Building Stories

OK, so after I posted my list of comics I’m looking forward to this year, my buddy David Ball was like, “Dude, what about Building Stories?” And I was all like, “Building the what now?” And he was all like “You know, man, Chris Ware, the thing he’s been serializing forever in stuff like The New York Times and Acme Novelty, etc.” And then I was like, “No way man, for realz?” And he was like “Totes, man.” And then he sent me this link and it’s totally true. New Chris Ware book comin’ atcha this autumn.

Did anyone catch this before? The Pantheon post seems to be at least three months old, but I don’t remember anyone talking about it beforehand.

Habibi is in, if you can call it a genre, the Arabian Nights genre. It’s borrowing from the tradition of 1001 Nights where one story folds into another and you lose sight of where you began. I was drawing from that book as a genre as if it were superheroes or crime noir, borrowing from a lot of the tropes of Arabian Nights and the bawdiness, the sensuality, the adventure, the violence, the religious aspects, the landscapes, the deserts, the harems.

— Craig Thompson, in conversation with CBR’s Alex Dueben, on his ambitious new graphic novel Habibi, which is set in a world shaped both by actual Islamic and Arab culture and an old-school, romanticized/exoticized Western vision of the same. As I’ve written elsewhere, Habibi isn’t really a book “about Islam,” as some of its PR makes it seem — it’s a book that uses Islam and the Middle East as a vector for exploring issues and obsessions close to Thompson’s heart, from religious texts to sexuality to art and design to simply drawing sweeping panoramic views of the desert. In that sense, his use of the term “genre” makes a good deal of sense, since like any genre artist might do, he’s using preexisting tropes as building blocks for his world.

But unlike superheroes, of course, Muslims and Arabs are real, and playing fast and loose with their culture and beliefs even in as knowing a fashion as Thompson is doing will not be without some controversy. The Muslim comics writer G. Willow Wilson offers a qualified defense of what Thompson’s doing in her review of the book:

Despite the fact that it contains a slew of clichés with which the Muslim community (especially the female half) has become very weary — underage marriage, harems, eunuchs, slavery, veiling, the imaginative fodder of the right wing — Habibi does not read like a book with an agenda. The orientalist tropes Thompson employs feel self-conscious; he deftly drafts them into the service of his protagonists’ emotional journeys as they are separated and reunited. This is not the usual titillating romp through the vices of a barbaric culture, after which the reader can close the book and thank God he lives in a civilized country.

Instead, the slave drivers and harem women feel like deliberate fictions, the purpose of which is to unpack universal human anxieties, primarily about the messy physicality of life and the permutations of love over time. It is not a comfortable read, but the discomfort stems from Thompson’s profound emphasis on the life of the body — the way pain, mutilation, aging, sex and pregnancy affects not only how we feel, but who we are.

Wilson goes on to say, however, that she feels that some of Thompson’s attempts to invert cliché get away from him. In that sense she’s confirming some of the concerns aired by readers in this discussion thread, who wonder if being aware of using a stereotype defuses that stereotype’s destructive power at all.

Of course, Wilson’s coming at the book from the position of a devout believer, which is an alien viewpoint to me no matter what the religion in question might be. “Reading the book,” she writes, “I reflected wryly that I should really have made wudu (ablutions made before Muslims perform prayer) beforehand, something I never thought I’d have to do before picking up a graphic novel.” This isn’t directed at Wilson personally, but man, am I grateful never ever to have to worry about that sort of thing. And in terms of addressing whether Thompson shows sufficient sensitivity toward Muslim beliefs, I’m torn between a desire to be respectful toward other religions and cultures, especially in the face of the increasingly naked anti-Muslim bigotry of certain elements in this country today, and my desire not to give a fuck about what any religion thinks I should or shouldn’t do. Perhaps that’s the real strength of Habibi: It’s an exceedingly lovely, exceedingly meaty book that’s interesting even in its problems and failures.

