The G-Man Retcon

Chris Giarrusso created his comic G-Man in bits and pieces: short stories, backup features, comic strips, half-parodies of other superhero sagas.

As the Image Comics webpage for the first volume says, G-Man: Learning to Fly “Collects the origin of G-Man and Great Man, the G-Man Christmas Story, Mean Brother/Idiot Brother adventures, and a complete collection of the original G-Man comic strips that started it all.”

Because that book is a grab bag, its pieces come in different sizes and lengths. Some were obviously designed for different sizes, and they have different storytelling rhythms. It’s still a fun read. We see Mikey and his big brother Dave gaining their powers from the family’s magic cape. Several of their (male) friends already have superpowers, with no explanation. It’s just a fact of life at their school.

Two G-Man miniseries/graphic novels followed, each with a wider focus showing more of the brothers’ universe. There’s more explanation of the magic cape in Cape Crisis, the best of the volumes. We meet the Color Guardians, female classmates who are one unfathomable mass to the boys, and the Suntroopers and Thunderfriends teams of grown-up heroes.

The latest G-Man installment comes from another publisher and takes another form: an illustrated middle-grade novel written as a daily journal, like Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Rachel Renee Russell’s Dork Diaries. Most of the pictures, supposedly by young Mikey, are in a simpler, line-art style which Giarrusso is also using for a weekly online comic strip. There are occasional full-color pin-up pages as well, in the guise of photos taped into the journal.

In addition, The G-Man Super Journal: Awesome Origins is a prequel, going back not only to before Mikey gained his powers but before all his friends had theirs. It folds in characters who first appeared in the graphic novels, such as the Color Guardians, Cool Wraps, and that annoying kid Tony. And it offers explanations for how all the kids got their powers. Actually, several explanations for each: alien birth, divine descent, freak accidents, top-secret website in Japan, and so on. As a result, G-Man: Super Journal is now the most complete introduction to the G brothers’ saga.

Whereas Learning to Fly’s big scenes are mostly at home and Cape Crisis on the playground, Awesome Origins is driven by events at school: Mikey’s struggle with a teacher who doesn’t like superheroes, tests to join the Suntroopers, and most especially that annoying kid Tony. The illustrations have a deadpan sarcasm that (along with the superpowers, of course) distinguishes this series from its diaristic forebears.

I still prefer the G-Man comics, but a mostly-new G-Man story in illustrated prose form is still a lot of fun. And its publisher’s wider distribution might bring new readers to all the volumes.

G-Man, Come Home!

G-Man: Coming Home brings a lot of delights, but I found it less satisfying than G-Man: Cape Crisis. This book picks up just after the end of that previous volume when G-Man (Mikey) and his older brother Great Man (David) have regained the magic cape and belt that provided their powers. The world thinks of Great Man as dead, but that isn’t worrying him because it gets him out of the house.

One plotting problem for G-Man writer-artist Chris Giarrusso is evident on the back cover (visible by scrolling down on this page): he’s created a world that’s too fun for his heroes. Below portraits of the brothers is an assemblage of other characters with special powers. We see the boys’ five loyal buddies: Kid Thunder, Suntrooper Solazzo, Tan Man, Billy Demon, and Sparky. We see the seven Color Girls, who function as a single source of unfathomable energy and emotion (the way many middle-grade boys view girls). We see this world’s mightiest adult hero team: Racing Stripe, Miss Victory, Cool Wraps, Captain Thunderman, Lugg, Color Queen, and Suntrooper Captain Davis. Also on the scene but not shown are the boys’ mentor, wizard Glendolf, and the godlike creature they rescued in the last volume, Khrysomallos.

In sum, for something to threaten G-Man and Great Man in this volume, it would have to be tremendously powerful and/or to strip away those allies. The first bad guy (also shown on the back cover, the only antagonist there) has a giant robot. Well, in the first chapter he does. After the Color Girls bring him down, he has nothing on his side but a fake moustache.

The second antagonist is the head of the Suntroopers, upset that the boys’ magic cape and belt can negate his troops’ solar suits. The Suntroopers function in this universe like the Green Lantern Corps, a space-based patrol system. Everyone sees them as heroes. They would be a formidable enemy for G-Man and Great Man, except that, well, the boys’ cape and belt can negate the Suntroopers’ solar suits. Plus, the head of the force and his chosen deputies quickly come across as incompetent hotheads. There’s a moment at the end of chapter 3 when it appears Suntrooper Captain Davis will follow orders rather than protect the brothers, but otherwise that conflict, explained and re-explained, produces more parties at superhero headquarters than anxiety.

