Salvatore Vol. 2

It’s time once again for our annual look at six books that were, for whatever reason, unjustly ignored by the public and critical cognoscenti at large. With all the titles that are published lately, it’s no real surprise that some books fall through the cracks, though in certain cases it seems grossly unwarranted.

After the jump are six books that, while they may not have made my “best of 2011″ list, I think got nowhere near the amount of attention they deserved. There are lots more that I could include if I had the time. I’m sure there are books you read this year that you don’t think got enough praise either. Be sure to let me know what they are in the comments section.

1. Salvatore by Nicholas De Crecy (NBM). Although highly acclaimed on the other side of the Atlantic, De Crecy is one of those many, many European cartoonists that remains persona non grata here in the U.S. Only three of De Crecy’s books have been translated for American audiences so far: the Louvre-themed Glacial Period and two volumes of Salvatore, the second of which came out this year with barely a peep from critics or readers. That’s a shame as Salvatore is a charmingly absurd anthropomorphic tale involving a philosophizing dog mechanic who, along with his silent, minuscule, bald servent — sets off for South America in a ridiculous contraption of an automobile in search of his true love. As that description suggests, Salvatore is a rather complicated farce, with lots of side stories and supporting characters, including a near-sighted mama pig who searches in vain for a lost child while the rest of her brood becomes ecological entrepreneurs. De Crecy applies an arch, overly formal writing style here that, combined with his rough, detailed art, gives the story an off-kilter, almost grotesque feel that makes it seem both otherworldly and a sly satire of modern foibles, cultures and attitudes. Certainly there’s nothing quite like it being published right now.

King of Flies Vol. 2

2. Pure Pajamas by Marc Bell (D&Q). I have no evidence backing this up, but I suspect Bell is an artist that confounds a number of people. He adopts a big-foot, potato-nose visual style in the best comic strip tradition, and his world is a friendly, anthropomorphic fantasia where everything, from your breakfast food on down is eager to wish you well. On the other hand, his stories lean towards the distressingly surreal, cute characters can easily come to violent ends and things can go bizarrely awry for the most absurd reasons. Myself, I find that tension between the rubbery cute and off-kilter savagery to be one of Bell’s strengths. Pure Pajamas, which collects various strips and stories Bell has done for various media over the years, is about as good an example of those strengths as you’re likely to find.

3. King of the Flies Vol. 2: The Origin of the World by Mezzo and Pirus (Fantagraphics). I suspect a number of potential readers flipped through King of the Flies (either online or in stores) and dismissed it quickly as an obvious Charles Burns rip-off. That’s somewhat understandable. After all, Mezzo and Pirus do wear their influences on their sleeves. Not just Burns, but other artistic lodestones like Quentin Tarintino, David Lynch and Jim Thompson haunt this three-part saga as much as one recently deceased character does. But this dark, disjointed story about an assortment of misfit suburban characters plagued by bad luck and their own poor choices is a compelling, bitterly funny read nevertheless. Despite its obvious influences King never feels like a pale imitation, especially in the second volume, where the ante is upped considerably, both on an aesthetic and narrative level. Don’t let your initial impressions keep you from checking it out.

4. Everything Vol. 1: Blabber, Blabber, Blabber by Lynda Barry (D&Q). It seems odd that a Lynda Barry book should make this list after the deserved acclaim that greeted her last two books, Picture This and What It Is. Yet aside from a review at the AV Club and a New York Times profile (which admittedly is nothing to sneeze at) I’m not sure anyone talked about this new collection of some very early work other than to acknowledge its existence. It certainly seemed to slip off a lot of people’s radar (including my own) when it came time to make a “best of” list. Yet Blabber offers a fascinating look at Barry’s early development as a cartoonist, as she moves from the delicate, oddball Ernie Pook to the rawer, more emotionally savage material of “Boys and Girls.” There’s a lot here for Barry fans, and fans of good comics in general, to chew on.

The Man Who Grew His Beard

5. The Man Who Grew His Beard by Olivier Schrauwen (Fantagraphics). Color Engineering author Yuichi Yokoyama got all the attention this year, but to my eyes Schrauwen is just as innovative and wholly original a cartoonist as Yokoyama. The main difference between the two is that where Yokoyama is focused on expressing motion, machinery and discovery, Schrauwen prefers to explore differences in perception, especially between reality and that of the imagination. Many of the characters in Schrauwen’s collection of short stories (many of which appeared previously in Mome) are mentally disturbed or disabled in some fashion and attempt to reshape what they see in order to compensate for their liabilities. None of this is explicit however; it’s often up to the reader to determine where truth and subjectivity begin and end (though he does frequently drop hints). Incredibly inventive and at times darkly funny, Beard is the work of a master cartoonist worth more attention.

6. Tank Tankuro by Gajo Sakamoto (PressPop). Japanese comics are generally thought to have begun with the end of World War II, but of course that isn’t the case, as this impressive book, lovingly designed by Chris Ware, proves. The Tank in question is an overly exuberant robot warrior/superhero whose metal ball body not only protects him from gunfire but can help produce airplane wings, a drill or even smaller clones of himself — whatever’s needed to get him out of a particular jam. Though decidedly militaristic and nationalistic (Tank is perhaps a bit too eager for war) Sakamoto’s comics from the 1930s are irrepressibly buoyant and loopy enough to delight even the most ardent pacifist. In a golden age of reprints where tons of lesser works are getting dragged back out for a glossy-page omnibus, here’s a little known gem that really deserves a spot in the limelight.

Courtesy of Fantagraphics, we’re pleased to present one more preview from the publishing house–Dutch comics artist and graphic designer Joost Swarte’s Is That All There Is?

The book collects virtually all of Swarte’s European alternative comics work from 1972 on, including stories published in Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s RAW Magazine in the 1980s. It also includes an introduction by Chris Ware. Some of the stories were done in watercolor, retro duotones and Zip-a-Tone screens, and Fantagraphics is putting a lot of care into matching the coloring.

Please note this preview contains some nudity, so it’s probably Not Safe For Work and isn’t for children. Check it out after the jump. It comes out in February.

Infinite Kung Fu

With only a couple days left in 2011, here are a few more “best of 2011″ lists from the past few days:

• iFanboy has chosen DC Comics as their publisher of the year. They’ve also listed their best collections of the year, including Infinite Kung Fu, Mr. Murder is Dead, Bone 20th Anniversary Full Color Edition and the Walt Simonson Thor Omnibus.

• ComicsAlliance finished up their countdown of their top comics of the year, with Daredevil and Love and Rockets New Stories Volume 4 taking the top two positions.

• The A.V. Club has posted two separate lists–one focused on superhero and mainstream comics, the second on “graphic novels and art comics.” The mainstream list includes a separate “Best of” section that includes categories like best new characters, best one-shot and “best fix.”

• Kelly Thompson lists 13 “fantastic female creators” for 2011 on Jezebel, which is a companion piece to previous lists she’s done (i.e. no repeats). This year’s list includes Marjorie Liu, Carla Speed McNeil, Renae De Liz and Kelly Sue DeConnick, among others.

• Newsarama looks at the top ten comic trends of 2011, including reboots, crowdfunding and teasers.

• Writing for Pop Dose, longtime blogger Johnny Bacardi shares his favorite comics of the year, including Chester 5000, Batwoman and Carbon Grey.

• Marc Mason at Comics Waiting Room shares his ten best graphic novels of the year, a list that includes Level Up!, The Sixth Gun trades and Anya’s Ghost.

• Roger Ash at Westfield Comics listed his favorites of the year, with Usagi Yojimbo topping his list.

• Jason Serafino at Complex includes Amazing Spider-Man, Red Skrull Incarnate and The Walking Dead in his list of the 25 best comics of the year.

• Rob McMonigal at Panel Patter lists his 10 favorite manga of the year, including Stargazing Dog, 20th Century Boys and Twin Spica.

• David Berry , writer of the Graphics Scenes feature at the National Post, lists the five best graphic novels of the year, which include Mark Twain’s Autobiography: 1910 – 2010 and Big Questions.

• JT Lindroos’ best books of the year list at Bookgasm includes a sub-section on Eurocomics, including Hilda and the Midnight Giant and The Empire of a Thousand Planets.

• Ryan Ingram at The Snipe had several comics industry folks, including Brandon Graham, Rebecca Dart and the staff at Lucky’s Comics in Vancouver, list some of their favorites of the year.

• Four Colours & the Truth has posted several year-end lists, including best comic series, best graphic novels, best digital or webcomics, and best anthologies.

The artists of L'Association in 1991, seated from left: Mattt Konture, Killoffer, Stanislas, Lewis Trondheim, Jean-Christophe Menu, David B., Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian

What if the Image Seven were Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, Chester Brown and so on, instead of dudes who made their bones drawing Spider-Man and Wolverine? The result would probably look a lot like L’Association.

Founded in 1991 by French alternative-comics titans David B., Killoffer, Mattt Konture, Jean-Christophe Menu, Mokeït, Stanislas, and Lewis Trondheim, L’Association was formed as a response to the lack of opportunity for avant-garde comics provided by France’s mainstream comics publishers. But L’Asso quickly became a sales forced to be reckoned with on its own, thanks in large part to its breakout hit, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Over the years, the publisher’s lineup took on “everybody who’s anybody” proportions in the Francophone comics world, with Julie Doucet, Joann Sfar, Blutch, Dupuy & Berberian, Emmanuel Guibert, and Guy Delisle all releasing work through the collective.

But as was the case here in the States with the makers of Spawn, Youngblood, WildC.A.T.s et al, L’Asso became a house divided. A combination of personal rivalries, diverging interests, and outside opportunities elsewhere soon saw the seven founders go their separate ways, leaving Jean-Christophe Menu as the publisher’s head honcho. What happened next — hidden financial records, unexpected layoffs, an employee strike, accusations of alcoholism and paranoia, tumultuous meetings involving hundreds of people, and a team-up between the departed founders to wrest control of their former company away from Menu’s allegedly dictatorial hands — became the stuff of comics legend.

Now the Comics Journal’s Matthias Wivel is telling the story of the L’Asso War — and getting participants on both sides on the record. In part one of his fascinating report, he takes us from the founding of the group to the eve of the company-wide strike in protest of Menu-directed layoffs that rocked Angoulême, France’s biggest comic con. In part two, he chronicles the strike and the resulting legal wranglings and wild-sounding general assembly meetings that eventually led to the co-founders’ return and Menu (and Satrapi)’s departure. Filled with juicy quotes from Menu, Trondheim, David B. and other leading players, the whole sordid saga reads like a movie, or more appropriately a comic, which, thanks to a team of cartoonists led by Trondheim, it’s about to become. Take a break and read the whole thing — it’s one of the most compelling collisions of art, commerce, and clashing cartoonists that comics on either side of the Atlantic has ever seen.

Love & Rockets New Stories #4

Fantagraphics sent over their list of books debuting at the San Diego Comic-Con later this month, and boy is it packed tighter than my suitcase on vacation day. The publisher will have almost two dozen new books at the show, including the last Mome; new stuff from Michael Kupperman, the Hernandez Bros. and Johnny Ryan; tons of Eurocomics; a Lou Reed/Edgar Allan Poe joint; and more. Check them out:

Love & Rockets New Stories 4 by Los Bros Hernandez: Featuring new stories by Jaime and Gilbert, including new material featuring Maggie set in the present and during her teen years.

Mark Twain’s Autobiography by Michael Kupperman: Probably the one I’ve been looking forward to the most, Kupperman publishes Mark Twain’s “biography” since the day the author/humorist died through last year — including his affair with Marilyn Monroe and his time-traveling adventures with Einstein.

Prison Pit Vol. 3 by Johnny Ryan: More deranged, twisted ultraviolent fun from Ryan.

Mome 22, edited by Eric Reynolds: The double-sized last volume of Fantagraphics’ anthology, featuring comics by Kurt Wolfgang, Paul Hornschemeier, Gabrielle Bell, Tim Hensley, Anders Nilsen, Zak Sally, Tom Kaczynski, Andrice Arp, Eleanor Davis, Joe Kimball, Laura Park and many, many more.

The Raven by Lou Reed and Lorenzo Mattotti: Musician Lou Reed teams up with Stigmata creator Lorenzo Mattotti for “the definitive book version compiling the songs, verses and narratives that comprise POEtry/The Raven,” a musical and subsequent CD based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

The Art of Joe Kubert, edited by Bill Schelly: This is a coffee table book “that honors this legendary creator with beautifully reproduced artwork from every phase of his career as well as critical commentary by the book’s editor, comics historian and Kubert biographer Bill Schelly.”

Setting the Standard: Alex Toth

Setting the Standard: Alex Toth, edited by Greg Sadowski: Collecting the influential artist’s work from his time at Standard Comics.

