...everything is beginning to overwhelm him. He's having trouble making the next big leap at his job, he's being passed over by the younger kids, his kids are growing up way too fast, his wife is seriously ill, and his father-in-law who is senile lives with them. What's a genius to do? But then...he discovers that his father-in-law knew Einstein himself! And even more than that Einstein shared his greatest discovery with him. Can Ted get the secret for himself? And if he can...what will he do with it?

For such a short book Steven deals with a lot of complicated topics ranging from aging in-laws, illness, being smart but not smart enough, and most importantly of all...what do you do when you've been told the greatest secret known to man? It's like the parable of the gold pieces from the Bible, but in this case letting the secret go to seed maybe the best thing to do with it. This is the question that Ted struggles with, all the while trying to deal with normal life and the pressures of his job. And it's the story's greatest strength. We see Ted as neither a hero, or a villain, or even someone to aspire to be like. He's just...like the rest of us, struggling to deal with life and everything that is thrown at him. There is no neat and tidy ending with this book. No question is every truly answered and we don't know what Ted may do with the secret. Instead the book is just like the real world...gray and unclear, with hints of light.

One of the things I struggled the most with this book were the illustrations. It took me a while to realize why everything was gray and somewhat fuzzy, with hints of green and light running through it, is that Teddy is mirroring what we see in the storyline, he's mirroring life. It's not supposed to be clear and rosy, instead it's muted and unclear, with those hints of light shining through every once in a while, like a bolt of genius out of the gray. The one big issue I have with the book, is the type choice. It was at times difficult to read and made for some interesting... confusion, such as where it looks like the father-in-law is calling Albert Bett instead of Bert.

Overall while I enjoyed the book, I found it difficult to grasp until the 3rd or 4th reading. And I think that's because the author paralleled life so closely, creating a character that we can't but help find uncomfortable because he's so like us and he struggles with the same things that we do. And yet...that's also the biggest selling point of the book. This is a good book for adults and I give the it 3.5 out of 5 stars.

ARC provided by Gina at FirstSecond½

I read this without knowing anything about it other than I liked the cover art. I read the first and what turned out to be the original story translated from French and thought, good. Great art, fantastic painting-quality art and a somewhat muddled story about a biographer looking for information on an unknown artist who died in WWI. Then I got to the middle, where the first story ended and had to flip it over to read the other story, told with the same art by a different writer who had no knowledge of what the original story was about. I didn't know this until the end when I read the author's note so SPOILERS, I guess.
The concept behind the two stories is interesting and makes the work maybe more intriguing than if it didn't have this conceit. I like both stories about the same and thought they worked independently and created unintentional contrast and comparisons. Again the art is stunning. Overall not what I was expecting and I'm kind of glad I went into it blind, with no clue what was going on.

This isn't the first Sandman spin-off-- it's predated by the launch of Sandman Mystery Theatre and the first Death miniseries-- but it's kinda the first standalone one. (I say "kinda" because it did garner a sequel, but said sequel was never collected in trade paperback.) Its subject is a little odd, though; I refused to believe that any Sandman fans were clamoring for a return of the Three Fates or the Three Witches or the Three Goddesses or whatever they were. (I mean, they don't even have clear names.) They would just pop up sporadically and be cryptic; I think they had a role in the finale, but maybe the Three Furies were something separate? I don't know and I don't really care.

The story opens with a Pict barbarian coming to Londinium and raping a Roman woman. She's a priestess of the Triple Goddess, though, and lets off a prayer as she dies. Too late to save herself, but the Triple Goddess decide that she will get her revenge: when she and her killer are next reincarnated in the London area, her killer will die. This takes over a millennium, but finally a young maiden is due to marry a guy who turns out to be a rapist. She's secretly a witch, and so is he, and though the Triple Goddess try their best, it doesn't quite come together, everyone dies, and no revenge is had. At this point, I wasn't really into the story either way-- didn't hate it, didn't love it. Did kinda wonder what the point was. (Except that the introduction had told me, but I'll come back to that later.)

So they're left to try again in 1842, where for some reason the priestess has been reincarnated as a man-- and not just any man, but Sir Richard F. Burton (though he's no "sir" yet). What? This just seemed bizarre to me. The killer is actually his mother's lover, and willingly so. Richard Burton is chastised by her for not allowing her her sexual freedom. But he chases the lover anyway and, whoops, the lover rapes Burton. I guess because he's just so evil? Then Burton meets up with gypsies, who teach him sex magic or something (you know gypsies) and then he finds the lover, but doesn't kill him, and goes on to be imperialist bastard we all know and love. And who wrote awful, dull travelogues.

The last bit brings us to the 1990s, when the priestess is now an old lady, and the barbarian is her baby-raping, wife-mind-controlling, priest-killing warlock son-in-law. Because he just wasn't evil enough? It's starting to get over the top at this point. Anyway, the grandma wins, and the Triple Goddess sentences him to be reincarnated throughout the past as the victim of every sex crime ever. Leaving aside the fact that "sex crime" sounds a bit too 20th-century in the mouth of a pagan goddess, it's just what!? I don't even understand what this is supposed to mean. Does it make rape into an empowering act for women? Or is it poetic justice (because raping men is funny maybe)? Or something? God, how bizarre. The book tries to pull back from it by having one of the Goddesses say "I actually started wondering if the matter deserved all the fuss we'd given it," but you know, that ending still exists!