Furthermore, adults handle a lot of the major problem-solving in this book—often without even telling the kids. Almost needless to say, Suntrooper Captain Davis has a clever plan all along. “We didn’t have time to tell you the plan!” Captain Thunderman tells his son. Cool Wraps informs the brothers that he kept them “incapacitated so you wouldn’t accidentally give away the plan!” The result is less satisfying, as well as less nerve-wracking, than if the kids were on their own.

But then comes chapter 5, when G-Man and Great Man are on their own as their parents race off to the hospital to deliver their baby sibling. (No, David and Mikey didn’t see that coming, either.) This single issue has everything I love about G-Man: out-of-this-world plot twists, snarky humor, obdurate personalities, and family dynamics where no amount of friction can break the underlying bonds. The rest of G-Man: Coming Home has all that too, but not in such concentrated form.

Chris Giarrusso’s Brother Act

My favorite set of brothers in superhero comics appears in Chris Giarrusso’s G-Man series. Mikey, called G-Man by his friends, is the younger brother: eager, imaginative, perseverant, and naive. David, who took the name Great Man, is his elder: capable, exasperated, bossy, and protective.

Giarrusso was at the MoCCA Festival last weekend, and I did something I’d never done before: commissioned a sketch.

Specifically, I asked for “Great Man cosplaying Nightwing and G-Man cosplaying Robin. The Tim Drake version.” To which Giarrusso answered, “Really?” and “Um, I don’t have all the costume details in my head.”

I assured him I wouldn’t sweat the small stuff. After all, he publishes with Marvel. (And he knows the costumes well enough to produce these versions of Batman, #1, and Superman/Batman, #26.)

By the end of the afternoon, I was the proud owner of this piece of art.

I asked Giarrusso about the next volume of G-Man. He said he was more than halfway through creating that story, in which the fraternal dynamic of Great Man and G-Man will be tested by the arrival of…a baby brother!

(And speaking of annoying baby brothers, last week Caanan, creator of Max Overacts, posted this convention sketch of Damian Wayne and his babysitters, titled “Don’t Be Rude—Be a Hero.”)

G-Man to Become a Middle Child

It’s no surprise that Chris Giarrusso based his G-Man and Great Man characters on his own childhood (a) superhero dreams and (b) relationship with his older brother. The interaction of those brothers is one of the details that grounds his G-Man comics in reality, and makes them delightful.

For Dave (Great Man), his little brother Mikey always needs to be told what to do, never has any good ideas, and says nothing worth listening to, even if occasionally what he says might keep the universe from falling apart. It makes perfect sense to Dave to build an aircraft with a comfy chair for himself and a milk crate for Mikey because he, after all, will be the pilot. (You don’t think Mikey would be pilot, do you? Ha!) On the other hand, if any other kids or creatures go after Mikey, Dave will be there in an instant to protect his little brother.

As for Mikey (G-Man), his doggedness is best summarized by Dan Savage in The Kid:

Younger brothers are less powerful than older brothers, so persistence and stamina are our survival/revenge strategies. Older siblings may hit harder, but younger brothers move faster, and we are relentless. . . . younger brothers everywhere [never] knew when to stop. We took jokes, wrestling matches, and “playful fights” past the point where they were fun...

Now? asks Mikey. Now? Now?

This interview with Giarrusso at Sketch Maven shows just how much his real older-brother-Dave shaped his career as a comics artist, in unmistakable older-brother way:

When I was in college, my brother Dave called me one day to inform me that I was going to be working for Marvel Comics. He explained that Marvel offered internships for college students, and that all I had to do was apply and then I'd get an internship and then get hired on staff shortly after. Realistically speaking, this was not a likely scenario, but he had this strange confidence that it would play out that way. And that ended up being exactly the way it happened.

And as for the video games on Giarrusso’s ChrisGComics.com website:

My brother Dave put those games together. He runs my whole website. One day he just calls me up and says, "I made a video game for you." And then he kept making more.

However, there will soon be a new variable in the comics’ fraternal equation. Mikey is going to have someone to lord over, too:

The next volume of G-Man will feature the arrival/introduction of G-Man's little brother. A lot of people know Great Man is based on my big brother, but there are actually three of us, and it's time to introduce the third G brother into the books.

(Thanks to Brigid Alverson for the link to this interview.)

Homer Price in Capes?

Last week and month I had an intriguing online exchange with author Gail Gauthier about the notion of “Homer Price in space.”

Was it possible, I questioned, to replicate the tone of Robert McCloskey’s books in an environment that wasn’t familiar to the point of quaintness. Homer’s adventures depend on ordinary things—ragweed, balls of twine, visting movie stars, tunes that get in your head—being just a little bit off. But if we readers don’t have a deep sense of where the “on” setting should be, how can we be sure what’s off? To repeat the analogy I used in Gail’s comments section, maybe all donut machines work that way in zero gravity.

