Fantastic Fangirls: Comics and Culture

by Sigrid

Underground #1
Writer: Jeff Parker
Artist: Steve Lieber
Published by Image Comics
Due out September 23

Very few people skyrocket to fame and fortune. It sometimes looks that way to the rest of us; you wake up one morning and suddenly everybody’s talking about this Megan Fox chick, and it looks like she just vaulted into celebrity-dom. But if you look up her career, she’s been an unknown actress for eight years, and a working child-model before that. That’s not a vault to fame, that’s a slog of hard, thankless work for the last decade. (And let’s remember that Fox is twenty-three years old.)

There’s a movie, Ellie Parker, starring Naomi Watts. This was made after Mullholland Drive, after Tank Girl, but before Watts could actually make a living as an actress. It’s about exactly that — about not making a living as an actress, or the even-worse state of barely making a living as an actress. Of getting by just well enough to not give up, but not really making it work, either. It’s vaguely autobiographical — but the next year Watts made The Ring, Ned Kelly, and 21 Grams. Boo-yah.

All of which is to say, Jeff Parker and Steve Lieber are going to remember 2009 as that year. The year the hard slogging work turned into a vault through the limelight. Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber’s Eisner-winning graphic novel, Whiteout, has been not only optioned for a movie, not only written, and not only been actually produced, but is scheduled for release this year and stars Kate Beckinsale. (Kate “I-taught-myself-to-not-blink-when-the-squibs-hit-my-face” Beckinsale of the extremely well-costumed Underworld franchise.) Jeff Parker, meanwhile, has Agents of Atlas, Exiles, and Dark Reign: The Hood coming out from Marvel and just saw the completion of Mysterius the Unfathomable at Wildstorm and X-Men: First Class at Marvel. His name has been on a comic in my pull list nearly every week in 2009.

Actually, let’s look a moment at the talent of Lieber and Parker’s Periscope Studio. I personally recognize — without using wikipedia — the names of Terry Dodson, Ron Chan, Rich Ellis, Paul Tobin, Paul Guinan, Matthew Clark, Kieron Dwyer, Karl Kessel, Dylan Meconis, Erika Moen, and Colleen Coover. Besides Parker and Lieber. [Editorial bias: This reviewer is working on a project with Erika Moen, and the Fantastic Fangirls have gotten permission from Colleen Coover to use her art for our Twitter icon. We pretty much like Periscope Studio, generally.] For the last year or year and a half Periscope Studio has been getting a growing share of comics industry recognition, attention, and paid work. I say good for all of them; not only are they a talented group of artists but they have put in the work.

Seriously. Go to the studio’s page and check out each member’s working credits. There’s a lot of work there that isn’t superstar. That isn’t breakout. That paid the rent and the bills and the cost for flying to the next convention, but didn’t get interviews on Newsarama or Word Balloon or iFanboy. There’s a lot of the Ellie Parker world there, of taking little jobs everywhere for the portfolio and the connections and the reputation and the money. A lot of making enough to not quit but not enough to stop worrying.

But I digress.

In this payoff year, Steve Lieber and Jeff Parker have a new creator-owned work coming out. Underground. Story by Parker, art by Lieber, and color done by Ron Chan. Underground is the story of normal people, some of whom make bad decisions, and the trouble they get into. Park Ranger Wesley Fischer is committed to protecting the natural environment of a local cave; the townsfolk are intent on developing it for tourism. Complications ensue. You can read the whole first issue in black and white here. But the creative team made full-color copies electronically available to reviewers — including Fantastic Fangirls — in advance of the September 23rd sale date.

I will be buying this comic. It fills a niche in comics that is currently under-represented, that of the action-adventure genre. Not the horror-thriller, that’s got plenty of love. But the action-adventure-thriller, something Mel Gibson would have been in in his heyday, or something that involves Matt Damon looking battered and stern. In Underground we get that, all set up in the first issue and ready to go. We have the conflict between the factions of the town, we have the personal relationships and secrets, we have the intrinsically action-oriented setting of the caves, and we have people with explosives. This is a story that will go somewhere, fast.

Steve Lieber’s art carries the story deftly. From the clear variations in protagonist Wesley Fischer’s facial expressions on page five, to her opening dream sequence, to the action that closes issue #1, the art tells the story. The panels are dynamic, changing point of view and distance from the subject in ways that focus the reader’s attention on what’s important in the frame. Every character looks different from the other characters. The backgrounds are realistically detailed, from Seth’s bedroom end tables to the counters in the town diner. But Lieber’s true strength is in his realistic human forms. People look like people, they look real, as strong or vulnerable as human bodies actually are.

Jeff Parker’s story is off to a good start. I’m not incredibly interested in the plot elements — but I, personally, rarely read a story for the plot revelation. What I love, and what I love about Parker’s work on X-Men: First Class and Mysterius the Unfathomable, is the way character is revealed by the events of the plot. I want to know more about Wesley. I want to know what the dream bits at the start of the story mean, I want to know how and why she got this job when she’s not a local, I want to know how much Seth means to her. I want to see the actions in the plot as they put pressure on the characters, as the characters are pushed into actions they may not want to take. I want to know what happens next — and that’s the mark of a good story.

Underground is also promising in some specific areas that concern the Fantastic Fangirls. It has a female protagonist. The male lead (at least, in the first issue he’s the lead) is a person of color. The town has people of color in it and they have views and opinions and thoughts of their own. One of the Native Americans in the story is purposefully a bit of a caricature, but he is not the only Native American or person of color given a speaking part. There is variety in the representations of women and minorities, and that’s always what I ask for. The economics of the town feel realistic to me, putting poorer persons of color in favor of economic development while the white, educated outsider is in favor of protecting the environment at the cost of jobs. It’s a realistic situation with no easy answers that exists across our country, and I like it in the world of the story.

I went into this review predisposed in favor of Underground; let’s be clear about that. I am rooting for the Periscope Studio crew. I like Underground, which isn’t surprising. But I think a lot of you reading this will like it, too. It’s a good action story, the characters are either likable, interesting, or both, and the dialogue is real. (May I draw your attention again to page five?) The art is not only technically very, very good, it is well-suited to this setting and story. It’s easy to relate to the characters Lieber and Parker have created. I’m guessing that if you read the black and white preview you’ll want to buy the comic. And, once you buy issue #1 you’ll buy #2 — to find out what happens next.

The vault into the limelight that 2009 really, really should be for Parker and Lieber, it’s not due to easy dumb luck. It’s because of their hard work and talent and the production of books like Underground. If you go check out the pdf of issue 1, you’ll understand what I mean.

Email: sigrid @ fantasticfangirls.org
Twitter: sigridellis