World Comic Book Review

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25th April 2024

DG Stewart

DG Stewart is the editor of WCBR and is a content contributor. He completed a Bachelor of Arts majoring in literature at the University of Western Australia in 1989, and is an Adjunct Professor at Murdoch University in Australia.

In the market for a giant weaponised robot? It pays to buy Japanese.

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North Dakota in the United States has legislation which specifically allows flying drones used for policing to be equipped with Tasers, pepper spray and rubber bullets. This is not new thinking. Comic books both in the US and Japan have long considered militarised robots, although ordinarily on a gargantuan scale for visual effect. (For the purposes of this discussion, we exclude “mecha” and other forms of exoskeletons, like “Iron Man”, “Gundam”, and “Neon Genesis Evangelion”).

In US comic books, most robots tend to be opponents to altruistic superheroes. Here is the schematic for a Sentinel, a mutant hunting robot most often seen in Marvel Comic’s “Uncanny X-men” titles:

sentinel drone

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Separated at Birth: the beetle-browed villains of American comic books

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The Free Dictionary provides a definition of “beetle-browed”:

[Middle English bitel-brouwed , having grim brows, sullen, perhaps from bitil, betil, bug, beetle (from the resemblance of a pair of thick eyebrows to the tufted antennae of a cockchafer); see beetle1, or from bitel, sharp (probably from Old English *bitol, biting, from Old English bite, bite); see bit2 + brouwed (from brow, brow; see brow).]

Beetle-browed villains in comic books visually convey malevolence through a deep scowl. The remarkable similarity between some of these characters, though, extends beyond their visages. These villains also are very heavy-set, often donned in armour, frequently (but not exclusively) capable of projecting explosive forces from their hands, are alien, and seem born to rule. The examples we have listed below are the most obvious.

In the images below, we have deliberately not identified which character is which and modified the images to greyscale. The similarities are remarkable.

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A quick overview of tobacco smoking in mainstream comic books – Japan, the US, and France/Belgium

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In a peer-reviewed article entitled “Smoking in Movies: Impact on Adolescent Smoking” written by James D. Sargent MD (Adolsc Med 16 (2005) 345-370, there is a startling finding:

“Adolescent never smokers who nominated a star who smoked on screen were 1.4 times more likely to take up smoking over the 4-year follow-up period, even after controlling for other baseline influences… [there is] strong… epidemiologic evidence of a link between exposure to movie smoking and adolescent smoking. It is notable that the estimates of the effect of seeing movie smoking on smoking initiation in both longitudinal studies were almost identical to estimates that were obtained for the cross-sectional samples. This suggests that continued exposure to movie smoking and its effect on adolescent smoking persists over time.”

If there is to be any conclusion from this survey, it is that the frequency of the depiction of smoking in comic books after decades of public education on the risks of smoking tobacco has not diminished, save in the US.

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East of West #26 (Review)

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East of West #26
(Image Comics, July 2016)
Writer: Jonathan Hickman

Imagine an alternative reality whereby the continental United States is divided between the Union, the Confederacy, a Texan Republic, a black homeland called The Kingdom, a Native American high technocratic autocracy called The Endless Lands, and a Maoist Chinese state where California would otherwise be. This universe also features the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse reincarnated as young children. This is except for Death, depicted as a lean cowboy, accompanied by two powerful Native American sorcerers, and who has fathered the beast of the Apocalypse manifest as a young boy.

This is the outlandish backdrop to “East of West”. And yet despite this absurdity, the series is written, by Jonathan Hickman, with utter finesse. The characters and interpersonal relations are riveting, the action epic, the dialogue fine-tuned, and the execution sublime.

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