Esperanza by Jaime Hernanadez: The fifth volume of “Locas” stories, collecting the remainder of the stories from Love and Rockets Volume II, picking up where 2010’s Penny Century collection left off.

Like A Sniper Lining Up His Shot by Jacques Tardi: Tardi “returns to the world of guns, crime, betrayal and bloodshed with this stunning, grisly, and remarkably faithful interpretation” of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s last completed crime thriller.

Murder By High Tide: Gil Jordan by M. Tillieux: A “never-before-translated classic from the Golden Age of Franco-Belgian comics,” this collects two stories featuring Detective Gil Jordan.

The Pin-Up Art of Humorama, edited by Alex Chun: A collection of single-panel pin-up cartoons and other material published under the Humorama banner in the 1950s in digest-sized magazines like Romp, Stare and Joker, by creators like Bill Ward, Jack Cole, Dan DeCarlo and more.

Drawing Power, edited by Rick Marschall and Warren Bernard: An oversized, full-color, 128-page book that looks at the history of cartoon advertising from the 1870s to the 1940s.

Sibyl-Anne vs. Ratticus by R. Macherot: A translation of Franco-Belgian all-ages comics, featuring mice fighting rats who want to take over their land. This is the first time it’s been translated into English.

Willie & Joe: Back Home hardcover and Willie & Joe: The WWII Years softcover by Bill Maulden: Both collect World War II-era cartoons by “the most beloved enlisted man in the U.S. Army.”

The Armed Garden by David B.: A collection of stories of “history, magic and gods” by the creator of Epileptic.

Complete Peanuts 1981-1982 (Vol. 16) by Charles Schutz: A new volume of the popular and charming strip.

Even More Jewish Comedians by Drew Friedman: The third and final volume collecting Friedman’s caricatures of Jewish comedians.

The Hidden

The Hidden by Richard Sala: A post-apocalyptic story of a group of survivors who end up at an abandoned trading post, where they try to figure out if the world has really ended.

The Man Who Grew His Beard by Olivier Schrauwen: The first American collection of stories by the popular Belgian cartoonist, whose work has appeared in Mome.

Nuts by Gahan Wilson: A collection of one-page stories that ran in National Lampoon in the 1970s, these focus on a normal kid dealing with life rather than the vampires and other ghoulies you might expect from Wilson.

Fantagraphics also provide a list of creators who would be at the show:

Wilfred Santigo
Anders Neilson
Rob Goodin
Joyce Farmer
Johnny Ryan
Los Bros Hernandez (Jaime, Beto, and Mario)
Easter Pearl Watson
Mark Kalesniko
Bill Schelly
Paul Hornschemeier
Tim Hensley
John Pham

Athos in America

Welcome to another edition of What Are You Reading?, where every week we talk about the comics, books and other stuff we’ve been reading lately. Today our special guest is Kim Thompson, co-publisher, editor, translator and AutoChatter at Fantagraphics … and world traveler, as you’ll see below.

To see what Kim and the Robot 6 crew have been reading, click the link …

Chris Mautner

The Horror, The Horror

The best thing about The Horror, The Horror: Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You to Read by Jim Trombetta is the accompanying DVD containing a 1955 episode of the TV show Confidential File, directed by none other than Irving Kershner of Empire Strikes Back fame. The show is all about the evils of comic book publishing (despite the fact that the comics code had by this point already been established) and panders in the most frothy, exploitative way imaginable, with a lengthy scene of young boys reading a batch of horror and crime comics and then tying up and torturing one of their younger playmates. A Current Affair never tried anything like this.

As for the book, it’s a bit of a mess. Trombetta seems more interested in psychoanalyzing the themes and subtext of most of these comics than exploring their history and worth (or unworth as the case may be) as literature, and he does so in a rather agonized, tortured manner. More to the point, he seems content to discuss mainly the covers of these comics and doesn’t spend much time talking about the stories found within. All in all, it’s a bit of a frustrating read, all the more so for the occasional appearances of genuine insight and spot-on analysis.

Tom Bondurant

Frankenstein and the Creatures of the Unknown

Appropriately enough, Frankenstein and the Creatures of the Unknown (written by Jeff Lemire, drawn by Ibraim Roberson) continues a concept which refuses to die. Successfully reproducing the fusion of horror and giddy mayhem which characterized the Grant Morrison/Doug Mahnke Seven Soldiers miniseries, this Flashpoint spinoff casts the monster as a Superman-style inspirational archetype, heading up the WWII-era Creature Commandos. In this case, though, after single-handedly defeating Hitler, he runs afoul of the military’s next supernatural-soldier project, and … well, it’s just the first issue; it’s mostly prologue. Very entertaining stuff, though, as you might expect from the high concept of “monsters fighting Nazis.” Now carry that into the present, add a healthy dose of paranoia, and you’ve got the makings not just of a diverting three-issue miniseries, but most likely of a promising ongoing series come September.

As it happens, another monsters-fighting-Nazis miniseries started this week, the American Vampire spinoff Survival of the Fittest. Written by the busy Scott Snyder and drawn by the fabulous Sean Murphy, it too is a good introduction to what should be a fine four issues. Our protagonist is Felicia Book, able literally to sniff out vampires (among other things) thanks to her late father’s encounter with AV‘s head villain, Skinner Sweet. Her back story is contrasted against that of Cash McCogan, himself the father of a vampire-infected child who wasn’t as lucky as Felicia. In turn, they’re both part of a secret anti-vampire society that’s uncovered some potentially game-changing information. Anyway, this first issue lays out the world of American Vampire pretty efficiently, mostly through Felicia’s encounter with a newspaper editor who’s been unwittingly drawn into the vampires’ plans. AV:SOTF is therefore reliant on its own paranoid perspective, and that almost spoils the plot before it even gets started. (If Felicia and Cash succeed, the series pretty much loses its reason for being.) However, Snyder and Murphy combine for a no-nonsense, tight-lipped, unflinching mood which makes the reader want to saddle up with Felicia and Cash regardless of the outcome.

Finally, I know Birds Of Prey will continue after Gail Simone leaves, and with current regular artist Jesus Saiz to boot, but this week’s issue #13 (drawn by Diego Olmos) is solid evidence it won’t be the same. This time it’s Black Canary and Dove versus Junior, with the rest of the Birds taking on various henchmen, just to get out of Junior’s headquarters alive. Like Saiz, Olmos’ work is clear but moody, and he has good layout and pacing skills. Naturally, Simone knows these characters so well by now, they spring pretty much fully-formed from her scripts. Whether it’s Black Canary trying to figure out how to hold off Junior while still ministering to Dove, or Huntress and the Question playfully renewing their partnership, the dialogue rings true and the plot proceeds from their motivations. If these are the last few issues of Birds Of Prey I read for a while, it’ll be because they can’t get much better.

Brigid Alverson

Black Butler

I was really disappointed when I read the first volume of Black Butler. I liked the idea of combining an action story, an attractive hero with superpowers, and a Victorian England setting with touches of refinement. I didn’t care at all for the execution, though—I thought the art was sloppy, the story was nearly incoherent, and the side characters, three clumsy servants, were so terrible that they really marred the book. Despite what I think, Black Butler has consistently made the New York Times manga best-seller list—this week there are two volumes on the list, vol. 1 and vol. 5. So, thinking maybe I was missing something, I went back and read the last four volumes, which include a Jack the Ripper story arc that is… incoherent and overacted. I guess there’s no accounting for taste, but the extreme popularity of this series continues to elude me.

Much more pleasing was Kevin Keller #1, the first issue of Archie Comics’ Kevin Keller mini-series. Kevin is re-introduced to the readers, and the fact that he is gay continues to be treated in a matter-of-fact way. This first issue includes his account of how he came out to his parents and his desire to pursue a career in the military. All this is handled in a very idealized way, but that’s Riverdale for you. And there’s a goofy segment about a pie-eating contest gone wrong as well.

Kim Thompson

My reading this past few weeks has been heavily influenced by a trip to Scandinavia to attend a Norwegian comics convention.

The Devil's Star

(1) Jo Nesbø’s latest thriller, The Devil’s Star, which I picked up in Copenhagen (in Danish; I thought it would be more faithful to the Norwegian original than the American translation) and which succeeded in making the endless flight back (three stopovers) much, much shorter. Creep-out bonus: Two of the characters meet in the Edvard Munch Museum in Oslo in front of the same painting my wife and I had just stopped at just three days earlier.

(2) The first book of the complete works of Jan Lööf, a Swedish cartoonist whose Felix is a great classic, sort of like a cross between V.T. Hamlin and Kim Deitch, which I’d never had a chance to check out before and which is genuinely amazing.

(3) Xeroxes of the entire upcoming volume of new short stories by the Norwegian cartoonist Jason, Athos in America, which he handed me in Oslo and I am now pretty much the only person in the world to have read—the perks of being a publisher.

(4) An amazing book of illustrated memoirs by the great Norwegian cartoonist Olaf Gulbransson (whose life was chronicled in the graphic novel Olaf G., easily one of the best new European graphic novels of the new millennium), given to me by its Norwegian publisher.

(5) Geniet (“The Genius”), a fascinating new biography of Lars Von Trier which I was reading even as that Cannes controversy erupted, and which shows that he is one genuinely fucked-up dude in addition to being my favorite living (although apparently barely) movie director. Skaal!

I Killed Adolf Hitler

Comics College is a monthly feature where we provide an introductory guide to some of the comics medium’s most important auteurs and offer our best educated suggestions on how to become familiar with their body of work.

With a few notable exceptions, most European cartoonists have a tough time getting noticed by U.S. audiences. That’s definitely not the case, however, with this month’s Comics College entry, the Norwegian artist John Arne Sæterøy, better known to most American readers by his pen name, Jason.

Why he’s important

Well, for starters, he’s just so consistently great. Since his U.S. debut in 2001, Jason has produced 15 books, with nary a drop in quality. More to the point, he’s been able to use and play with a lot of familiar genre cliches — movie monsters, the big heist, the man accused of a crime he didn’t commit — and make them seem fresh and inviting.

That’s largely because his characters are usually grounded in a strong emotional reality. What often drives them are not simplistic ideals about right and wrong but love, longing, guilt and anxiety, the same stuff that drives most of us. What’s especially fascinating about his work, though, is how he’s able to convey all these roiling emotions with such a placid, minimalist style. His characters rarely register anything other than a placid indifference to their surroundings, yet simply though context and some exquisite pacing he’s able to ensure the reader is fully aware of what’s going on behind those animal faces and pupil-less eyes. Anyone interested in learning about timing and tempo in comics to should be studying Jason’s comics.

Where to start

Hey, Wait was the first book that introduced America to Jason and it’s an extremely good book, but at this point I think I Killed Adolph Hitler serves as a better introduction as it’s more indicative of the artist’s interests and overall style. A lot of his familiar tropes can be found here: the blend of sardonic wit and affecting emotional drama, an awkward and occasionally one-sided romance and a playfulness with familiar genre tropes, in this case the time travel paradox. It also happens to be one of his best and most iconic works so far.

From there you should read

Hey Wait

As I mentioned, Hey Wait ... was Jason’s first book to be published on North American shores. The stark, heartbreaking tale, which shows how a ugly childhood tragedy affected the  knocked many readers for a loop and even if if it doesn’t suggest the directions his work would later take it still packs a strong emotional wallop. Keep a box of tissues handy.

One of my personal favorite Jason books is The Last Musketeer, which puts noble swordsman Athos in the modern world, dissolute, but willing to face off single-handedly against a horde of Martian invaders. It’s a clever, frothy riff on classic adventure tales that nevertheless manages to tug your heart strings on the last page.

I’m also partial to The Left Bank Gang, a Reservoir Dogs-style thriller that re-imagines the modernist authors Hemingway, Joyce, Pound and Fizgerald as cartoonists who have to turn to robbing banks in order to pay their bills. A sly comment on the financial vagaries of working in comics? More than likely. A sharp riff on a familiar genre? Definitely.

In case you haven’t caught on yet, Jason is rather partial to crime stories and noirish thrillers, a fact evidenced by Why Are You Doing This, a Hitchcockian tale about an ordinary man who is framed for a murder he didn’t commit. And, of course, he finds one woman who believes in his innocence and is willing to help him. It’s a credit to Jason’s considerable talents that he’s able to create such a memorable story out of such familiar material.

Further reading

The Left Bank Gang

Jason is one of the most talented “silent” storytellers currently working in comics, a fact evidenced by the book Shhhh, which collects a number of wordless stories that vary from the humorous to the tragic, most of them involving a decidedly nonplussed bird-man.

