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Ain't nothin like free comics! And this is nothing like a normal free comic. This is CASANOVA 8, by Matt Fraction and Fábio Moon. And MySpace Comic Books has the whole thing, online, for free! Check out the pages below for the first chapter in the new story arc, "When Is Casanova Quinn?"
If you've read CASANOVA before, then you are one of us: a tight yet scattered circle of enlightened masters who share the biggest open secret in comics: CASANOVA is one of the best new books to hit the stands. And if you haven't read CASANOVA before, then open your mind, because Sirs Fraction and Moon are about to blow it away.
Oh, yeah. Fraction is new to MySpace. Do the neighborly thing and go over and say hi. With glitter comments.
Even better, we've wrapped up the pages into a handy unrestricted CBR file for downloading! If you are not familiar with CBR (or its close cousin, the CBZ ) it's a file format that collects comic book pages together for convenient viewing on your computer. You can read it offline with your favorite CBR viewer, share it with your friends, burn it on CDs and throw it at strangers, write it to a thumb drive and put it in a time capsule for all eternity (or leave it behind in a shady backroom bar).DOWNLOAD casanova08.cbr HERE!If you're on a PC, do the right-click-save-file thing, if you're on a Mac, do the control-click-save-file thing.
If you like what you see here, you can pick up the absolutely stunning CASANOVA: LUXURIA hardcover from Image, a beautiful oversized collection of the first seven issues, drawn exquisitely by Gabriel Bá!
Thanks to Matt Fraction, Fábio Moon, and everyone at Image Comics for taking the plunge and releasing their baby for free into the wilds of MySpace. Gracias, gents!
And now, before Casanova 8, some words from Fraction himself. Hiyah Earthmen.
When they were kids, I suspect that most guys in comics had heroes that put on capes. When I was a kid, my heroes put on ties, ordered drinks, and seduced women that wanted to kill them.
Never a clotheshorse or a social butterfly, I was a fat, perpetually new kid in about a dozen different schools, each one existing on a wholly new planet than the last, with its own customs and rituals I generally didn't understand, didn't like, and eventually came to hate.
The appeal, then, to me, of James Bond and his ilk wasn't the action, the state-sponsored murder, or the gadgets-- although all that was supercool-- it was that Bond always knew what to say, what to drink, and how to live in any one of a dozen skins his job called on him to wear from day to day.
I didn't want super-strength and heat-vision; I didn't want to sublimate any latent homosexual desires I may have had by punching other dudes in their spandex-clad taints-- I wanted to look good in a tux, hold my liquor, and go back to my suite with the beautiful girl in the backless evening gown.
The world travel was a nice perk.
And, okay, the gadgets. The gadgets fucking rule.
I read a lot of comics then.
I didn't come to comics traditionally; I wasn't a legacy case or a superhero reader by default. See, I always loved telling stories with pictures, whether it was movies or comics or whatever. When I was a kid, I drew incessantly. I came to comics looking for visual fuel by the metric ton. I wanted cool shit to look at. I didn't care what it was.
And I came about in the age when the superhero genre had loosened its grip, ever so slightly, on the medium, and you could find all kinds of comics. I bought and read everything that looked cool without prejudice.
To me, comics have always been about anything and everything.
(Now, I very much DID come around to the superhero side of the street-- when in Rome, right?-- but that's not what got me in the door. Anyway.)
Something else I liked, but I don't know that I was able to articulate it until much later, was that comics are, at their root and in their bones, kinda sleazy.
Comics are made for moms to take them away from us.
Maybe it's the mobbed-up history comics have, maybe it's residual legacy from Kefauver and Wertham, or maybe it's that comics are small enough and invisible enough to fly under the radar of the Common Culture and have managed, in a lot of ways, to remain unhygienic, a little savage, and a bit too crass to sit at the table with the other civilized mediums.
There's an undercurrent of sex, violence, and populist realpolitik in comics, if you want to look for it. I always did, and I always loved them even more for that. I mean, is Superman a strange visitor from another planet? Or is he a defender of the workingman from plutocrats and gangsters alike? Or is he a holy golem come to save the Jewish people from the unspeakable horrors of Hitler? Is Superman a way for mobsters to keep their newspapers selling while milking the nickels and dimes out of kids?
Yeah, man, all of it.
Anyway. So now I write comics, and CASANOVA is the kind of comics I write.
When I got the chance to write my first ongoing series, I thought nobody would buy it, nobody would read it, and very quickly Image Comics-- my publisher-- would stop publishing it. So, okay then, operating strategy: get busy quick. Swing for the goddamn bleachers. Make everybody pay. Write what you love, and who cares what it sells. Otherwise, y'know-- super-strength, heat-vision, sublimated latent homosexual desires, taints, etc. Write what you want to read; write like you'll never get the chance again.
I wanted to write a book about my kind of heroes. Spies. Sex. A little science fiction, a little sleaze. And a little more sex.
So here's CASANOVA 8: maybe it's a kind of spy comic.
Enjoy.
Matt Fraction                  
8:14 PM
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