After signing off, I realized that I’d just read a book that contained a lot of what I enjoy about the Homer Price novels, yet set in a rather wild supernatural environment. That book was G-Man: Cape Crisis, by Chris Giarrusso. It’s in comics form, and stars several young superheroes with a somewhat addled wizard mentor. The kids are generally eager and well-meaning, and the adults generally too bothered to get a clue or do useful work.

That story gets its grounding, I think, in the clichés and givens of superhero tales. Mikey’s magic cape lets him fly, be super-strong, and super-tough. (Not invulnerable, as other kids point out at the start.) Those powers make sense because we’re used to seeing superheroes with them. Mikey’s circle of young heroes contains three who can fly and blast things in different ways, one who’s superfast, and one who can turn different colors—easily portrayed on the brightly tinted pages.

But Giarrusso doesn’t try to incorporate rarer, less easy to understand powers, such as controlling one’s body density (the Vision), tactile telekinesis (the second Superboy), or shape-changing within certain rather arbitrary parameters (Beast Boy). Depicting those powers might raise more questions about what’s ordinary in this world, and what’s off.

Lots of the humor (and there is a lot of it, in forms that made me laugh out loud) grows from our expectations: the boys questioning the science behind holding a buttercup under your chin, the fact that broomsticks can fly but clearly aren’t designed to be ridden, the hope that if you foil a bank robbery you’ll get some of the money as a reward. Some of those expectations reflect everyday life, but others simply reflect experience with fantasy adventures.

So a “Homer Price in space” could work, I guess, as long as it’s grounded in our received understandings of what space is like, and doesn’t drift too far into novelty or scientific exactitude. Maybe it’s even worked already; I haven’t read the Danny Dunn books in decades.

Take Offs

Kids suffering from a shortage of even newer Wimpy Kid books could do a lot worse than Chris Giarrusso’s G-Man: Learning to Fly.

Overbearing older brother? Check. Clueless parents with unrealistic expectations? Check. Strange but loyal friends? Check. Lots of elementary-school humor? Check.

The big differences between Giarrusso’s story and Jeff Kinney’s are that:

• Mikey (G-Man), his brother David (Great Man), and their young friends have superpowers.
• G-Man is actually told in comics form, and hasn’t simply been labeled a “graphic novel” because it has lots of cartoons.

G-Man: Learning to Fly isn’t a “graphic novel” by my definition, either; it’s a collection of stories. The brothers’ origin tale (“Hey, Mom, where’s our magic blanket?” “Check the hall closet.”) takes up about 40% of the book. The rest is a series of G-Man’s adventures at school, at superhero camp, and in strange alternate dimensions.

Some of those tales are as short as a single page originally published in the back of Savage Dragon and other Image comics magazines. Others are longer, though still made up of collections of such pages. Different adventures appear to have been initially printed at different sizes, and the G-Man/Skullboy crossovers are co-created by Jacob Chabot. Giarrusso is now publishing a G-Man miniseries which could lead to a more unified second volume.

G-Man’s stories find most of their humor in kids’ lives: sibling relationships, parental nagging, playground fights, incompetence in all forms. Superpowers and attendant expectations are just frosting on the cake. Anyone can get those jokes.

Other jokes—especially in the latter half of the book—rely on readers’ knowledge of comics history. There’s an homage to the cover of Flash, #123, and another of DC’s Infinite Crisis, for example. The reaction to G-Man’s new outfit is a parody of how comics publishers use costume changes and how fans react (“It sucks!” Super Cardinal keeps yelling). These details will fly over the heads of readers who haven’t immersed themselves in superhero history, but, having run the experiment, I don’t think they’ll interfere with their enjoyment of G-Man.

(Extensive previews available at Giarrusso’s website.)

Comics That Go Both Ways

I’d like to find a comics page spread that starts with two characters talking in the upper left, then separating. The reader can follow one character across the spread and then down to the lower right, or follow the other down the page and across to the lower right.

Either way, each character has an individual experience before rejoining the other, and only the reader knows what’s happened to both. It’s quite possible Chris Ware has done something like this already, and I just haven’t had the eyesight and patience to enjoy it. If I can’t find an example, I may have to write one.

While waiting, I keep my eyes open for comics pages that play with our idea of panel order. There’s one in Chris Giarrusso’s new G-Man: Learning to Fly collection, which you can find by going to his “Comic Bits” page and selecting strip 28.

A more algorithmic approach to the same issue appears on Jason Shiga’s “April Fooled” poster, originally created for Nickelodeon magazine.

And Sunday Press has collected Gustave Verbeek’s Upside-Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo comics from 1903-05. Each illustration serves its story twice, once when viewed right-side-up and differently when viewed upside-down. I saw a selection of these Sunday strips in Art Out of Time (reviewed here), and, while I don’t think the concept ever got past the novelty stage, I’m still amazed Verbeek was able to keep up the gimmick as long as he did.