For a bit more on MetaMaus, check out this article in The Art Newspaper, and for a bit more on Spiegelman, stay tuned to his Facebook page.

But will he tell us what he had for breakfast?

Blankets creator Craig Thompson has just finished a new book, Habibi, which he describes thusly:

Sprawling across an epic landscape of deserts, harems, and modern industrial clutter, HABIBI tells the tale of Dodola and Zam, refugee child slaves bound to each other by chance, by circumstance, and by the love that grows between them.

At once contemporary and timeless, HABIBI gives us a love story of astounding resonance: a parable about our relationship to the natural world, the cultural divide between the first and third worlds, the common heritage of Christianity and Islam, and, most potently, the magic of storytelling.

Ambitious! The book is due out in September from Pantheon, but Thompson launched a Habibi website yesterday, with basic information and an amazing Process Gallery filled with pages in various stages of completion—sketches, pencils, inks—as well as a few photos of the creator in action. Stop by and check it out, and if you’re going to San Diego, well, surprise! Thompson will be there too.

Skullkickers

The San Diego Comic-Con runs kicks off with a preview night on July 20, then runs July 21-24. If you are a comics creator or publisher, and you’re planning to bring something new to the con — a sketchbook, a print, a graphic novel debut, anything! — then we want to hear from you. Drop me an email and let me know if you’ll have something cool on hand that attendees should know about. Feel free to send any artwork as well.

This time around we have panties from Pantheon (seriously), more Mimoco, word of an announcement by Dark Horse, plans for Viz and Arcana, several Hasbro exclusives and more. So let’s get to it …

Skullkickers creators Jim Zubkavich and Edwin Huang will be at the Image Comics booth #2729, selling hardcovers of the first volume of Skullkickers with an SDCC-exclusive cover. You can find more details here.

*****

by Craig Thompson

Pantheon Books will be at booth #1515, giving away MetaMaus buttons and … panties? They’ll also have the above poster by Craig Thompson, which he’ll be signing at the booth:

Pantheon Books will be at this year’s San Diego ComicCon (July 20-24), and we would love to see you there. We will be at Booth #1515.

We have two Pantheon authors joining us at ComicCon this year: Craig Thompson/HABIBI (onsale 9/20) and Chip Kidd/BAT MANGA!. Both will be appearing at our booth and on author panels.

Also, just a note that this year marks the 25th anniversary of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-Prize winning Maus, and in the fall Pantheon is publishing Spiegelman’s METAMAUS (onsale 10/4), a studied look at the genesis of Maus, accompanied by a DVD with never-before-seen panels, a home movie, and other objects relating to the original publication of Spiegelman’s groundbreaking original comic book. We will have METAMAUS buttons on hand for giveaway throughout the convention.

Finally, next spring, Pantheon’s sister imprint Schocken Books is publishing its first ever graphic novel: UNTERZAKHN (onsale 3/20/2012) by Leela Corman, a mesmerizing, heartbreaking story of immigrant life on New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century. In anticipation of this exciting release, we will be giving away women’s panties at the Pantheon booth, since, as some of you may know, the word “unterzakhn” is Yiddish for “underthings.”

Unterzakhn

*****

Previously I highlighted the Harley Quinn USB flash drive that Mimoco will have at the show. They’ve released more details about their plans, which also include SDCC-exclusive Flash Drives featuring Bossk, the reptilian bounty hunter from The Empire Strikes Back, and Emily the Strange:

They’ll also be hosting Emily the Strange creator Rob Reger, Harley Quinn voice actress Tara Strong and Billy Dee Williams, aka Lando Calrissian, at various times during the show. You can find all the details here.

*****

Viz sent out information on their booth activities, which include:

VIZ Media’s Booth (#2813) will be a hub of continual activity on the main show floor. The VIZ MANGA APP is the latest technological innovation for digital manga comics for the Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Fans that drop by the booth and show the App installed on their Apple device will receive a special free tchotchkie as a ‘thank you’ from VIZ Media while supplies last.

