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Matt Bowers’ Memphis: Superheroes in the Bluff City

CREDIT: Matt Bowers

Matt Bowers

Bluff City-based illustrator Matt Bowers loves Memphis. It’s why he set his new superhero comic book here. “I love this city,” Bowers says. “I want to tell stories that I would want to read, and set them in this city.”

Bowers, a freelance comic illustrator and letterer, has written, illustrated, and lettered a comic book ode to the little city on the big river, and he’s releasing the first issue of the ongoing series — which he calls simply Memphis — with a book-signing at 901 Comics, Saturday, October 26th, at 10 a.m.

Matt Bowers

Of the book, Bowers says, “It’s basically my take on ‘What would it be like if there were superheroes in this city?’” And, true to the funky nature of the city, the superheroes it breeds in Bowers’ books aren’t the run-of-the-mill variety. Memphis intertwines three storylines following a trio of vastly different characters. “They’re all in this area, but they don’t necessarily know each other,” Bowers explains.

There’s China Monroe, a bounty hunter and private investigator; Pigeon, a winged homeless woman with a desire to help people who, like her, have been neglected by society at large; and the Power Angels, a corporate concern culled from contestants on the popular Battle Quiz television program and bankrolled by the mysterious, wealthy Mr. Jones. “They can’t stand the name,” Bowers says of the Power Angels. “They think it’s sexist, but they want to do good. They want to be superheroes.”

Bowers has been working on Memphis for some time. He has released some issues digitally, but he’s given the issues some extra attention for the original print run on the Bad Dog Comics label. “I re-lettered it. It’s kind of like a remastered version,” Bowers explains. And though Bowers writes, illustrates, and letters the comics himself, he happily admits he has had some valuable assistance from a source close to his heart — his wife, Kristin Heath.

Matt Bowers

“When I finish each issue, I have my wife read it. And then she gives me notes, and she helps me with the dialogue,” Bowers says. “We went to middle school together in Bartlett,” Bowers says. “And reconnected like 30 years later. Now we’ve been together 10 years.”

“She got diagnosed with cancer, and we’ve just been focused on getting her through that, getting her treated and out the other side,” Bowers says. Happily, Kristin is now cancer-free, which, it turns out, helped give Bowers the push he needed to publish in print. With more time on his hands, Bowers says he was primed for 901 Comics co-owner and Bad Dog Comics owner Shannon Merritt’s suggestion that Memphis was perfect for print. “Shannon started publishing,” Bowers says. “One day, I was walking around the shop, and he said, ‘You know, you ought to let me publish your book,’ and I was like, ‘Let’s do it!’”

Matt Bowers

“It’s just really good work,” Merritt says. “The art’s really, really good. It’s on par with anything else on the shelves.” Merritt adds, laughing, that it would be a missed opportunity for the comics company with “901” in its name not to jump at the chance to publish a book called Memphis.

“Memphis is in each story,” Bowers adds. “That’s the one thing that’s always constant.” The illustrator has taken pains to be sure that the book pays homage to its namesake, as he has included familiar landmarks in many of the backgrounds.

“In the new issue I’m working on, China takes her friends to Spillit,” Bowers says. “Kristin and I have gone a bunch of times. We even took my mom, and she loved it.” Bowers has even been working with Leah Keys and the Spillit staff to incorporate regulars into the stories.

Also fitting for Memphis is the role music has played in the comic. “Music is a huge influence,” Bowers says. “Each issue starts with a quote from a song. … A bass line, a beat, or a lyric will just trigger something in my head.” The styles the characters wear are influenced by music and pop culture as well, with many of the characters looking like fans of punk and new wave. Though that could easily be a nod to Memphis’ history with alternative music, Bowers says its as much a reference to another of his loves, the indie comic series Love and Rockets.

Bowers has also lettered comics for Scout Comics and Short Fuse Media. “That was one thing I was still able to do while Kristin was going through chemo,” Bowers says. “It’s creative, but it’s not as focused as this.” Bowers motions to a just-opened box of the first issue of Memphis.

Of Memphis, one more thing must be said: The art is stunning. Bowers’ style will surely appeal to fans of alternative comics of the ’80s and ’90s. The marriage of his indie style and more mainstream, superhero-based content creates an interesting contrast. And Bowers shows no signs of slowing down. Issue No. 1 is on stands now, with the second issue slated for a December release. And after that? “I’ve got the first 50 issues plotted,” Bowers says with a laugh.

And that unmitigated ambition? Yeah, that’s pretty “Memphis,” too.

Matt Bowers signs copies of his new, ongoing comic, Memphis, at 901 Comics, Saturday, October 26th, 10 a.m.

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Deep Cuts: Local Comic Crowdfunding Campaign

For the past three years, a group of Memphis-based artists and illustrators have been working away in semi-secret, hunched over sketch pads and digital illustration tablets, emailing each other ideas, and hogging the big table at Memphis Pizza Cafe when they met up to discuss their project in person.