You can also witness his pantomime skills in such books as Meow Baby, which collects a number of early gag strips, most of them involving well-known movie monsters like Dracula; Tell Me Something, a tale of love on the run; You Can’t Get There from Here, a tale of obsessive love that just happens to involve Dr. Frankenstein and his monster; and The Living and the Dead, a zombie/romance story. A couple of these books are out of print, but the good news is Fantagraphics has compiled all four of them into the hardcover collection Almost Silent.

For his fourth book, Jason opted to adapt a 1909 detective story by Stein Riverton entitled The Iron Wagon. It’s a rather rather gripping, if somewhat familiar whodunit, perhaps most notable for its uncharacteristic verbosity. Sadly, this book is long out of print, but Fantagraphics recently packaged it with Hey, Wait and Shhhhh in the recent collection, What I Did.

Jason loves to take a familiar genre or theme and give it a odd, character based twist. He does so, for instance, in Werewolves of Montpellier, about a schlub of a jewel thief who disguises himself as a werewolf to hide from his crimes, only to inadvertently come across the real thing. The true meat of the story, however, isn’t the supernatural angle, but the main character’s relationship with his next-door neighbor, a lesbian he’s deeply in love with.

Isle of 100,000 Graves

For his latest book, Isle of 100,000 Graves, Jason teamed up with the writer Fabien Vehlmann for his first collaboration. The story follows a little girl who, through the help of some pirates, travels to a mysterious island run by, well, executioners, in the hopes of finding out what happened to her father. Despite the extra hand behind the drawing table, Graves displays all the wit and charm of Jason’s previous works and fits in perfectly with the rest of his ouvre.

Ancillary material

Those who want to see what Jason’s stories look like when he draws honest-to-goodness people should check out Pocket Full of Rain, which collects a number of early short stories and strips, most of which find him experimenting with a variety of styles and influences. If you want even more background information on the artist, track down a copy of Comics Journal #294, which features a lengthy interview with him.

Avoid

Of the five stories in Low Moon, two are excellent, two are “meh,” and one is decidedly lackluster. A lot of cartoonists would kill for a final tally like that but considering Jason’s overall track record, that makes Low Moon easily the weakest book in his bibliography. That doesn’t necessarily mean the book is to be avoided — those two stories are rather excellent after all — but it might be advisable to save that particular book for last.

Next month: George Herriman

The series has had a rather remarkable and distinguished run since its inception in 2005. In addition to featuring work by such notable cartoonists like Jim Woodring and Gilbert Hernandez, it’s served as a publishing venue to highlight the work of up and coming artists like Laura Park, Tom Kaczynski and Sara Edward-Corbett, as well as introduce American readers to work by notable European creators like Emile Bravo and Sergio Ponchione.

As a memorial of sorts for the anthology’s oncoming demise, I thought I’d attempt to put together a quick list of my own favorite stories from Mome. This was a tough list to put together actually, and there are a number of names I feel a bit guilty for leaving off, but I’m sure you all can duly chastise me for my omissions in the comments section.

1) Wally Gropius by Tim Hensley. Mome serialized a number of lengthy tales in the past six years, but as good as many of them were, none were as inspired as Hensley’s oddball ode to the teen/humor comics of yesteryear. Truly one of the most unique comics to come down the pike in however many years, it showed how Reynolds’ original ethos of giving new cartoonists a venue to get their work in front of readers could bear brilliant fruit. (I reviewed the book here and interviewed Hensley here, if you want to know more about it.)

Mome Vol. 7

2) At Loose Ends by Lewis Trondheim. Anytime you can get someone of Trondheim’s stature and talent in your anthology, you’ve already got me reaching for my wallet. This is especially the case when you’re translating something like At Loose Ends, Trondheim’s farewell essay/midlife crisis of sorts, where he approaches middle age wondering how he can continue to keep his creative juices flowing and produce good work in his declining years and whether he shouldn’t just give up on cartooning altogether. It’s a rather insightful, frank and funny look at the toll drawing funny pictures can take on your psyche and easily one of the best things Trondheim’s done (at least that’s been translated so far).

3) Seven Sacks by Eleanor Davis (Vol. 7). Davis is an incredible talent, an artist seemingly capable of tackling any type of story, be it folk tale, children’s story, or horror. Sacks hints at the latter as it focuses on a riverman who ferrys across a number of gruesome monsters on their way to some sort of strange gathering. And each monster carries with him a rather bulky and squirming sack that contains … rabbits? Maybe? It’s one of the most haunting things Davis has ever done and one of the stories I’m constantly reminded of when I think of how Mome gave young artists a chance to shine.

Mome Vol. 13

4) The Veiled Prophet by David B (Vol. 4). As acclaimed as David B’s work has proven to be here in North America, a short work like the Veiled Prophet wouldn’t be easy to publish as a stand-alone story in today’s graphic-novel heavy climate, so kudos to Reynolds, Kim Thompson and company for making the effort to translate this haunting story, a cautionary fable about a cult religious leader who stirs up revolution and in ancient Asia. If you missed it, the good news is that it will be included in the forthcoming David B. collection, The Armed Garden.

5) Satelitte CMYK by Dash Shaw (Vol. 13). Shaw contributed a number of great short pieces to Mome, many of them collected in the book The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D., but this one, about a space station with different levels, each one getting its own color scheme, is probably my favorite. In particular I love its sci-fi trappings, the way it doesn’t fully reveal its secrets until the very end and its inspired use of color. I don’t know if it’s the best thing Shaw’s ever done, but it’s the best thing he ever did in this anthology.

6) 5:45 a.m. by Al Columbia (Vol. 11). I almost went with one of Killoffer’s submissions for this spot but ultimately decided upon Columbia’s wordless story, one of the creepiest and most frightening things to run in Mome, and this an anthology that frequently featured the work of Josh Simmons. A mere four pages long, Columbia offers glimpses into a rather disheveled and seemingly empty home early in the morning before coming upon the ugly punchline, and then finally pulling back and forcing us to completely re-evaluate what we’ve seen before. It’s a typically grim entry for Columbia that, while perhaps less gruesome than his Pim and Francie material, is no less unsettling.

Endnote: At the risk of plugging my stuff so much, I feel I should note I interviewed Reynolds about Mome last year at the old Comics Journal website.

The Arctic Marauder

The Arctic Marauder
by Jacques Tardi
Fantagraphics Books, 64 pages, $16.99

Based on what’s been translated in English so far, it seems as though are two kinds of Jacques Tardi books. The first is the dark, grim and gritty type, best represented by books like the wonderful but harrowing It Was the War of the Trenches and the steely-eyed noir West Coast Blues. The second is what I’d dub (rather awkwardly, because I can’t for the moment find better terminology) his goofier, more tongue in cheek style, best seen in the Adventures of Adele Blanc Sec series (and, to a certain extent, the satirical You Are There).

The Arctic Marauder, Fantagraphics’ latest entry in their Tardi line, easily fits in the second category. It’s a wickedly sly take on classic turn-of-the-century pulp adventures that nevertheless manages to both tweak and evoke those stories. It is, in short, a blast to read.

In many ways Marauder, which was originally published in French in 1974, points forward to the Blanc Sec series, which he would start in ’76. Like Blanc Sec, it is very clearly designed to remind readers of the type of fantastic fiction of the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly the work of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, though Marauder in particular probably owes quite a bit as well the Fantomas, Dr. Mabuse type of pulp villains that ran rampant through European novels around that time.

The story involves young, fresh-faced Jerome Plumier, who, while navigating the Arctic Ocean, comes across a icy, abandoned ship perched on top of an iceberg, just before his own vessel mysteriously explodes. One hospital recovery later, he’s searching for his missing scientist uncle, who may or may not have something to do with all of these ships blowing up in the Arctic, not to mention the mysterious old lady who keeps following him around and shooting strangers in train compartments. Could there be some sort of vast conspiracy at work? (Answer: Yes.)

Tardi writes all of this as if he was getting paid by the exclamation point. The book’s nameless narrator throws as many 50-cent adjectives out there as possible, while asking rhetorical questions like “Why are we always so disappointed in the ones we love?” If the prose were any more purple, it would bruise.

But as much fun as the overwrought text is, the art is the book’s main draw. Each page is laid out in an ornate art nouveau fashion, with circular panels, rounded corners and  symmetrical patterns giving off the languid, fluid style of the fin de siecle era. Long, narrow panels dominate the page, to add a sense of scale, particularly when icebergs, ships or ornate, villainous hideouts are involved. In order to best evoke the woodcut engravings of the era, Tardi used scratchboard style, drawing in the main characters and then using a variety of knife and comb-like tools to carve out the backgrounds. Apparently it was such an arduous chore that he swore never to do it again, but the effect here is magnificent. Marauder looks quite unlike any comic you’ve read before.

Whatever problems the current comics marketplace has (and there are plenty to be sure), I continue to be amazed and grateful that it can (after all these years) accept an artist like Tardi and a quirky book like Arctic Marauder into its fold. I hope you’ll join me in welcoming its arrival.

The Man Who Grew His Beard

Like you, I’m all a-twitter about the release of those Carl Barks books from Fantagraphics later this year. (you are a-twitter, aren’t you?) Not to mention Craig Thompson’s Habibi, Paul Pope’s Battling Boy, Chester Brown’s Paying for It and that Grant Morrison Multiversity mini-series. And, hey, maybe we’ll even see the first volume of Pogo! Yep, by any yardstick, it seems like 2011 promises to be another year of really great releases.

But, even beyond the big-name titles and huge company crossovers, there are a number of comics and graphic novels arriving in stores this year that warrant further attention. They may have not have garnered much of your notice, since they’re not attached to a well-known creator or license or come from overseas. Here then, are six such books, all due this year, all of which I’m willing to bet good money aren’t on your radar, but should be. As usual, be sure to note any books you’re excited about but haven’t generated much buzz yet in the comments section.

1) The Man Who Grew His Beard by Olivier Schrauwen (Fantagraphics). If you’ve had the lucky opportunity to read Schrauwen’s My Boy, or perused his work in the anthology Mome, then you’ll know this Belgian artist is the real deal — a true, utterly unique and frequently inspired cartoonist who draws upon century-old cartooning styles (McCay, Outcault) to create something contemporary and frequently bizarre. This is the first American collection of Schrauwen’s work and I’m really excited to see him reach a potentially wider audience. Actually, I’m just excited to read more of an artist I’ve only been able to catch in dribs and drabs.

Psychiatric Tales

2) The Adventures of Herge written by Jose-Louis Bocquet and Jean-Luc Fromental and illustrated by Stanislas Barthélémy (Drawn and Quarterly). Not to be confused with the biography by Michael Farr, this is a somewhat fictionalized, truncated account of the Tintin creator’s life, ably illustrated in the ligne claire style by Stanislas (as he’s usually known). It was originally translated for one of the final volumes of the late, lamented Drawn & Quarterly anthology and, as a big Tintin fan, it’s nice to see it be collected into a book. I don’t know if there’s more material to the book than what D&Q initially released several years ago, but even if that’s not the case, I’m more than happy to become familiar with this book once again.

3) Psychiatric Tales by Darryl Cunningham (Bloomsbury). I’ve really enjoyed reading Cunningham’s thoughtful look at different types of mental illnesses and his experiences working in a psychiatric ward and am very happy to see them collected in book form and released on these shores. I expect this to make a lot of “best of” lists come December.

4) Lychee Light Club by Usamaru Furuya (Vertical). North America hasn’t seen much of Furuya’s work translated in English, apart from the release of Short Cuts a number of years back. That drought seems to finally be ending. Viz released the first volume of Genkaku Picasso last year, and now Vertical plans to bring the one-volume Light Club to our shores. The book is about a group of nerdy boys who create a powerful machine to help them find the most beautiful women in the world, only to have everything go wrong. It all sounds delightfully subversive and strange, which is how I like it.

Lucille

5) Lucille by Ludovic Debeurme (Top Shelf). If you follow the Eurocomics scene at all (and no points against you if you don’t), this title may have caught your eye, as it won the René Goscinny Prize and the Angoulême Essential Award back in 2006 or so. It’s about two psychologically damaged people who bond and run away across Europe together. Eurocomics expert Bart Beaty wasn’t too crazy about it, but I’m intrigued enough by the concept and small samples I’ve found online to want to check the book out when it arrives in stores in April.

6) Garden by Yuichi Yokoyama (Picturebox). Yokoyama’s no stranger to American readers. His 2008 book Travel won a good deal of acclaim and interest among a certain segment of alt-comix and alt-manga fans. Still, I was completely unaware that PictureBox was going to release his latest 328-page masterpiece until publisher Dan Nadel mentioned it in our year-end round-up. Do I have any idea what this book is about? Not a clue. Am I still going to get it anyway the day it hits stores? Oh yeah.