Like Black Orchid (it must be a Vertigo thing), this collection contains a fawning introduction from someone I've never heard of, but I think is supposed to be famous maybe, Penelope Spheeris. Spheeris describes the book as creating "a comic-book world for those who are evolved enough to know that ultimately there is justice in the world." There's nothing evolved about this book! It depicts men as eternal rapists and women as eternal victims, whose best outcome for "justice" is that the men can secretly be the victims of the rapes they commit. She also claims that it shows the power of women as "immeasurably strong and immeasurably subtle," though I feel like being victimized through the millennia is pretty much neither. And lastly, she's quick to claim that men will like this book too even if it is all about female power (really?) because the stories "are sexually titillating without being sexist. They are sometimes erotic, but in an artful, beautiful way... and in a way that allows the WitchCraft women to keep their power and their moral strength." WHAT!? Did we read the same book? Because in the book I read, every sex act bar two is coerced. This book is not remotely titillating-- sex is nasty, brutish, and short, a means to an end for one or both parties in every case. None of the participants are ever drawn attractively. And let's not even talk about the assumption that "boys and men alike" need sex on display to enjoy a story about women anyway...

I freely admit that Penelope Spheeris's introduction is not James Robinson's fault. But it does show the same warped, unpleasant set of values that seems to underly this entire book. Ugh.

Neil Gaiman's The Sandman Spin-Offs: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »

Painful and disturbing (while beautifully drawn), this volume makes explicit something often tacit in Matt Wagner's Grendel cycle, the multiple connections between aggression and gender, and the way it plays out within families. Filling in a bit of the Grendel story only alluded to in Wagner's work, Devil Child explores the tragic experience of Stacy Palumbo, Hunter Rose's adopted daughter and the mother of Christine Spar, the second Grendel.

A refreshing take on the run-of-the-mill haunted house theme often used for horror fiction: this time around, the spirits that haunt the place are still the vengeful type, but not for personal reasons.

The spirits compose the members of the court, for trials of different people who are tried for keeping terrible secrets that has caused harm to themselves & to others (whether directly or indirectly). Watch out for the twist at the end.

Book Details:

Title House of Secrets: Foundation
Author Steven Seagle & Teddy Kristiansen
Reviewed By Purplycookie

I wanted to like this more than I actually did. I love the idea of a comics writer making a graphic novel about Superman that's more about his inability to write a Superman story because he's just not into the character. Lots of people feel that Superman is too inacessible, too perfect. They feel that his stories are boring, or too ridiculous in that way that only superhero's can be. ("They Saved Luthor's Brain!" anyone?) I also like the idea of an author using this as a launching point for some self-exploration, and into telling a more personal story not necessarily about popular culture icons or art and the creative process, but about something else even only marginally connected to that. However... I just didn't find the story Seagle actually wrote - an autobiographical exploration of the history of Huntington's disease in his family and his fears surrounding that - to be all that interesting. I found I didn't care about the author as a character very much.

The art in this book is stunning though, and overall it's a fantastic concept. I just wish the actual execution would have been done by someone else.

The "Grendel" brand is quite inconsistent; you have eccellent works but also sub-par material; this one falls somewhere in between. The story feels like an excuse for Matt Wagner to display child abuse, trying hard to shock the reader. And I like artist Tim Sale like the next man, but here he's even more "essential" than usual. All in all, Wagner probably got from me the result he wanted, which wasn't admiration but rather disgust.

One of my personal top five comic series of all time, abet one that has no connection to Ables home from 'The Sandman', instead we are treated to a huanted house tale with a twist that features one of the best female leads in comics in the form of Rain Harper. Writen by Steven Seagle one half of the Sandman Mystery Theatre writing team and later writer of Vertigo's cult hit American Virgin), the smart dialouge is a joy to read and Teddy Kristiansen's art is absolutly beautiful! A highly recomended read but the problem is the series got better and better as it went along, and Vertigo still hasn't reprinted any of it beyound the debut arc.

disturbing. very disturbing. i wish now that i had not spent my lunch time reading this. i can never unknow what is on these pages.

An unusual sort of graphic novel, about a comic book writer with a history of Huntington's Chorea in his family, who is trying to come to terms with the possibility that the disease will strike him, and at the same time is offered a comic book writer's dream assignment, a Superman story. Several flashbacks look at how he has come to view Superman as an icon over the years, and how this has come to relate to his own views on life and death, and being able to leap tall buildings... It gets a bit heavy at times, possibly too much so, but improves on second reading. The same is true of the unusual art stylings of Teddy Kristiansen. It was a bit disconcerting at first, but you get used to it. Can't say I'm a big fan, though.½