Video game fans will also want to be sure to check out playable demos for Namco Bandai’s NARUTO SHIPPUDEN: ULTIMATE NINJA STORM GENERATIONS, which will be released in Spring 2012, and NIS America’s new BLEACH: SOUL RESSURRECCIÓN, launching in August 2011.

Sunday July 24th is Kid’s Day at the VIZ Media booth. Young and older fans alike are invited to pose for pictures with Kon from BLEACH, NARUTO (Classic Version), Edamame from MAMESHIBA, and more. Visitors can also attend screenings of Episode 1 of the new VOLTRON FORCE anime series and stay for special free VIZ Kids samplers and product giveaways.

Don’t miss other exclusive VIZ Media product giveaways during special times throughout the show (attendees should check the booth for a daily schedule). There will be free NARUTO ninja headbands and whisker tattoos, as well as MAMESHIBA headbands and the ever-popular VIZ Media convention tote bag. This year the tote commemorates VIZ Media’s 25th Anniversary. Don’t miss the chance to score this special convention exclusive!

*****

Dark Horse, meanwhile, is promoting an announcement that will be made at 7:30 p.m. on Preview Night, July 20::

*****

Arcana has two new books they’ll have at the show:

SideShows

Kade Art Book. Limited to 250 copies, Arcana’s seminal character, Kade, created by owner Sean Patrick O’Reilly is celebrated in style in a limited edition art book. Featuring an original cover by Tim Bradstreet (HELLRAISER, IRON MAN: THE RAPTURE) and including brand new artwork from talented artists such as Tim Seeley (HACK/SLASH), Brent Schoonover (HORRORWOOD), Greg Horn (THOR GOES HOLLYWOOD), Kevin Mellon (GEARHEAD), Ashley Wood (MYSTERY SOCIETY), Liam Sharp (GOD KILLERS), Ben Templesmith (30 DAYS OF NIGHT), Greg Titus (VAMPIRE HUNTRESS), and Whilce Portacio (UNCANNY X-MEN, WETWORKS). Don’t miss out on this limited title and your chance to see some of the industry’s top talent’s take on Kade, Arcana’s enigmatic warrior.

Sean Patrick O’Reilly says of the art book, “Kade is Arcana’s first comic and graphic novel, and we now have seven graphic novels in the library for the series. This comic book artbook looks back at some of the great talents that have worked on the series, and also showcases some never before seen artwork. Just some of the artists are Tim Bradstreet, Greg Horn, Bob Hall, Whilce Portacio and many of the talented artist at Cadence Comics.”

SideShows Launch Edition. Written by Erik Hendrix with art from
Michael David Nelsen, SideShows is an action-packed story of crime and powers set in 1950′s Las Vegas. It makes its debut at SDCC this year in an extremely limited “launch edition” of 100 copies. In addition to the story, it contains some behind the scenes of the concept as well as pin-ups from some amazing artists.

*****

And finally, Hasbro will have a whole bunch of exclusive toys for sale at the show, from Marvel, Transformers, G.I. Joe and Star Wars. Check them out:

from Mister Wonderful by Daniel Clowes

Part one-crazy-night comedy of errors, part Curb Your Enthusiasm-style comedy of discomfort, part heartwarming second-chance romance, part cartooning master class, Daniel Clowes’s new book Mister Wonderful packs a lot of delights in between its long covers. The book began life as a weekly strip in The New York Times Magazine‘s “Funny Pages” section before Clowes reformatted, edited, and expanded it for its new incarnation from his frequent publisher Pantheon. Now the misadventures of Marshall, a middle-aged divorcé with a penchant for second-guessing pretty much every word out of his own mouth, and his fateful blind date can sit comfortably on your bookshelf instead of lying in your recycling bin after the weekend’s over. And the added bonus to any new Clowes comic, of course, is new Clowes interviews.