The Zabime Sisters

The Zabime Sisters
by Aristophane
First Second, 96 pages, $16.99

The Zabime Sisters follows a day in the life of three girls who live on the Caribbean island nation of Guadeloupe. That description will, I suspect, cause many readers to assume that this is a book heavy in political and social import, as we’ve become come to expect any graphic novel set in or focused on a culture that’s not specifically North America or Eastern Europe to be some harrowing tale of life lived under a harsh totalitarian regime, poverty, colonialism, or some other real-world horror. But Zabime Sisters is not that book at all.

If there’s any other comic it resembles, it might be the Aya trilogy, published by Drawn & Quarterly. Like that series, Sisters avoids simple, negative assumptions about race and culture to tell an easily identifiable story without sacrificing period details. At the same time, however, it avoids Aya’s soap opera stylings in favor of something more naturalistic and meandering.

From 'Zabime Sisters'

In fact, it more or less avoids any plot whatsoever. Summer vacation having officially begun, the book follows the three Zabime sisters as they spend the day exploring their neighborhood, playing in the nearby creek, climbing trees, meeting up with friends and getting into (or narrowly avoiding) trouble. They and their friends and acquaintances gossip, worry, threaten and offer advice. A potential, much-discussed fight at the schoolyard between the local bully and an unknown kid is the only object of suspense that ties the book together. Like a lazy summer day, Sisters seems content to simply follow the children wherever they happen to wander to and not push them in one direction or another too hard.

And at this point you might be thinking “Oh no, not another nostalgia-fueled, sun-dappled, Hallmark tear-stained potrayal of childhood, thank you very much.” But you’d be wrong again. Not that the Zabime Sisters doesn’t indulge in a bit of nostalgia — it’s clear Aristophane had a lot of affection for his cast and that he’s drawing upon his own experiences here — but it isn’t trapped or weighed down by it either. Any potential wistfulness or simpering sentimentality is handily dispensed with by Aristophane’s sharp observation of how children interact, think and behave.

From 'The Zabime Sisters'

The key is the omniscient narration, which frequently clues us in on the characters’ various emotional states and trains of thought while the action transpires. As a result, we discover a lot about the individual cast members — not just the sisters, but virtually every character, to the point where the book feels less about the three girls than it does about the group of kids as a whole. Aristophane’s narration picks up on their insecurities and fears (the bully, for instance, really a bit of a coward who just wants to prove himself) and thus, underscores the casual cruelty the children inflict on each other. The children in Zabime display an all-too-familiar ignorance, by which I mean not that they’re stupid or uneducated, but that they seem blithely unaware of the sort of influence and repercussions their taunts and insults and rumors they spread have. Significantly, only one boy seems to have the awareness to stand apart from the fray, and he chides one of the sisters for stealing mangoes and her callousness towards a younger child.

It’s telling perhaps that, except for the Mother in the beginning of the book, there are no adults anywhere to be found. They are much discussed and feared and little understood, but they are not present. Perhaps to compensate for their absence, the children in Zabime are often seem attempting to behave in what they believe are adult ways — a lot of their actions are obviously mimicking adult behavior — but like many kids they seem unsure and hesitant about how to best do so, and tend to mimic the bad behavior more often than the good.

I’ve spent a good deal of time talking about the story and themes of Sisters but not very much about the art. Which is a bit shameful of me as the art is an integral, perhaps the most essential part of the book. Employing a dry brush technique, Aristophane fills his panels with slashes of thick black ink in a manner that at first seems hurried but upon closer detail reveals a good deal of care and consideration. The way he is able to convey a worried look or the detail on a dress from a collection or rough, slashing lines is nothing short of astonishing. His splotchy panels, filled with foliage and background details, constantly threaten to become overcrowded or too busy but never do. This is one of those book that draws impressed gasps upon first opening.

This is the only work by French Aristophane that’s been translated in English so far. It’s also the last work he completed before dying in 2004. It seems a tragedy that it took this long to get his work overseas (Sisters was originally published in France in 1996) not to mention that someone of his artistic caliber was lost to us so soon. Hopefully the release of Sisters in America will draw more interest in him and his work. This is a deeper, more thoughtful book than first glance or a one-sentance summation can suggest. It’s too knowing, too heartfelt and too honest to be dismissed.

Tintin in Tibet

Comics College is a monthly feature where we provide an introductory guide to some of the comics medium’s most important auteurs and offer our best educated suggestions on how to become familiar with their body of work.

Welcome and happy holidays to all our Comics College readers. Today, as a post-Thanksgiving treat to you, we’ll be talking a lengthy look at the career of one Georges Remi, better known by his pen name, Herge, and by extension, his most famous creation, the plucky boy reporter Tintin.

Why he’s important

There are only a handful of cartoonists in the world who have had as enormous and significant an influence in comics as Herge has. There’s Osamu Tezuka, Charles Schulz, Jack Kirby and then there’s Herge. The incredible popularity of the Tintin books and their considerable influence on European comics really cannot be overestimated. Artists like Joost Swarte and Yves Challand built their entire careers upon Herge’s style, creating what eventually would be known as the “ligne claire” school. Herge to Eurocomics is sort of like the Beatles to rock music: You’re either influence by it, or you work in opposition to it. There’s no in between.

Plus, Herge’s work remains utterly charming and enthralling after all these decades. Though ostensibly created for younger readers, the Tintin books are some of the few all-ages books that can be read by adults and children alike, without any embarrassment on the former’s part (well, there are one or two exceptions, but we’ll get to that later).

Where to start

The Complete Tintin

Though he did create other characters, Herge is primarily known for Tintin, the crime-solving reporter (even though he mysteriously never files a story) who, with his cadre of friends and little dog Snowy, brings down a rabble of drug pushers, spies, counterfeiters, dictators, warmongers and general bad guys.

Tintin’s American publisher, Little, Brown, has, in recent years, made the decision to package three Tintin stories together in one, much smaller, hardbound volume apiece. It’s not a move I support, quite frankly, as I feel it doesn’t give the reader the chance to fully appreciate Herge’s detailed, precise art in the manner it was initially designed for. Instead, I’d suggest picking up the individual, traditional BD-sized books, most of which are still easily available online. The hardcover volumes are admittedly a cheaper option in the long run though.

Having disparaged the hardcover volumes, I will admit that the Collector’s Gift Set, which collects all of Tintin’s color adventures (minus Tintin in the Congo, more on that in a while) is pretty spiffy looking. Still, at $150 a pop, it’s might not be the first purchase a Tintin neophyte might want to make.

So, all that being said, if you’re going to stick with the hardbound volumes and you don’t want to blow your whole wad on the complete set, then I recommend starting with Volume six, which contains what most Tintinologists consider Herge’s finest moment, the lovely Tintin in Tibet, in which our hero treks to the Asian land in search of a friend he believes has survived a horrible plane crash, even though all evidence points to the contrary. It’s a touching tale about sacrifice, faith and friendship and shows the amount of research and detail the author put into his books. You’ll swear after reading he actually visited the country even though he never did.

Volume 6 is also recommended as it contains The Calculus Affair, one of my personal favorite stories and, I think, a rather archetypical tale, and also quite good Red Sea Sharks.

From there you should read

Explorers on the Moon

Volumes three, four and five contain some of the best and most memorable Tintin tales, including the two-part Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure (in which Tintin searches for buried treasure and we meet the deaf genius Prof. Calculus); the Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun (in which Tintin heads to South America and meets up with some ancient Incans); and the excellent Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon (which contains some rather accurate predictions about space travel). These books are about as good as Herge ever gets.

From there I’d go back to the earlier volumes one and two, which feature Tintin minus his usual boozing companion Captain Haddock (and, in several cases, before Herge became more culturally aware and devoted himself to researching the places he wrote about). Of special note here are The Blue Lotus, which marks a turning point in the artist’s attitude towards other cultures and the world around him. Also good are The Cigars of the Pharaoh, Lotus’ prequel, The Black Island, which finds him in Scotland, and King Ottokar’s Scepter, a great bit of escapist fun involving an attempted coup d’etat in Eastern Europe.

Conclude your Tintin reading with the final volume, number seven, which contains the Castafiore Emerald, Flight 714 and Tintin and the Picaros. The latter two verge dangerously close to self-parody and you get a sense Herge was growing tired of the formula and perhaps even feeling a little trapped by his creation. Emerald, however, is a great little drawing room comedy, with Tintin staying at home for once.

Further reading

The Calculus Affair

Herge was working on Tintin’s 24th adventure when he died. The preliminary script, notes and sketches were collected into the posthumous Tintin and Alph-Art. While the tale, which has the boy reporter rooting out corruption in the modern art world, is sadly uncompleted, it provides about as good a glance at Herge’s working methods and inspiration we’re ever likely to get.

In his early days, Herge serialized his stories in magazines in black and white and only later collected and printed them in color volumes, often redrawing the stories from scratch. Last Gasp has released a number of these early, original black and white versions in English and they provide a nice point of comparison regarding Herge’s considerable artistic growth during this time. So far they’ve released Tintin in America, Cigars of the Pharaoh, The Blue Lotus and Tintin in the Congo (more on that in a minute). I’m still waiting for an English version of Black Island, which I understand is quite different from its final volume.

Last Gasp also published Tintin’s first adventure, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. The art is crude and minimal and shows little of the charm and flair that would later typify Herge’s work. It’s mostly worth noting because it’s Tintin’s first adventure and because it shows just how far he came.

The upcoming Peter Jackson/Steven Spielberg film is not the first time Tintin has appeared in the cinema. A number of attempts have been made before, including some odd-looking live-action films. One of the best might be Tintin and the Lake of Sharks, which, though not anywhere near as strong as the core canon, is closer in tone and style to the source material than anyone would have a right to expect. While you can’t easily get a copy of the film on DVD, you can score an English “book of the film” on the Internet easily enough.

Ancillary material

Tintin: The Complete Companion

Books about Herge and his famous creation abound, many of them released by (you guessed it) Last Gasp and several of them by or edited by one Michael Farr. Farr wrote a biography of Herge, entitled (appropriately enough) The Adventures of Herge, Creator of Tintin (you may also want to check out The Man Who Created Tintin by Pierre Assouline).  He also penned Tintin: The Complete Companion, which goes book by book through the series and compares different versions as well as provides valuable information on influences, origins and research methods. Tintin and Co., meanwhile, takes a closer look at Herge’s cast of characters.

For my money though, the book to check out is Art of Herge: Inventor of Tintin by Philippe Goddin, which offers scores of early sketches, advertising art, original art, paintings and other illustrations that throw a new light on the man and his work. There are two volumes out now, and I’m hoping a third is on the way soon, as they’ve proven to be quite invaluable.

Avoid

There’s a reason why Tintin in the Congo has (apart from the afore-mentioned Last Gasp release) never been published in America. It’s horribly racist. Indefensibly so, with the boy reporter schooling a bunch of big-lipped, dull-witted savages in basic arithmetic and the glories of occupying power Belgium (he doesn’t treat the surrounding wildlife much better either). It’s an especially egregious attitude considering how Belgium treated its colony and the people who lived there in real life. Herge was deeply embarrassed about the book (which he blamed on his own youth and naiveté), and his later work reveals a great sensitivity and sympathy for other races and cultures that belies Congo’s simple-minded bigotry. Still, it’s not a book for newcomers — especially those with an easily offended sense of moral outrage — to tackle on first blush. In fact, it’s probably a book best saved for last.

Next month: Charles M. Schulz

The Bulletproof Coffin

Welcome to this week’s edition of What Are You Reading. JK Parkin is off enjoying the APE convention this weekend, so I’m filling in. Our guest this week is blogger and critic Sean Witzke. To find out what he and the rest of the Robot 6 staff have been reading this week, just click on the link below.

Bruce Wayne -- The Road Home: Batman & Robin

Tim O’Shea: Bruce Wayne: The Road Home. What a crappy title. It actually sounds like an Elseworld title for a universe where Bruce Wayne does infomercials. And yet, I bought some of the books this week. In a sense you get double the story as their dueling narrators in each tale (Bruce Wayne “journaling” his observations, as well as typically the lead character [Red Robin; Batgirl] internal monologuing along). Oddly in the Batman & Robin one-shot, Vicki Vale is the other narrator. I think the Batgirl installment is the most interesting read, given Bruce Wayne and Stephanie Brown’s convoluted history. Of all the Bat books, I’m an oddball and enjoy Red Robin and Batgirl the most. I am enjoying the Wendy Harris/Proxy character development. But am the only person disturbed that DC editorial seemingly plotted out the paralysis of a character seemingly to create an Oracle Jr? Back to the story though, I imagine Cassandra Cain fans (no she does not appear, she merely comes up in a conversation) are not going to be very happy with the latest plot reveals in terms of her career path. But who knows, maybe Cain will be head of HR in the new Batman Inc. series.