Now, after three years of script-writing, character designs, and story-boarding, the creators of the Paper Cuts comics anthology have announced the project along with a crowdfunding campaign that runs until Thursday, July 4th.

Joni Miller

Paper Cuts is a full-color, 170-page independent comics anthology inspired, in part, by the popular Flight comics anthology. The project, presided over by editor Shane McDermott and art director Elliot Boyette, was announced to the world via its Kickstarter campaign on Tuesday and is available exclusively via Kickstarter pledge. The goal is set at $12,800, and as of this writing, the campaign has garnered $1,816 in pledges.

“It wasn’t super organised at first because I’m not super organised,” says McDermott, a freelance graphic designer and former editorial illustrator for The Commercial Appeal and professor at Memphis College of Art (MCA). After making the move to freelancing, McDermott found himself thinking about a comics project he had kept on the back burner for what seemed like too long. So he started making calls, seeing who might be interested in contributing to an independent comics anthology. As both a former professor and student at MCA, it was only natural for McDermott to look to his former classmates and students to fill out the ranks of the anthology. “A lot of us met for pizza one night and started talking about it and formed our core group.

Shane McDermott

“Most of us are alums of the Memphis College of Art,” McDermott says before taking pains to stress that, while he might have taught some of the anthology’s contributors, when it came to Paper Cuts, they were peers and equals. “Since the school is closing, it’s really important to us that this book does succeed, because it’s a tribute to the school and to the program,” he adds.

“We debated on whether or not to have a theme early on, but we decided to just let everybody do what they want,” McDermott says of the eclectic collection. “If there’s any commonality between us, it’s that we’re all indie artists making our own thing,” adds Boyette, the anthology’s art director and a graphic designer for the city of Memphis.

That freedom allowed the artists to follow their passions — and has made for some seriously strange and exciting subject matter. Included in the anthology are stories about a nurturing velociraptor mom, space adventures, love stories, and a guy with T-rex heads for hands. McDermott’s entry is a side story from a larger work of his called Sea Horse. “It’s about this guy who gets stuck in the imaginative worlds he created as a child, but it’s sort of run down because he hasn’t been there in a while because he’s an adult,” McDermott says before describing his submission for Paper Cuts, a story that somehow manages to cleverly wrangle all my favorite genres into one comic. “[It’s] called ‘The Ghouls, the Bat, and the Ugly.’ It’s a haunted Western. It has zombies and a vampire and a wicked witch of the wild west getting into a shoot-out at the Black Lagoon Saloon.”

Elliot Boyette

Boyette, a fan of both silly comic humor and post-apocalyptic scenarios, decided to marry the two seemingly disparate styles for his offering. “It’s about what happens when a calamity happens in the world and people band together in a run-down Hardee’s and make up a whole new cult religion,” he says. “It was true, pure fun making this comic.” Boyette didn’t actually set the story in a Hardee’s, though; he made up his own fast foot setting for his comic-book showdown: Nova Burger.

McDermott’s and Boyette’s graphic short stories will be in good company in Paper Cuts, alongside works by Rachel Stovall Davis, Nick Hewlett, Joni Miller, April Rodriguez, and a packed lineup of creative others. Fans of weird comics and out-there stories have until Independence Day 2019 to support this collection from independent artists.

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Doctor Strange

I sometimes think it’s strange when people talk about a comic book character’s “true” identity. These characters were, and are, always changing to meet the commercial needs of the publishers. I mean, She-Hulk was briefly a member of the Fantastic Four! The only rules are a complete lack of rules.

Benedict Cumberbatch is Doctor Strange

And yet, there is something about the way Doctor Strange is drawn in the latest Marvel blockbuster that bugs me. I’m not a deep expert on comics. The number of comic book superheroes I have an emotional attachment to is not very large: Spider Man, Batman (90s animated series version), Rom The Spaceknight (that one’s never getting a $100 million movie), Dr. Manhattan, The Tick, and Doctor Strange.

Hiring Benedict Cumberbatch to play the Sorcerer Supreme was the perfect casting choice, which is keeping with the generally good decisions Marvel Studios has made under Producer Supreme Kevin Feige. And, as I’ll get to in a minute, Doctor Strange delivers big time on the visual front, and holds together reasonably well on the writing front. It’s the characterization that left me cold, which is surprising, because the promise of getting the characterization exactly right is what mustered the tiny bit of excitement I have left for Marvel-branded, extruded movie-type product.

After a perfunctory, McGuffin-establishing battle between reality bending mystics, we meet Dr. Stephen Strange, a brilliant neurosurgeon whose massive intellect is outstripped only by his outsized self-regard. And how do the trio of screenwriters and director Scott Derrickson choose to demonstrate his extraordinary brainpower? Turns out he’s a master of 70s pop music trivia. Sure, they reveal this character beat while Strange is in the midst of delicate brain surgery, but wouldn’t a complete mastery of classical music history be more consistent with the character than a fondness for Chuck Mangionie? From the first introduction, they have changed Doctor Strange into Buckaroo Banzai.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Buckaroo Banzai! Far from it. (Where’s my $100 million version of Buckaroo Banzai Against The World Crime League, Hollywood?) But I can’t help but get the feeling that the real reason Doctor Strange listens to dad rock is because everybody loved Starlord’s mom’s mix tape in Guardians Of The Galaxy. Just as Batman and Superman are essentially the same character in Batman vs Superman, so too are members of Marvel’s much more varied hero stable morphing into marketing driven sameness.

Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One shows Stephen Strange what’s up.

But at least Cumberbatch looks the part, and, as appropriate for an origin story, he gains gravitas as the story proceeds. Strange injures his hands in a car accident (don’t text and drive your Lamborghini, people!), ending his neurosurgery career. Medicine fails, so he heads of to Nepal (don’t want to piss off the Chinese market by using the original Tibet) in search of a magical way to restore the full use of his hands. Once there he finds Kamar-Taj, a monastery full of sorcerers led by The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton, hitting her marks with crisp perfection), who teaches Strange the arts of conjuring and inter-dimensional travel. When the magic starts flying, Doctor Strange’s real strength is revealed. There are clear visual references, like the wall- and ceiling-walking martial arts moves taken from The Matrix and the recursive, bending cityscapes from Inception. But like an original beat built out of samples, the visual synthesis feels fresh, even while it pays tribute to artist Steve Ditko’s psychedelic 60s phantasmagoria.

Strange’s journey from adept to master is hastened by the attack of Kaecillius (Mads Mikkelsen), a rogue student of the Ancient One who wants to summon a god of the Dark Dimension to Earth, offering the planet in exchange for everlasting life. Pretty standard stuff for a superhero flick, really, but at least it’s a coherent vehicle to keep the eye-popping visuals flowing.

Doctor Strange is the best superhero movie of the year, but it doesn’t do much to change my hypothesis that we reached Peak Comics with The Avengers: Age Of Ultron. The film’s sturdy competence offers a sharp contrast with the flailing nonsense of the DC filmic universe, which says to me that Disney and Marvel are the only studio today that has an actual good creative process in place. But there’s a thin line between “process” and “formula”, and despite all of its visual bravado, Doctor Strange’s reality bends too strongly towards formula.

Doctor Strange

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Time Warp Drive-In: Comic Book Hardcore

This mild spring day is perfect weather for the drive-in. Fortunately, the Time Warp’s got you covered!

The theme is Comic Book Hardcore, but the first item on tonight’s program is the official premiere of episode 1 of Waif, the sci-fi serial directed by Time Warp Drive In co-host Mike McCarthy. Waif is the story of an alien stowaway, played by Meghan Prewitt, who finds herself stranded on future Earth. The sci fi serial form is perfectly suited to McCarthy’s pulpy sensibilities, and the the space-based special effects by Raffe Murray in the opening episode have a pleasing hint of the 70s BBC shops that produced classic Doctor Who and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

Waif

2005’s Sin City saw OG indie auteur Robert Rodriguez’s  most significant contribution to the comic book movie genre. Rodriguez, in collaboration with famed Batman artist Frank Miller, abandoned photorealism entirely and created a dark, stylized world where Miller’s hardboiled characters and over-the-top femme fatales fit right in. It’s too bad the sequel, 2014’s A Dame To Kill For, was so godawful, because this is one of the greatest visual masterpieces of 21st century filmmaking, and a perfect drive-in feature.

Sin City

Next up is an early entry into the comic book movie sweepstakes, the 1994 adaptation of The Crow, based on the underground comic by James O’Barr. The film is infamous not so much for what happens onscreen as what happened offscreen: Its star, Brandon Lee, son of martial arts legend Bruce Lee, was killed in a still-mysterious on-set accident eight days prior to filming wrap. Viewed from a distance of 22 years, Lee’s performance has a brooding charisma that inspires all sorts of might-have-beens, and the film looks like the blueprint for the DC grimdark philosophy of superhero films.

The Crow

1995’s Tank Girl is an infamous flop that destroyed careers and poisoned the reputation one of the few girl power comics on the scene in the 1990s. Lori Petty stars as the titular Tank Girl, who roams the post-apocalyptic world not so much like Furiosa as like Mad Max if he were played by Gewn Stephanie. It’s also notable for being one of the stranger roles rapper turned TV cop drama regular Ice-T has had, as he appears as a sentient marsupial mutant named T-Saint. The years have been kind to this film, imbuing it with a sense of trashy fun. Like Repo Man, it finds its salvation in a good soundtrack and some now-classic fashion.

Tank Girl

The final film on the docket is Blade, another 1990s comic book film that looks better in retrospect than it did a the time. It stars Wesley Snipes in a career-making turn as a sword-slinging vampire hunter. In this origin story, Blade, a half-human whose mother was bitten by a vampire while he was in the womb, faces off against the great character actor Stephen Dorff as a vamp set on world domination. It’s got enough stylish vampire decapitations to keep you awake into the wee hours of the drive-in. 

Blade