Over on the CBR mothership, Clowes spoke with Alex Dueben, who elicited from the cartoonist a provocative take on the much-lamented demise of the alternative comic-book series (a la Clowes’s own Eightball):

Do you ever see yourself going back to “Eightball?” If not doing it the same way, then doing something like what Seth did last year when he returned to “Palookaville?”

No. I think the great thing about those early comics, “Eightball” and “Yummy Fur” and all that, was it was the pre-Internet days. We had letters pages and we were a fulcrum for this community. You felt a certain responsibility to mediate that. There’s no necessity for that at all anymore. If I was going to do a comic, I wouldn’t put in a letters page. There’s no point to it. Beyond that kind of thing, I don’t know. If I were going to do a bunch of short little comics, I might consider doing another issue, but it would never be the same as those early comics. It would have to be a whole new thing.

Most people tend to focus on the alternative comic book as a format superseded by book-formatted collections and graphic novels, but the community aspect of those series — the way letters pages and notes from the artists would lead readers to similar books and similar people who read them — was a powerful enticement in its own right, meaning that the Internet probably had as much to do with the format’s obsolescence as did perfectbound hardcovers.

Meanwhile, yours truly interviewed Clowes for The Comics Journal’s website. Here he explains the origin of Mister Wonderful, the idea for which came to him spontaneously in the middle of the phone call during which an editor for The New York Times Magazine offered him the gig the strip would eventually be created for:

We were talking about the “Funny Pages” section—I had wondered how popular it could possibly be, since nobody I knew was really talking about it. It seemed like all the cartoonists who were in it and the friends of the cartoonists who were in it were talking about it, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that was making the rounds, where everybody was talking about the latest serial fiction piece that was running in there. She said, “Yeah, people are a little confused by it.” She was very careful in the way she spoke, and she said something like, “We’d really love it if you could consider the audience.”

I remember thinking, “Oh, she means, ‘Try to make this one mainstream in a way that will appeal to the New York Times reader.’” Off the top of my head, as a joke, I said, “I should just do a romance story.” I was making a joke—like, a Sandra Bullock movie! A totally formulaic Harlequin-romance kind of a story.

And she laughed, like, “Don’t do that.” [Laughter]

But then, as she was talking during the rest of the phone call, we were going over all this other stuff, I was talking without even listening to what I was saying. I was actually thinking, “That’s a great idea! I could do a romance story!” I immediately thought, “I should try to think of who would be the ultimate, quintessential New York Times Magazine reader—a schlubby, middle-aged guy, the kind of guy I would see reading the New York Times on Sunday morning at a café in Oakland—and make him the hero of this romance.”

Duncan the Wonder Dog

The finalists were announced this morning for the 31st annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, which honor works in 10 categories, including biography, fiction, history and, yes, graphic novels.

Finalists and winners are selected by panels of three judges composed of published authors who specialize in each genre or category. The winners will be presented April 29 in a ceremony at the Chandler Auditorium in Los Angeles as a prelude to the 16th annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

The finalists in the graphic novel category are:

• Adam Hines, Duncan the Wonder Dog: Show One (AdHouse Books)
• Dash Shaw, Bodyworld (Pantheon)
• Karl Stevens, The Lodger (KSA Publishing)
• C. Tyler, You’ll Never Know, Book Two: Collateral Damage (Fantagraphics)
• Jim Woodring, Weathercraft (Fantagraphics)

For the full list of finalists in all categories, visit the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes website.