Paul Cornell’s Knight and Squire 1 (of 6) is the most enjoyable introduction issue I’ve read in a good long while. Even though it’s set in the DC universe, thanks to the fact it’s a British-based comic continuity, Cornell has essentially a vastly underutilized set of dynamics with which to build stories. And yet, Cornell covers a hell of a lot of ground in this first issue, set the entire time in a pub – a very special pub. Jimmy Broxton’s art is an acquired taste for me, but by the time I got to end of th eread, his style grew on me a bit. In some ways, Cornell’s approach on this book is slightly reminiscent of Alan Moore’s goofy style on Supreme (and to a lesser extent on some of his America’s Best Comics series).

Roger Langridge and Chris Samnee bestowed us with another issue of Thor: The Mighty Avenger (issue 5 for those of you counting) this week with the introduction of Langridge’s take on Namor. What superlatives can I use? Hell, I’ve run out. In a sense, it seems that Langridge has chosen to make Jane Foster be almost the co-lead on this book (Thor would not succeed in this issue were it not for Jane’s help). It’s a great use of the character and I hope parents, looking for a good story with a strong female lead for their children to read, take notice of this series.

I was sorting through some old comics the other night and found some gems. Consider the following:

Tim's pile o'mags

– The Comic Reader 209 (March 1983): featuring Mike Tiefenbacher’s review of the Comic Buyer’s Guide as it transitioned from Alan Light as editor to Don & Maggie Thompson; the final installment (150 strips in total) of Captain Kentucky by Don Rosa
– Amazing Heroes 48 (June 1, 1984): featuring “Ace” MacDonald on Mister X (Dean Motter, Paul Rivoche; Gilbert, Mario and Jaime Hernandez) and Mark Waid’s piece “The Bizarro Papers”
–Amazing Heroes 167 (June 15, 1989): featuring a look at Batman at Fifty, which included a Kevin Nowlan cover, as well as a Rich Morrissey essay on Gardner Fox and interviews with Dick Sprang and Charles Paris.

Life With Archie

Brigid Alverson: I returned from New York Comic Con with an abundance of comics, and the first ones I turned to were the Life With Archie magazines (the November one isn’t out on stands yet, but you could get it at the Archie booth). The stories keep the basic simplicity of Archie comics, but the characters are now in their 20s and dealing with a different set of issues than their high-school avatars. The result is something that doesn’t really read like an adult graphic novel — the characters are too broadly drawn, the storylines too simple — but still has plenty of narrative pull. In other words, I couldn’t put the damn things down.

I’m also enjoying the first volume of IDW’s Library of American Comics compilation of Blondie. I was really curious to read this, as I had heard that when the strip started out, Dagwood was a wealthy playboy, Blondie was a penniless flapper, and Dagwood’s family violently opposed their match and cut him off when they were married. This turns out to be true, but the situation is played more for laughs than for drama, and the gags are pretty weak at first. The comic goes better as it goes on, though, and it makes a fascinating period piece. I particularly enjoyed Brian Walker’s essay on the history of the strip, especially the elaborate marketing campaign that preceded the launch. It’s clear that the strip was well thought out from the beginning, and the promotional materials pictured in the book are really cute.

Like A Dog

Chris Mautner: I didn’t read this recently, but I realized that I never spoke up about Like a Dog, Zak Sally’s collection of early short stories that Fantagraphics published last year. More to the point, I don’t think very many other people spoke up about it either, which is a a shame. Sally’s doing great things in Sammy the Mouse, his oversized Ignatz series, and this collection of early comics shows he didn’t just spring up out of nowhere. Bitter, haunting stories like “The Man Who Killed Wally Wood” and “The War Back Home” show a striking willingness to ask uncomfortable questions about himself and the world around him. His account of Dostoyevsky’s time in prison is a real highlight and I think marks a turning point in his storytelling ability. And the fearless, self-lacerating essay he provides at the end brings the book to a near-perfect close. Really, it’s a tight little collection.

I really like Drew Weing’s art style, his big feet, round bodies and sausage noses really hits my cartooning sweet spot. That being said, I had a bit of trouble with Set to Sea, a slight, fitfully amusing chapbook about a would-be poet who gets shanghaied and ends up becoming a sailor. At the risk of spoiling the whole story, my gripe with the book is its central idea that true art can only be made after having truly “lived,” or in this case, gone through a traumatic experience. It’s a line of reasoning that I see cropping up in stories every so often but it’s not one I’m particularly enamored of. Great art comes from working relentlessly on your art and having talent and insight and little else. The notion that the protagonist could only become great through a life-changing experience rings as more thn a little false to me.

Sean T. Collins: Over on my personal blog, LOVE AND ROCKTOBER is still going strong. This week I read through the Jaime Hernandez Love and Rockets collections Perla La Loca, Penny Century, and Ghost of Hoppers. Taken together they’re as powerful a depiction of what it means to become an adult as any you’re likely to find in comics. Click the links for full reviews!

King City #6

Sean Witzke: Well, the two big comics that I’m really looking for every time I step into a comic shop these days are Brandon Graham’s King City and David Hine and Shaky Kane’s Bulletproof Coffin. Bulletproof Coffin is kind of the gonzo version of Jack Staff – it’s about the revival of old comics that are long dead, and its just as well drawn, but it’s not a nostalgia-fest. Its full of comics-within-comics where EC comics, Kirby, Steranko, and ’90s Image all kind of happened at once to create this alternate comics history. It has this real disturbing undertone to it too, as if the fantasies and fake comic stories were both coming from the same disordered mental state that the character is going through. It’s messed up in all the right ways. King City is Brandon Graham’s almost-completed (one issue left!) science fiction epic. Well, epic isn’t the right word, but it’s close. Graham has spent the second half of the series compounding background detail and letting the plot slowly burn. Story-wise, issue #11 he finally lets things jump off and huge events happen – but more importantly in #10 and #11 Graham is upping his own game. There are things here I’ve never seen before, like the panel snapping in half along with the guy who says it. My favorite moment is when the sniper says about his clone “I love that guy”. I know its been hard for a lot of people to track this book down, but there might not be a trade coming, so its worth seeking out.

Along the same lines, I was just rereading James Stokoe’s Won Ton Soup 2, which is kind of a of middle ground between The Mighty Boosh and Alex Nino’s old Heavy Metal style. There’s a lot of uncomfortable talk about a Sex Bear and exactly what you need to do to take care of one, and the two leads get so high at one point that Stokoe gets exhausted and leaves two pages blank. Its the rare comic that is more about how much fun the artist had drawing it than the book itself. Every frame is just about how jazzed he was that he could have the story of blood cells in Johnny Boyo’s stomach lining. Stokoe’s Orc Stain is great too, but its been almost impossible for me to find a copy of the fourth issue.

I’m still going through some of the books I picked up at NYCC, my favorite of which is Darwyn Cooke’s latest Parker book The Outfit. Which has my favorite opening splash page in a comic this year, of Parker ducking a bullet as it bounces right next to his girl’s head, the caption reading “When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed.” The rest of the book, with its intuitive brilliance of how Cooke uses shot choice and his magazine-illustration style jumping, is just a victory lap.

I finally grabbed Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit book 2, which is the funniest shit I’ve read in years. MF Wilson and Nathan Fox’s Flourescent Black too – its huge, and Fox has leveled up since his work on Dark Reign Zodiac. He draws less like Paul Pope now and more like himself, and these pages vibrate in neon. But, the best purchases of the con were at the Alca booth which had exorbitantly expensive and gorgeous french albums – I grabbed the the latest Arzak: L’arpenteur by Moebius and Meka: Outside by Morvan and Bengal. I’ve wanted a physical copy of Bengal comic for years, ever since I had a friend tip me off to his website 5 years ago. The books are in French, but who cares when they look this good, right? Bengal’s pages (and colors) are fluid and massive, and his characters are actually expressive – you really don’t need to know what they’re saying, and much of this book is two characters arguing. Moebius’ new Arzak – well I’m sure you’ve heard, it’s the best looking thing. His new style (and how many people at Moebius’ age are dropping a new style this late in their career) is immaculate, and maybe shows a little bit of an urge to one-up his stylistic godchildren like Frank Quitely and Ladronn.

Also while we’re on Jean Giraud, I’ve finally just read Moebius’ Airtight Garage for the first time in color. It’s a completely different experience, I read scans of it in black and white (and in French, which I can’t read) a few years ago, but in color it’s not just a great comic but a perfect comic, Moebius draws in a dozen different styles, improvising from short to short, from his Blueberry style to psychedelia to cartoony minimalism to full-on superhero fight sequences. In black and white, it was nice and interesting, in color it feels like Moebius is branching out even further. I know that Incal and Arzach and his Silver Surfer are all more famously accepted as great, but this is my favorite thing Moebius has ever drawn. The ending is so perfect, I won’t spoil it, but I can’t imagine that story ending any other way.

Black Kiss #1

Finally, I’ve been rereading Howard Chaykin’s Black Kiss, which is brilliant and gross and the best thing Chaykin ever did. It’s one of my favorite comics, and I’ve been rereading through stuff I consider classics. Black Kiss is almost impossible for me to write about though, and I don’t know why. I guess its because any time you quantify it, well you’re talking about a book where in the first issue the main action is prostitute pretending to be blind so a priest thinks its okay to sleep with her in a confessional booth. Chaykin is here doing the best pages of his life, with a story that’s like Brian De Palma’s Body Double but a thousand times better and more complicated, with hermaphrodites and vampires and repeating pages where you just stare at an answering machine (one thing that still gets me is that back when I was a kid, Chris Bachelo was sneaking in tributes to Black Kiss into his Uncanny X-Men run with that shot of the answering machine). This is great comics the same way that a lot of all this stuff is, because Chaykin was drawing whatever the hell he thought was great and doing it so well you didn’t care. All of these guys – they love this stuff and you can tell.

Usagi Yojimbo: Return of the Black Soul

Welcome once again to What Are You Reading? This week our special guest is Paul Maybury, creator of the webcomic Party Bear. His work can be found in Comic Book Tattoo, various volumes of Popgun and 24seven, and, of course, the full-length graphic novel Aqua Leung. Be sure to check out the sketches he shares.

To see what Paul and the rest of the Robot 6 crew have been reading lately, click on the link …

*****

Sean. T. Collins

Exit Wounds

I took last week off from WAYR last, so I’ve got fully half a dozen comics to share with you–well, my bloviating about half a dozen comics, at least. Click the links for full reviews…

Neighbourhood Sacrifice by Steph Davidson, Michael DeForge, and Jesjit Gill: Dark, down and dirty newsprint zinemaking from a trio of intriguing artists.

The San Francisco Panorama Comics Section by various: Uneven but nonetheless enjoyable broadsheet-format comics from an all-star line-up assembled by McSweeney’s.

Paper Blog Update Supplemental Postcard Set Sticker Pack by Anders Nilsen: A minicomic and assorted other goodies featuring never-before-seen strips from one of alternative comics’ best writers and biggest talents.

Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan: Strong art dukes it out with predictable writing in Modan’s much-acclaimed Israeli drama.

Prison Pit: Book 2 by Johnny Ryan: Johnny Ryan goes as far as he’s ever gone.

The Witness by Hob: The artist also known as Eli Bishop serves up an existentially chilling minicomic about the death and afterlife of a dinosaur. No, seriously.

Brigid Alverson

Market Day

I picked up James Sturm’s Market Day from the library, having seen a preview of it online. I thought it was well done but lacked a satisfying conclusion. I liked the main character, and the way the story followed the monologue in his head. I really liked the fact that although this was a story about a traditional society, Sturm didn’t fall back on the standard folk-tale stereotypes. His characters are a bit neurotic and often deeply thoughtful, reflecting on the world around them and their own place in it. At the same time, the internal monologue we are listening to is an interesting one: Mendelman, the rug-maker, observes the world around him, thinks about how to translate it into rugs (in a way that only a graphic novel could show), experiences rejection, indignation, despair, and camaraderie, and reflects on the meaning of his life and his place in the world. It’s a wonderful, human portrait, and it is beautifully drawn with a limited palette and a simple but effective line, but having followed Mendelman through this day of upheaval and self-examination, I really wanted Sturm to finish the story, but it seemed to simply stop, rather than end.

The folks at Norton sent me a galley of Sophie Crumb’s art book. It was a bit of a tough sell—what parent doesn’t think their child is a genius? So I guess if you’re Robert and Aline Crumb, you get to show that to the world? Actually reading the book tempered my indignation quite a bit, however. First of all, from the pictures and descriptions, it’s clear that Sophie was indeed ahead of most kids her age. (Almost as advanced as my children! Hey, Norton, where’s my book?) And while her drawings are still little-kid drawings, she comes up with fairly complex relationships and stories within them. I ended up liking it quite a bit, although in the end, it suffers from the fact that it is a sketchbook—the drawings don’t have the finish of a completed work of art, and they don’t knit together into a single narrative, like a comic book. They just float on the page, and like any sketchbook, weak drawings share space with strong ones. For me, the best part of the book was the end, where she did combine pictures and text into something like a narrative, and I’d like to see more of that—I could see her doing a killer comic about life with her baby and husband. But those little-kid pictures sure are cute.

