Welcome to the Weekly Comics Hype! I'm doing these alphabetically, but occasionally skipping around a bit. I'm aware that many of my readers really liked Steve Gerber's Howard the Duck, and much of that iconoclastic, surreal spirit found its way back into the pages of his excellent 1998 series Nevada.
Nevada's story actually began in the late 1970s in an issue of Howard the Duck, where, to satisfy the editorial requirement for an exciting fight scene, there's a double-page spread of a Las Vegas showgirl and her pet ostrich locked in battle with an evil desk lamp. Twenty years later, a different showgirl and her ostrich got their own title at DC's Vertigo imprint.
And what a title! Nevada is absolutely classic Gerber, with a thoughtful, sympathetic character dumped way over her head into an unreal and bizarre situation. Nevada is a dancer at a major Las Vegas hotel called the Nile who performs two shows nightly with her ostrich Bolero and tries to avoid her ex-boyfriend Dolan. She talks and sings 1960s songs to herself and doesn't have very many friends.
But things at the Nile are very bad. The management is hushing up a series of absurdly grisly murders. Fortunately, the killer has been picking off lonely businessmen, but that's about to change.
And then Nevada is attacked backstage by a bizarre animal unlike anything seen on Earth before, and the city detectives make the unpleasant realization that the killer seems to be able to warp time and reality to complete his tasks...
At the same time, a vagrant who was once a professor starts showing up in Nevada's dreams, and then her dreams start showing up in the hotel. The police want the vagrant to steer clear of Nevada, and a strange man with a lava lamp for a head want the police to steer clear of the vagrant...
Like the best of Gerber's work, Nevada goes right up to the edge of surreal and skirts right along implausibility without becoming incoherent. Part of this is down to Phil Winslade's really good work on the art. Winslade doesn't get nearly as much credit as he should; he's an excellent storyteller who keeps the story flowing and grounded, where lesser artists would certainly have made a mess of the spectacularly strange fourth and fifth issues. (It's a similar sequence to some of the edgy episodes in The Invisibles which were ruined by their artists; Grant Morrison would have done well with Winslade on his team.)
Nevada was a six-part series from Vertigo which was preceded by a short episode in a Vertigo anthology which cast Liberace as an angel and Bugsy Malone, Howard Hughes and Don King as the Three Wise Men. Nevada has yet to return after this outing, so the complete series is available for a nicely-priced fifteen bucks.
Nevada is available from your local comic shop, who would enjoy your custom; new books ship on Wednesdays, so why not stop in after work?
Nevada's story actually began in the late 1970s in an issue of Howard the Duck, where, to satisfy the editorial requirement for an exciting fight scene, there's a double-page spread of a Las Vegas showgirl and her pet ostrich locked in battle with an evil desk lamp. Twenty years later, a different showgirl and her ostrich got their own title at DC's Vertigo imprint.
And what a title! Nevada is absolutely classic Gerber, with a thoughtful, sympathetic character dumped way over her head into an unreal and bizarre situation. Nevada is a dancer at a major Las Vegas hotel called the Nile who performs two shows nightly with her ostrich Bolero and tries to avoid her ex-boyfriend Dolan. She talks and sings 1960s songs to herself and doesn't have very many friends.
But things at the Nile are very bad. The management is hushing up a series of absurdly grisly murders. Fortunately, the killer has been picking off lonely businessmen, but that's about to change.
And then Nevada is attacked backstage by a bizarre animal unlike anything seen on Earth before, and the city detectives make the unpleasant realization that the killer seems to be able to warp time and reality to complete his tasks...
At the same time, a vagrant who was once a professor starts showing up in Nevada's dreams, and then her dreams start showing up in the hotel. The police want the vagrant to steer clear of Nevada, and a strange man with a lava lamp for a head want the police to steer clear of the vagrant...
Like the best of Gerber's work, Nevada goes right up to the edge of surreal and skirts right along implausibility without becoming incoherent. Part of this is down to Phil Winslade's really good work on the art. Winslade doesn't get nearly as much credit as he should; he's an excellent storyteller who keeps the story flowing and grounded, where lesser artists would certainly have made a mess of the spectacularly strange fourth and fifth issues. (It's a similar sequence to some of the edgy episodes in The Invisibles which were ruined by their artists; Grant Morrison would have done well with Winslade on his team.)
Nevada was a six-part series from Vertigo which was preceded by a short episode in a Vertigo anthology which cast Liberace as an angel and Bugsy Malone, Howard Hughes and Don King as the Three Wise Men. Nevada has yet to return after this outing, so the complete series is available for a nicely-priced fifteen bucks.
Nevada is available from your local comic shop, who would enjoy your custom; new books ship on Wednesdays, so why not stop in after work?