It’s difficult to describe the impact of Thompson’s last bona fide graphic novel, the 2003 memoir Blankets, to people who weren’t there to feel it. (Though God knows I’ve tried.) This is hard to imagine in a world where your bookshelves can groan under the weight of Bottomless Belly Button, A Drifting Life, If ‘n Oof et al, but at the time this Top Shelf release was the longest original graphic novel ever published; its mere existence was a statement about the future of the medium. And it’s equally difficult to describe just how hard its story of finding and losing first love and religious faith while growing up amid the snows of the conservative upper-Midwest hit with readers, many of whom had never cracked open a comic without being harangued by true believers. My wife, whose prior experience with comics was pretty much limited to stuff I’d force her to read, started flipping through it on the kitchen table one day, read it in one sitting, and eventually got a picture from it tattooed on her person, let’s put it that way. Thompson followed the book up with Carnet de Voyage, a 2004 travelogue recounting his experiences touring Europe in support of Blankets and Northern Africa as research for his already nascent next project Habibi, but Habibi itself is really the “next Craig Thompson book” for which fans have been waiting. And God help us all, but its long-discussed filtering of Middle Eastern and Muslim culture through an epic fantasy lens remains as timely as it was when Thompson concocted the idea during the first term of the Bush Administration. I can’t wait to read it.

Anyway, click the link to see a whole bunch of cover designs that didn’t make the cut over at Thompson’s blog.

Batgirl #17

Welcome to a long holiday weekend (at least here in the United States) edition of What Are You Reading? Today our special guest is Doug Zawisza, who writes reviews and the occasional article for Comic Book Resources.

To see what Doug and the Robot 6 gang are reading, click below.

*****

Brigid Alverson

Pooches of Power!

I’m overwhelmed by cuteness right now! Capstone Press, which is a publisher I mainly associate with the library and school market, is launching a line of DC Super Pets chapter books, illustrated by Art Baltazar of Tiny Titans fame. I picked up Pooches of Power!, in which Ace the Bat-Hound and Krypto the Super-Dog team up to thwart a gang of sardine-stealing birds working under the aegis of The Penguin, and I have to say I enjoyed it. Despite being an early reader, it had a fairly complicated plot and plenty of interesting characters. I can see a lot of comics fans reading this story with their kids, but it’s also accessible enough that a child who had never heard of Batman before could enjoy it.

So, to bring my blood sugar levels down a bit, I read the first volume of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. Yes, I know it’s been around forever, but I hate zombies so I never felt the urge to pick it up. Of course, I quickly realized what everyone else already knew, that this is far more than a zombie story; it’s one of those comics in which, in the immortal words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy and it is us.” In some ways, it’s a very familiar and typically American story — people thrust out of normal society (and away from the government) and forced to live by their wits, supplemented with plenty of guns. Kirkman makes it interesting even to zombie-haters like me with a varied cast of characters and some interesting interpersonal dynamics. By the end of the first volume, I knew I would be signing up for the duration.

Sean T. Collins

I’ll tell you what — if you ever wanna feel good about comics, spend a few days cramming with nearly every title you heard positive things about at the end of the year. Click the links for full reviews!

The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd: A Work of Satire and Fiction by Benjamin Marra (Traditional Comics): In addition to being Marra what he does best — sex and violence in ’80s-trash fashion — this is a killer satire of one of America’s most satirizable pundits.

Crickets #3 by Sammy Harkham (self-published): As rock-solid a showcase of alternative comics as you’re likely to find, centered on a story about life as a low-level hack in Roger Corman’s ’60s/’70s movie factory.

Powr Mastrs Vol. 3 by CF (PictureBox): Kinky, funny, focused alt-SF/F. The artist also known as Christopher Forgues is doing something special in this series.

Mould Map #1

Mould Map #1 by various artists, edited by Hugh Frost and Leon Sadler (Landfill Editions): Each artist in this giant-sized artcomix anthology gets one page to tell a sci-fi story; in many cases this leads to stuff that’s more sci-fi tone poem than actual tale, and the material’s the better for it. It’s a British import, but American readers will recognize and welcome work from CF, Aidan Koch, and Matthew Thurber.

Bodyworld by Dash Shaw (Pantheon): Given the hubbub about how the webcomic version of this near-future sci-fi comedy was pushing that medium’s envelope, I was surprised by just how straightforward and focused it was. Strong character work, too, in an indie-comedy vein.