Chris Mautner

A Home for Mr. Easter

A Home for Mr. Easter by Brooke A. Allen — A rollicking, fast-paced affair from a relative newcomer. Allen could stand to tighten up her line a bit — there were times I had a bit of trouble figuring out what exactly was going on, especially in large crowd scenes with complicated backgrounds. That being said, she manages to keep her hero’s quest story moving at a fair clip without ever flagging once. And I liked how she had a rather unconventional heroine (a rather large, possibly mentally handicapped teen) as her lead. All in all, it’s a solid debut book and I plan on keeping an eye out for what Allen does next.

Booth by C.C. Colbert and Tanitoc — A fictionalized retelling of the day’s leading up to Lincoln’s assassination, from the perspective of his assassin. This was alright — I’m not sure Tanitoc’s impressionistic art style fits the material — I had trouble frequently trying to tell who was who and what they’re relation was to each other. It didn’t help much that Colbert’s script assumed too much on the reader’s part and didn’t really spell enough out for history dimwits like me. Bottom line: If you want to learn about Lincoln’s death via comics, Rick Geary’s version is a much better account.

Tim O’Shea

Roger Stern writing Captain America, I just get giddy reading that phrase. Add to the mix it’s the present day James Barnes Captain America–with Nick Dragotta drawing the 1940s era Bucky scenes and Marco Santucci on the modern day material and it gets even better–with the first installment of a four-part miniseries, Captain America:Forever Allies. Dragotta has a Darwyn Cooke vibe to his art that’s just perfect for Stern’s writing. My one gripe–Marvel’s penchant for reprint back-ups as a justification for the $3.99 price tag: instead of the 100th reprint of Cap’s origin, how hard would it have been to reprint one of Stern and John Byrne’s Cap tales instead.

Gorilla Man #1

Gorilla Man: Jeff Parker’s Ken Gale origin miniseries continues to hold my interest. My one question: in a world where Deadpool seems to publish on a weekly basis–why is there not room for a Gorilla Man ongoing monthly, eh?

Avengers Prime: how much do I cherish Alan Davis artwork? I will endure the tiresome writing of Brian Michael Bendis in Avengers Prime just to see the incredibly executed layouts by Davis (and equally exquisite inks of Mark Farmer).

For all of us that enjoyed Paul Cornell’s Marvel work, we get one last treat with this week’s Spitfire one-shot. Cornell clearly has a bigger Spitfire/Blade story to tell (which we get a little taste of in this adventure) and someday I hope he gets to tell it.

I get the impression that if given the chance, Secret Warriors 18 scribe Jonathan Hickman would write an Untold Tales of the Howling Commandos miniseries. In this issue, he has the Commandos swapping war stories in a manner that says to me this guy understands Marvel history and character dynamics in a way that other current Marvel writers wishes they could.

Sweet Tooth 12: Jeff Lemire makes good storytelling look too easy.

iZombie 4: artist Michael Allred has every right to disagree with me, but the two-page of two characters walking through a mental landscape disguised as Egypt is the best sequential scene he’s pulled off in a damn long time. And I love that writer Chris Roberson snuck a punchline or two in the lush scenery.

Writer Jim Shooter and artist Bill Reinhold’s first issue of Magnus Robot Fighter is a little rushed and uneven in some parts (kudos to Dark Horse for reprinting the Russ Manning’s original first issue for contextual reference, it helped frame the modern day update in a sense), but I’ll likely be back to check out issue two. I wish Reinhold would tone down the cheesecake factor of the female leads, I get that it’s emulating Manning’s approach to a certain extent, but I wonder if it might alienate potential female readers.

Writer Jim McCann continues to hold my interest with the third issue of Hawkeye and Mockingbird. I particularly liked McCann’s pacing (with David Lopez’s art) in the opening where Hawkeye retraced the shooting that ended the last issue. Taking a CSI approach (on a slight level) with Hawkeye is a nice approach that makes sense for the character. He understands the physics of a shot more than most heroes, given his skill set.

Paul Maybury

First on my list, I finally tracked down a copy of Peplum by Blutch. I’ve literally been looking around for four years. While this isn’t the cover on my copy, I was floored by this image years ago, and remains one of my favorite comic covers ever:

Peplum

It’s almost a crime that more of Blutch’s work isn’t translated here in America. For now I’ll be slowly translating as I go while drooling over the imagery.

2 ) Fluorescent Black by Nathan Fox and MF Wilson
Nathan sent me a pdf of this a while back and I was excited to see this totally perverse and imaginative art with an interesting Biopunk story being published by Heavy Metal. Nathan is one of those guys that came into comics a little later, but has the work ethic and drive of a modern master. I finally got to pick up the hard cover in San Diego and man, this is one beautifully printed book. It doesn’t hurt that there’s a nifty pinup by yours truly in the back.

3) Peepo Choo by Felipe Smith
I was a huge fan of MBQ from TokyoPop, and was sad to see it end and then learn that Felipe was moving to Japan to work for Kodansha. I mean, super excited for him, but super bummed that I wouldn’t be able to read it. Thankfully, the fine folks at Vertical have blessed us with an English translation. It’s very much a spiritual successor of MBQ with some great characters like Milton, an American kid and hopeless Otaku who does some really weird Peepo Choo dance to communicate with people.

4) Usagi Yojimbo, Return of the Black Soul by Stan Sakai
The only book I’ve consistently followed my entire life. This volume mostly deals with the evil spirit known as Jei. We see Usagi, Gen and Stray dog team up again to track down a bounty. I love Stan’s pacing and whimsical story telling. The last three volumes really remind of me the feeling I got from the original Fantagraphics published volumes. I was lucky enough to receive this totally awesome Aqua Leung drawing by Stan a few years ago when I sat next to him at a show in Austin. Sorry, I just have to show it off:

5) Crogan’s March by Chris Schweizer.
Yes, Oni publishes Scott Pilgrim, but they also publish another fantastic series. The Crogan series is about a couple of kids learning about their famous family tree and the valuable lessons all of their stories tell. One of the few intelligent all ages series out there, I couldn’t recommend this book more. Heck, I even drew fan art for it. There are currently two volumes out, with a third on the way.

by Paul Maybury

6) Old City Blues by Giannis Milonogiannis
This recently wrapped up and is an amazing read from start to finish. It has a weird Snatchers (a very cool Sega CD game) vibe, with loose gritty art that fits the story perfectly. I hope this guy never stops making sweet sweet comics. Go read it now over on his site and give him a pat on the back. Webcomics can be a pretty thankless job, and it’s always nice to feel acknowledged by readers.

Adam Strange Archives Vol. 1

Welcome to another round of What Are You Reading. With JK Parkin in the midst of San Diego Comic-Con madness, I’m taking over the WAYR duties for this week. Our guest this week is blogger, noteworthy critic and Newsarama contributor Matt Seneca.

Find out what Matt’s been reading (he’s got a long list), and be sure to include your own current reading list, after the jump …

Batman Beyond #2

Tim O’Shea: After discussing the first issue of Batman Beyond with one of our readers, Lockjaw, a few weeks ago, I decided to pick up the second installment in the six-issue miniseries. I should not have been surprised, but DC editorial has decided to inject Hush into the Batman Beyond future continuity. Any appearance of Hush elicits an automatic groan from me, but I have to give Adam Beechen credit for summarizing the convoluted Hush backstory in a succinct manner. Plus I’m a sucker for grumpy elderly Bruce Wayne. I’ll likely be back for next issue.

Double shot of Jeff Parker this week. I’m almost too sad about the series’ cancellation (and a tad bored by the 3-D Man storyline [sorry Parker]) to enjoy Atlas 3. But note I said “almost.” Ken Hale/Gorilla Man is too great a character, no matter what, to not enjoy the story. I am happy to say I enjoyed Thunderbolts 146. In fact, it’s likely the
first time I’ve completely enjoyed the team dynamics, banter and general plotlines since the era when Kurt Busiek wrote it (yea, it’s been awhile since I enjoyed the series).

Dear IDW, I cannot thank you enough for the $2 oversized prelude to The Outfit — featuring Richard Stark’s Parker in The Man with the Getaway Face. Darwyn Cooke is a damned genius when it comes to layout, I could just look at his art and forget the words. But even his lettering style (which combined with the art) evokes an alluring Alex Toth vibe to it, which just absolutely demands my attention and respect. October 2010 cannot come soon enough, in terms of this project.

I never expected Gail Simone to be able to return Welcome to Tranquility, but she has. Considering how the first series ended, I was really thrown (as Simone intended) by how she mixed up the status quo on this series. And she continued to shake things up throughout this first issue, much to my delight. I’ll be back next issue to see if what I read was the truth or a major deception. Either way, I’m hooked, again. I just hope the emoticon-faced character upgraded to an iPad …

Last, but definitely not least, I want BOOM to do more comics like CBGB. The book is a blast to read. I absolutely cracked up with how artist Marc Ellerby handled celebrity likenesses in the story. I know it’s unlikely to sell well, but every indie fan who has understandably ignored past BOOM! work should do themselves a favor and check this
out. Here’s who is involved: Kieron Gillen (Phonogram), Rob G (Couriers), Sam Humphries (MySpace Comics), and Ellerby (Love The Way You Love). Featuring a cover from Jaime Hernandez (Love & Rockets). After reading Humphries for the first time here, I look forward to seeing more from him.

Super Maxi-Pad Girl #3

Michael May: Though you probably know from the title if Super Maxi-Pad Girl is your sort of thing, I’m finding that my opinion about it has softened somewhat since the first couple of issues. Creator Daniel Olson sent me the third one and I’ve either gotten used to the concept enough to relax about it or it’s genuinely less gross. Not that it’s completely toned down. I mean it’s still a superhero metaphor for menstruation, which makes it twenty-four pages of jokes about bodily fluids. But no one gets hit in the face with a used pad in this issue and some of the characters are starting to endear themselves to me. Especially the cute little Papyrus and Cotton, the ancient, sort of Golden Age versions of Super Maxi-Pad Girl who show up in a storyline about time-travel.

Meanwhile, Neal Shaffer and Luca Genovese’s The Awakening is an intriguing mystery, but the conclusion is rushed and leaves too many questions unanswered. It says “Volume 1,” so maybe there’s more to come, but it’s unsatisfying on its own.

Sean Collins: As I write this it’s Saturday evening and my power has been out for three and a half hours. On a hundred-degree day. Beating the heat with comics!

Scott Pilgrim, Vol. 6

Please click the links for full-length reviews of the books I read this week…

Batman R.I.P., by Grant Morrison, Tony S. Daniel, and Lee Garbett: A blast of a book, with wonderful creepy villains and Batman at his crazy best.

King-Cat Comics and Stories #69, by John Porcellino: A study in what comics do well, using the fewest lines possible.

Scott Pilgrim Vol. 6: Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour, by Bryan Lee O’Malley: The comic of the hour, deservedly so.

Brigid Alverson: Sam Costello sent me the print edition of his Split Lip webcomic, and I’m enjoying it, if one could be said to “enjoy” stories that deliberately induce discomfort. Let’s just say they are very effective. It’s an anthology of short horror stories, all written by Costello and illustrated by different artists, and the ones I have read so far all rely more on psychology than blood and guts, although insects and spiders have figured largely in the first few stories. The writing does have a few hiccups—there were parts of the stories that weren’t entirely clear to me—but the overall effect is very impressive. The stories are available for free on Costello’s website, but the book is a smoother read and the large format and lack of distractions help immerse you in the stories.

Twin Spica

Also this week I read the second volume of Twin Spica, a manga about a young girl who dreams of being an astronaut. In this volume, Asumi, the heroine, is 15, and she is just starting her astronaut training course at the academy. This story of young students striving to succeed, complicated by personality conflicts, is a standard manga
trope, but  creator Kou Yaginuma really breathes life into it, with characters and situations that feel genuine, and a nicely detailed art style that brings the setting to life. This is a slim volume, but I felt like I got a satisfying chunk of story plus a few bonuses. It ends on  cliffhanger, though, so now I can’t wait for volume 3.

Matt Seneca: I’m in a place right now where I hardly ever “read” comics if I’m not reviewing them.  Unless the book’s an utter masterpiece, panel to panel to page to page to cover to cover can get to be a slog for me.  Currently I’m finding a lot more enjoyment and reward in “looking at” comics than actually “reading” them.  As such I’ve started to keep a big pile going at all times, maybe a foot tall of hardcovers and magazines and board-and-bagged issues and whatever else.  Books cycle in as I acquire them, cycle out as I finish or get bored with them.  Sometimes I’ll take in one page of everything over the course of a few open minutes.  Sometimes I’ll take as long as I need to blaze through a book just to have absorbed it and be able to move on.  Sometimes something hooks me and I leave the rest of the comics behind until I’ve wrung every last drop out of it.  No matter what, the Pile is always there.  I like to think of it as an apartment tower to live in, each floor composed of a new fictional world, a different friend on every level.  Let’s take a walking tour.

Valentina

Hands down the biggest book for me right now is Valentina, the Italian maestro Guido Crepax’s ode in brush and ink to the beautiful woman who sluices through his panels like honey through open fingers.  In my opinion it’s absolutely the most important work not to have been resurrected by the Golden Age of Reprints — lushly drawn, supremely engaging comics that have as much human heart to them as formal mastery.  Crepax’s art is a kind of proto-Frank Miller looking mix between Jim Steranko, Alex Raymond, and Andy Warhol at his pop-art best.  By turns vigorously cartooned and stunningly illustrated with what might be the best ink line the medium’s played host to, it’s a comic with the stuff of real life to it, whose movements through time and space give off the silent, bright intimacy of great art or dreams.  The psychoerotic history of a young photographer named Valentina Roselli, it’s by turns action-packed, contemplative, sexy, and difficult — but always limitless, always pushing at the very furthest boundaries of what comics can do, and more often than not expanding them.

NBM published two English-language volumes of Valentina through their Eurotica imprint a while ago, but Crepax drew hundreds and hundreds of pages of the book (including a lot of the best ones) that remain untranslated.  There are many opulent Italian-langauge Valentina hardcovers that the confirmed fan can have pretty cheaply with a little looking; probably not the way to discover the book, but the best for just enjoying it.  If you’ve ever had a really powerful experience with foreign film you’ll know what I mean.  Looking at Crepax’ panels through the watery screen of a language barrier gives the images an almost hypnotic power, a dreamlike resonance that’s as close to unforgettable as comics come.

If you want Valentina for beginners, though, a few translated stories were serialized in Heavy Metal magazine between 1981 and ’84.  By that point in time the bastion of porn-y Eurocomics is generally considered to have passed its prime, but the good issues from the early ’80s are still better than just about anything you’ll get off the new racks.  Along with Valentina you can find  formalist shorts from Moebius, the great post-post-Kirby work of Yugoslav master Enki Bilal, achingly gorgeous sci-fi meanderings by Francois Schuiten, Richard Corben comics… and more than that, HM had a real atmosphere to it during this period.  It’s both bizarre and appropriate to turn a page of Jim Steranko’s vastly underrated Outland onto a review of the new John Cale record.  You can do a lot worse than digging through the Heavy Metal back issues at your local shop.  The stuff is only lost to time if no one reads it.

Solo #8

Of course, that sentence applies to just about any brilliant, uncollected comics series out there — for example, DC’s Solo.  You’ve probably heard of this mid-2000s experiment in art-comics from the more adventurous of the Big Two publishers, but even if you were reading it, odds are you stopped at some point.  The book got canned for poor sales with two completed issues left unpublished, one of the greater shames of the last decade in mainstream comics.  The quality fluctuates from issue to issue as different artists take the book’s reins to do whatever they want with the DC library for 48 pages, but it’s between like the four- and five-star levels, with every one offering up bounties worth of eye candy and usually more than one good story to read.  I most recently went through Teddy Kristiansen’s issue; the Danish painter is a guy who doesn’t get talked about a lot, but he’s an absolute master of the form, searing his pages with rough, bleak textures, spidery lines, and Cubist forms moving through giant, enigmatic cities.  He’s a hell of a writer, too, the brusque, emotional self-penned stories collected in his issue showing up even Neil Gaiman’s contribution.

His art also draws a remarkably straight line to the next book down in the Pile: Frank Santoro’s epic, big-hearted Storeyville, originally published as a tabloid-sized comics newspaper and given a massive deluxe hardcover by Picturebox a few years ago.  This thing never goes back on my shelf for long; it’s a primer in a unique, lovely form of comics art, crystallizing a beautiful moment in every panel while still rushing headlong through a full-steam story that reads like George Herriman adapting Mark Twain.  Each giant page is like a canvas that talks: there to read as fast as you can the first few times, then to savor the soft colors, the expressionistic pen marks, the compositions of forever more.  Both a look back through history into the gritty, pulp-mill Americana that spawned the comics medium and a signpost for tomorrow’s cartoonists to follow, it’s inspirational in every way a comic can be.

Same goes for Frank King’s Walt & Skeezix, a comic that isn’t a million miles from Storeyville in tone or execution.  The difference is that while Santoro looks back into yesteryear, King’s work is yesteryear itself: a great, long-unheralded comic reprinted for the audience of connoisseurs it always deserved.  While Santoro gives us a blurred, smeary, half-remembered splinter of the past, D&Q’s thick, lovingly designed Skeezix hardcovers are the next best thing to taking a history class.  King’s warm, wistful, robustly cartooned daily strips chronicle the real-life-speed development of a family around bachelor Walt and his foundling son Skeezix.  It’s probably the best work of character development in comics history, as King adds an up incident a day for years, creating human beings so fully rounded that before long the reader feels like part of the family too.  Walt & Skeezix is much more than a character piece, though: with its massive scope and quiet, observant tone it feels as much about the passage of time itself as the sprawling cast’s daily lives.  By volume 4, the most recent in the series, a good decade of American history has gone by, and the reader’s been shown as much of the world people lived in during the 1910s and ’20s as what they ended up doing in it.

Evoking a real world, whether past, present, or future, is the highest goal of comics, and while few succeed in the naturalistic mode of King, many have taken up the challenge of contemporary family drama and tailored it to their own skill set.  Witness another D&Q reprint hardcover, last year’s mammoth, revelatory Complete Doug Wright. Wright was one of the many forgotten men of Canadian cartooning until this career retrospective reintroduced him to the comics world, but his work has lost nothing in immediacy or charm during its wilderness years.  This bountiful, generously sized book reprints enough of Wright’s commercial art to double as an impressive monograph, and even includes some top-notch biography, but we’re here for the comics — and the decade of Wright’s mischievous-kid strip Nipper collected here does not disappoint.  Inhabiting a space somewhere between the minimalist gags of Dennis the Menace and the aesthetically minded Canadiana of comics by Seth (who designed this book), Nipper flies by in passage after passage of mid-century modern design and youthful exuberance.  It’s laugh-out-loud humor material from beginning to end, but what stands out most is Wright’s way with a pen.  Inscribing every panel with a perfect blend of detail and simplification, master of a shorthand most cartoonists would kill for, Wright’s light, immaculate art stands tall with that of any other master of his time period.

Travel

And speaking of midcentury modern, as well as master cartoonists from the ’50s and ’60s, the constructed, elegant end of Silver Age superhero art finds its answer to Kirby’s rough bombast in the work of Carmine Infantino, particularly the Adam Strange Archives.  Delicate and so dated they seem genuinely alien, Infantino’s space-age collaborations with writer Gardner Fox and inker Murphy Anderson are a strand of hero comics that died with their era, but provided just as much to follow up on as the pathos and slam of the early Marvel stories they sat next to on the newsstands.  Fox’s scripts are deft and considered, with more thinking and conceptualizing to them than mainstream comics would see again pre-Alan Moore, while the art is simply incredible.  Graceful and full of color, Infantino brings as much design and visual imagination to his pages as any pre-Steranko action artist, giving Fox’s quaint, Ray Bradbury-ish ideas a sunny beauty and convincing verve while Anderson brushes an illustrative luster over everything.  They haven’t made hero comics like these in over forty years, but heaven knows why.  Hermetically sealed by a history that’s passed them by, the best Adam Strange stories are visions of a more beautiful future that sadly never came to pass.

As to futures that still have a chance, you can’t do any better than checking out comics by Yuichi Yokoyama, without a doubt the most advanced and forward-looking comics artist working today.  Yokoyama draws like a robot, or maybe a Martian who’s been told about the comics medium but never actually seen examples of it.  His art is all straight black lines, zip-a-toned artificiality, postmodern architecture and jutting angles, with no room for any human warmth or feeling.  Even the Japanese characters that form his panels’ sound effects double as repetitive design elements.  Two things tend to happen in Yokoyama’s stories: nothing (men spend 200 pages taking a train ride from point A to point B) or everything (an entire city is destroyed and its inhabitants murdered by a fully-armed “ladder truck”).  Either way, something is always in rapid motion through the sterile, imposing beauty of Yokoyama’s landscapes, and there is always the prediction of a future for both comics and the world in general, often one too alien to fully understand.  If you’re interested in the big picture, in what comics will look like in a hundred years rather than twelve months, check out Travel and New Engineering.  They may absorb you, they may scare you, they may amuse you, they may even bore you, but you’ll be marked by them no matter what.

New edition of The Purple Smurf

The Smurfs are back! What, you didn’t know they ever left? Apparently the little blue guys have been out of print, at least in the U.S., for years, but NBM/Papercutz is bringing them back, with the first volume, The Purple Smurf, set to debut in August. (Incidentally, the Urban Dictionary has two definitions of “The Purple Smurf,” and neither of them is obscene. Go figure.)

Most people experienced the Smurfs as animated cartoons, rather than as comics, but that’s the origin — they first made their appearance in a Belgian kids’ comic in 1958. Jog, who broke the news (on a tip from Pedro Bouça), has more commentary, including the note that the purple Smurfs were actually black in the original comic; apparently the symbolism was too heavy-handed for the folks at Hanna-Barbera, who re-colored them in the animated cartoon.

NBM/Papercutz does a nice job when they bring European comics over here, except for a tendency to shrink them too much. At first glance, these look like full-size albums (like Tintin), but the type makes me think they are going to be smaller. The Amazon listings don’t give a trim size.

Hey Princess

Today we wrap up our look at Top Shelf’s upcoming Swedish Invasion with a preview of Hey Princess by Mats Jonsson. The book is a confessional autobiography centering on Jonsson’s arrival into the big city and his desperate attempts to find love and become hip. Not necessarily in that order.

Our exclusive preview begins just as Mats has finally convinced the girl of his dreams to break up with her boyfriend and come out with him to a concert… after which she promptly disappears with the band’s lead singer to ‘hang out’ in his hotel room …

Continuing our-three part preview of Top Shelf’s upcoming Swedish Invasion line of graphic novels, today’s we’re offering a look at The Troll King by Kolbeinn Karlsson. Here’s the synopsis from the official page:

A dwarf falls into a river and is taken to a place beyond space and time. A carrot takes a bath and finds itself transforming. Two reclusive mountain men rejoice when their wish for children is granted, but their sons make a terrible discovery. And throughout all these tales, the spirit of the forest walks on… Welcome to the surreal world of The Troll King, by Swedish visionary Kolbeinn Karlsson. It’s a fantastic journey into the wilderness lurking right outside your town, brought to you by comics’ cuddliest Viking.

Sounds like my kind of comic! You can determine if you feel the same by checking out the preview after the jump.

120 Days of Simon

Last week (or thereabouts) Top Shelf announced The Swedish Invasion, a publishing campaign by the company to help North American readers become more aware of Sweden’s apparently abundant comic goodness by releasing a plethora of graphic novels from some of that country’s more notable talents this spring.

We here at Robot 6 are pleased as punch to present a preview of three of these upcoming works this week, starting with 120 Days of Simon by Simon Gardenfors.

Simon is Gardenfors’ chronicle of his trip across Sweden. I’ll quote liberally from the press release:

The 120 Days of Simon began when Swedish cartoonist/rapper Simon Gärdenfors left his home to spend four months on the road. The rules were simple: For 120 days he wasn’t allowed to return to his home, or to spend more than two nights at the same place. Otherwise, anything could happen… and it did.

This simple idea grew into an epic adventure across Sweden as Simon slept on strangers’ couches, visited an ostrich farm, ate a psychedelic cactus, practiced free love, received death threats, was beaten up by teenagers, got adopted by a motorcycle gang, drank obscene amounts of alcohol, and sacrificed his underpants to the Nordic god Brage. And that’s just for starters!

Apparently the book’s publication caused a bit of consternation in his home country. Anyway, the preview of Simon lies in wait after the jump. Look for previews of more Swedish comics from Top Shelf in the days to come.

]]> http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2010/02/preview-120-days-of-simon/feed/ 0 http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2009/10/what-are-you-reading-43/ http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2009/10/what-are-you-reading-43/#comments Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:00:01 +0000 Chris Mautner http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/?p=24736

Preventative Maintenance

Welcome to What Are You Reading. Our guest this week is none other than the highly esteemed Eddie Campbell, author of the autobiographical Alec series, as well as the mythological Bacchus and co-conspirator with Alan Moore on the acclaimed From Hell.