Map of My Heart by John Porcellino (Drawn & Quarterly): This collection of strips and prose from Porcellino’s seminal King-Cat Comics and Stories minicomic series is pulled mostly from around the turn of the millennium and tracks an ever more impressive refinement of the artist’s minimalist style and frequently melancholy subject matter.

Carla Hoffman

Daredevil: Reborn #1, by Jock

Okay, WAYR, you’re part of my New Year’s Resolutions too, so let’s get to it! I read Daredevil Reborn #1 because I am supposed to. Daredevil is a popular character and if you don’t know where he’s going, you can’t relate that info to customers looking to see where ‘that guy Ben Affleck played that one time’ is. After Shadowland, I was personally just done with Matt Murdock and whatever terrible thing he was going to do to himself this time, but I’m happy to report that Daredevil Reborn #1 is really good. This is exactly what Daredevil needs as far as character tune-up and this exactly feels like what Andy Diggle wanted to write about. The artwork has a hard line, empty feeling to it, where characters look rough and in the middle of nowhere, the perfect canvas for this little expedition to find himself. I’ll admit that I wasn’t surprised by Daredevil stopping at a mean, middle-of-nowhere locale for trouble he whines about not wanting in an internal monologue, but I love the pacing, the artwork and the art in the storytelling and -most importantly- I believe this is all going somewhere. Diggle isn’t just going to give us this same sad Daredevil story we’ve been reading for years, he’s going for change and I can believe that after this issue.

I also read Incredible Hulks #620 in an act of masochism. Don’t get me wrong, it’s well written, it’s just not what I want to read. Me and the Hulk books have had a strained relationship since I want them to be a man’s internal struggle with the monster inside, and they want to be a team book of heavy hitters with some inference to previous stories. I know, women always want to change the men we love, and I want the Hulk books to be more like when we met. I don’t like their new haircut and hip attitude that’s making them all popular. It’s worse too, because this issue mentions the Devil Hulk and boy howdy, I love the Devil Hulk from Paul Jenkin’s run on the book. It has Jarella too, plus Glan Talbot, Marlo Jones, two Abominations, Doctor Strange, Skaar and Korg and Hiroim and possibly the kitchen sink in a background cameo. Like I said, the story was good, but it doesn’t feel like the Hulk I fell in love with.

Man I relate to Betty Banner more and more each day….

Last but not least I read Infinite Vacation #1 (Resolution #3!) because the cover looked interesting and a quick flip through looked weird enough for me. Other people will describe what happens inside the book better than I will, but suffice it to say that buying time to live your alter-selves’ lives in parallel universes with an app on your phone is rad. They don’t hold your hand through the idea, they just jump you right in with David Mackian artwork and smart and clever narratives. Do you like Cory Doctorow? Sure, we all do! Do you miss ‘hard sci-fi’ set in the real world and the idea that New Media could sell us on anything? How about a book that you’ll have to read a couple times to really understand? Infinite Vacation #1 is all of these and more. I think this is what all the cool indie kids will be talking about this week.

Chris Mautner

Networked

Networked: Carabella on the Run by Gerard Jones and Mark Badger — This is a unnecessarily convoluted story about a blue-skinned girl from another dimension who comes to our universe only to have the totalitarian regime from her world attempt to follow over to take over the Earth. The real purpose of the book is to warn everyone about the dangers of social networking and how the government can use stuff like Facebook and Twitter to monitor everything you do, etc. Considering the real dangers involved in sites like those — i.e. stalking, harassment, bullying, sexting — making grandiose arguments about how THE MAN is going to use FourSquare to create a one-world Orwellian state seems not only far-fetched, but a trifle irresponsible. Still, it’s always nice to see Mark Badger’s art.