I had originally interviewed Mr. Campbell about a month ago in anticipation of the release of his whopping big Alec omnibus collection, The Years Have Pants, so this is more of a What Were You Reading than a What Are You Reading, but I nevertheless think you’ll be intrigued by his selection. Look for the rest of my interview with Campbell to show up here at Robot 6 either later this week or next.

Click on the link below to continue reading.

Brave and Bold #28

Tom Bondurant: After what seems like months of Essential Avengers (and assorted color reprints), I have reached a stopping point, having finished the Serpent Crown paperback last night. The next Essential volume was just solicited for January, so I’m glad for the break. “Serpent Crown” is probably as good a title as any for George Perez’s introductory arc, although it doesn’t much feature the Serpent Crown itself except as a plot device pitting the Avengers against the Squadron Supreme. In hindsight, of course, it’s hard not to chuckle at Perez starting his Avengers run with an arc featuring more than one Earth and a good bit of time-travel. Really, though, I think he grew as an artist with each issue. After reading “Celestial Madonna” last weekend (also written by Steve Englehart, of course), I appreciated “Serpent Crown’s” relative lack of complexity, not to mention its lack of reliance on arcane Marvel history. Speaking of which, while “Serpent Crown” does seem a little too proud of its many DC references, Englehart does a good job incorporating other books’ characters into the Avengers. Moondragon, the Beast, Two-Gun Kid, and Hellcat play off the regular Assemblers quite well.

Another thing about the Avengers: having read both “Celestial Madonna” and “Serpent Crown” apart from their respective places in Avengers history (and out of order to boot), I think these big Avengers arcs work much better in context. Avengers — at least in the late ’60s to mid-’70s — seems so invested in its various subplots (the Hawkeye/Thor/Moondragon subplot in “SC” comes out of left field if you haven’t been following along) that the big-event arcs exist almost as an afterthought. Quite different from the Justice League story formula, so naturally one of the Squadron Supreme makes a comment about it.

According to writer J. Michael Straczynski, this week’s The Brave and the Bold #28 (as opposed to that other B&B #28) apparently commemorates December’s 65th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge. That’s fine, but I don’t quite see much else justifying this story’s existence. It’s not a bad standalone issue — the Flash is thrown back to wartime Belgium, but he breaks his leg in the process and spends several weeks fighting Nazis alongside the Blackhawks. The main point of the story is that while “the Flash” can’t kill or carry a gun, Barry Allen can, and does, when he sees what’s at stake. That’s fine too. However, it takes away the main characters’ signature moves. (At no point within the story do the Blackhawks ever fly their planes, because they too have chosen to help the infantry.) JMS could have substituted Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, the Losers, or the Boy Commandos for the Blackhawks without missing a beat, and honestly that might have been an improvement. Likewise, Barry didn’t have to be thrown back in time — it could have been any number of DC characters. I know it’s only two issues into JMS’s run, but he seems to be deliberately avoiding ostensibly “wacky” match-ups (like Batman using the H-Dial) in favor of examining serious issues. I like serious stuff as much as the next guy, but if I get a Blackhawk comic, I’d like a “Hawkaaa!” or at least see some planes. Anyway, Jesus Saiz is turning out to be a good fit for this title, since his unassuming style works well for a variety of characters and situations.

Finally, James Robinson, Mark Bagley, and Rob Hunter take over as the new Justice League of America creative team with this week’s #38, and I have to say, I hope Blue Jay isn’t dead. (And if he is, I hope it doesn’t stick.) I’d like to think DC is finally turning a corner on the whole “kill off a nobody just to show we’re hardcore” thing. Also, I’m not particularly attached to Plastic Man, but he too suffers mightily for the sake of gritty realism. Other than that, I thought Robinson, Bagley, and Hunter turned in a decent issue, equal parts talk and action, which set up appropriate questions about the future of the JLA (which, of course, we know) without just marking time until Blackest Night and Cry For Justice had ended. The characters sound more natural here than they do in CFJ, and Bagley’s work also seems more lively here than it did in Trinity. His Despero in particular looks more dangerous, especially with Rob Hunter’s scratchier inks. I remain cautiously optimistic about this book, and this issue did nothing to change that.

Dread & Superficiality

Brigid Alverson: I’m all over the place this week with a couple of really offbeat comics. Dread & Superficiality is a collection of the comic strip of that name that ran from 1976 to 1984 in newspapers all over the country. It’s about Woody Allen. Somehow I managed to live through that entire era and never notice this comic. The book is a real labor of love, with an essay by the creator of the strips, Stuart Hample, an introduction in comics and text by R. Buckminster Fuller, and the strips themselves, many shot from the original art, complete with yellowed paper, blue-pencil marks, bits of tape in the margins, and scribbled notes. This makes the book seem more like a history book than a comic book; it’s as close as you can get to a primary source. Hample’s account of dreaming up the strip, pitching it to Allen, and mediating questions of taste and tone makes for interesting reading, and the strips hold up pretty well.

Speaking of history, Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel is a very convincing imitation of one of those pictorial-history books you can pick up on the bargain racks at Borders or Barnes & Noble. Only this history is fake: Guinan and Bennett have inserted their own creation, a robot named Boilerplate, into the great events of history, Forrest-Gump style. Everything in the book is either completely accurate or completely false, and they make no distinction between the two, which makes it an interesting and puzzling read. Boilerplate himself is a bit of a tragic figure, a robot designed to replace human soldiers and thus end the violence of war. Instead of achieving this noble aim, he and his creator, Archibald Campion, fell into obscurity until they were “discovered” by Guinan and Bennett. Boilerplate first appeared in one of their graphic novels and is the star of his own Web site, which is apparently convincing enough that a third of the visitors don’t realize it is a hoax.

And now for something completely ridiculous: Largo Winch in The Hour of the Tiger. This book was first published in France in the 1990s, but it has a super 70s vibe: globetrotting playboy millionaire, scantily clad women, big hair, bright colors. It’s a rescue adventure tale: Largo’s best friend, a dissolute Swiss photographer, is arrested in Burma on trumped-up charges and sentenced to hang. Largo has to get him out, which he does, using a combination of skill, quick thinking, helicopters, guerilla freedom fighters, and killer monks. This is the
fourth volume, but it stands pretty well on its own. Excellent escapist entertainment.

Beasts of Burden #2

Tim O’Shea: I was more disappointed in Brave and Bold 28 than Tom. The cover has the Blackhawks in planes. I genuinely bought the book based on the dynamic nature of the cover … not knowing that they never flew a plane in the entire story. So much of the book made next to no sense. How exactly did Flash break his leg — getting it caught in a snow drift? Um, OK. Dialogue has the Blackhawks acknowledging they had dealt with Golden Age heroes, who last I checked weren’t really gung-ho on killing people. And yet, they expect this Flash from the future to become a killing machine. And how about that rift that just sits around in the forest, that only Flash can enter at superspeed … once his leg heals … but fortunately it’s a rift that can patiently wait. I admire JMS’s desire to observe the 65th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, but the story he structured around the event seems really forced and clunky.

Underground 2 takes some interesting turns with the bad guys playing against the expectations that Jeff Parker tricked me into assuming (damn he’s tricky…) Steve Lieber’s use of silhouette on the story’s last page (And on the cover for that matter) is quite effective.

Beasts of Burden 2 has some hilarious dialogue (it is Evan Dorkin) counter-balanced with some damn creepy horror (perfect for late October).

Nick Bertozzi’s “To Catch a WATCHER!!” (imagine a Uatu as a stalker…) opens the latest issue of Strange Tales 2 (of 3) and is the quite possibly my favorite Watcher story ever. Perverse and goofy? Sure. But still enjoyable. But the highlight of the issue for me is diagram happy Matt Kindt’s Black Widow tale. Sweet Jesus, I can’t wait to see Kindt do more Marvel work. Just a snippet of the Black Widow’s narration while on a mission: “Every mission is a learning experience. Every scar is a mental note…Mental notes saying: ‘do not do that again.’”

Batman Confidential 35 is the final installment in The Bat and the Beast storyline. I don’t know if Peter Milligan has any ideas to explore the Beast character further, but I get the impression he might.

In non-comics reading, something I recently ran across (wish I could remember where) motivated me to track down a copy of Roger Kahn’s 2006 memoir Into My Own: The Remarkable People and Events That Shaped a Life. Kahn has written many great books, which he discusses in the book. But the most effective part of the memoir for me was when Kahn wrote about his late son, Roger, who committed suicide at the age of 23. Kahn noted in the intro that a friend advised him “such personal matters would be difficult to write; it turned out also to be joyous. For when I wrote about Roger throwing passes, scoring hockey goals, or just being a kid, he was alive again and at my side.”

Music Box #1

Chris Mautner: In this week’s Can’t Wait for Wednesday, I talked about the new one-shot Angel comic from John Byrne and how, even though it’s not really my cuppa tea, it shows an understanding of basic storytelling and downright readability that most comic book tie-ins can’t seem to muster.

A number of similar titles from IDW serve to underscore that point. G.I. Joe: Snake Eyes, for example, is a dull, tepid affair, that speeds along so quickly to it’s cliffhanger ending that it doesn’t stop to question the plausibility of it’s characters, or whether we know or care to know the characters at all. It doesn’t help that the artist’s “Japanese village” looks about as Asian as southcentral Pennsylvania. If this comic were any more nondescript, you could use it as wallpaper.

That Snake Eyes comic was at least partly written by actor Ray Park, one of the latest in the ongoing “celebrity who deigns to dabble in comics” type of nonsense we’ve been prey to lately. Another example of that is Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Music Box, which while not so awful as to work me into a rage, it nevertheless fails to engage on any sort of level, even as a dumb, “fun” read. Its creators (and I doubt Hewitt did more than OK her name stamp on this) are seemingly more interested in its premise than is characters. And considering its premise is a reheated Twilight Zone plot, that’s not a good thing.

And please, no dirty jokes about the comic’s title.

Even worse is Clive Barker’s Seduth, which is kind of surprising since Barker has written comics before and you think he’d know better. The thing is basically an excuse to throw a lot of trippy 3-D images at the reader, and yeah, the 3-D stuff looks nice, but I kind of was expecting some sort of story and serviceable art to go along with my red and blue glasses, not this incomprehensible, ill-thought-out Lovecraftian gibberish. This thing is a complete mess.

Grandville

Matt Maxwell: GRANDVILLE by Brian Talbot
A most curious book indeed. Minus the anthropomorphic characters and the steampunk setting, it’d be a fairly typical revenge/thriller with the lone detective Doing It His Way as he takes down the aristocratic villains who are manipulating politics and even history itself to enrich and empower themselves. Played out against a familiar backdrop (airships crashing into buildings, being blamed on terrorists/anarchists in an effort to foment war and fear) everything else is intriguing. There’s some sharp observations by Mr. Talbot, but to my reading, there’s a lot of somewhat obvious plotting (unless of course by transplanting 9/11 conspiracy theories into an utterly alien setting, Mr. Talbot is making a point about the universality of conspiracies themselves). After the astonishing ALICE IN SUNDERLAND, GRANDVILLE comes off as a lesser work. Mind you, it’s still plenty entertaining and might earn him some new fans in the steampunk cognoscenti, but it’s not the heart-stopping, inventive and engaging ALICE. However, that’s a pretty unfair comparison, given that ALICE is really in a class by itself. I’ll note that the packaging itself is beautiful and certainly attractive for the price point.

Working through the JH Williams/Greg Rucka DETECTIVE issues as well. Mr. Williams makes every script he draws look so very smart. The way he attacks a page is an absolute joy to read. Can’t comment on the story itself, as I haven’t quite gotten through it yet, but man, are these some beautiful pages to look at.

Preventative Maintenance

Eddie Campbell: The thing I’m reading right at this minute is Will Eisner’s PS The Preventive Maintenance Monthly, which was the army technical magazine he published for 20 years. It’s just been put online in its entirety by Somebody at Virginia University Libraries.

I’m even reading all the technical articles about firing pins and how to keep your jeep’s engine heads from freezing in winter. I’m still working out why exactly it is taking over my brain. The feeling has always been that Eisner abandoned creative work to drop out of the public view and do this “commercial” and client work, but I think PS mag contributed something useful and practical to the daily life of the soldier, and I’m surprised at how it is transporting me to another time and place. It’s made me seriously think about my own career. Have I wasted my life creating comic book stories? Is any of it of any use to the world? I feel a serious crisis of the soul descending upon me. Obviously if everybody loves Pants I will conclude that it does all amount to something after all.