Elephant Man by Greg Houston — Fitfully amusing superhero parody that dares to say what if Jon Merrick fought crime. A lot of the problems that plagued Houston’s last book — Vatican Hustle — plague this book: It’s a bit too wordy, it’s a bit too self-aware and a bit too in love with how “zany” it is. Still, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t laugh several times and the plot is a lot tighter than Hustle‘s. For those who don’t get easily offended and don’t mind yet another collection of smart-ass jokes about superheroes, Elephant Man will suit you fine.

Rat Catcher by Andy Diggle and Victor Ibanez — This is the latest book in Vertigo’s Crime imprint, about a double-agent in the FBI who goes around killing mob informants and another agent who attempts to go after him. The book plays around with the two characters’ identities to keep you guessing as to who’s who, but it’s pretty obvious from the outset. More to the point, the book’s very plot-heavy, to the point where there’s really no room for characterization. It moves speedily enough that fans of the genre probably won’t mind too much, but it comes up short when compared to more notable recent crime comics like Criminal or 100 Bullets.

Tim O’Shea

Superman #707

Used to be I believed the closest I would get to Mark Waid writing Superman was Waid on Irredeemable. But if Chris Roberson remains as strong as he is on this first issue of his Superman run ([#707]/part five of this JMS-initiated Grounded storyline), this is the closest we can get to Waid. I’m often nervous when a writer shares that he’s been a fan of a character since childhood (as Roberson has said of Superman), but I was pleasantly surprised to see Roberson’s healthy knowledge of Superman is something that he wields in a reasonable, while engaging fashion.

So, this week the final Thor: The Mighty Avenger came out and was as strong as the other seven issues. And I’m still waiting to hear from Marvel when writer Roger Langridge and artist Chris Samnee have their next ongoing or limited series is scheduled. Those two need to work together again on more than just Free Comic Book Day material.

Bryan Miller concocts the finest Damian Wayne scene to date in Batgirl #17, as he is forced to go undercover as a grade school student on a field trip.

Doug Zawisza

For the past half-decade I start every year with the same resolutions: lose weight, eat better, read more. Every year, I fail at all three. I decided to bring those resolutions back again this year, and I’m trying, I really am, to knock them down this year. I’m sure most of you are familiar with similar resolutions, but the read more resolution is one that I try to apply to things outside of comics.

I’m the father of three very bright girls, all of whom love reading. My wife is a kindergarten teacher, so there’s never really a shortage of reading material in our house. As a matter of fact, there’s usually too much. Everyone’s reading two or three things, here, there, or wherever. I’ve always had multiple reading options open at all times, and right now is no different.

Secret Zoo

The Secret Zoo by Bryan Chick is a book that I happened across while researching an idea that’s been baking in my brain for longer than I care to think about. As a father of three voracious readers, I’m always trying to help them find new worlds. This is one world I’m glad we’ve found. My oldest and youngest haven’t had a chance at this book yet, but my ten-year-old and I have been enjoying it immensely. It’s the story about a boy who is looking for his missing sister, Megan. Noah Nowicki finds clues that tie his sister’s, disappearance to the Clarksville City Zoo. Most of those clues come to Noah via the animals AT the zoo. Chick delivers a story that is filled with adventure, child-like enthusiasm, and unbridled hope.

Chick has stated that he has a target audience of 9-12-years-old, but I’m enjoying it nonetheless. It’s a smart read that holds a great deal of potential beyond this book. Chick has planned the series to run over ten volumes, with the second set to be released on Feb. 1.

Skippyjon Jones came home with my wife. As I’ve already mentioned, she’s a kindergarten teacher and has her students bring in their favorite books to share. How my children made it past kindergarten without partaking in the free-wheeling, madcap imagination of Skippyjon is beyond me. Judy Schachner delivers the story of this creative young kitty who imagines himself as a Chihuahua and dreams up adventures for his “pack” of Chihuahuas (who are really stuffed animals in his closet). It’s zany fun that even my 13-year-old gets a good laugh at.

After the kids go to bed and when the wife tunes in to her shows, I find myself with some spare time to flip some pages, so I do. This week the highlight of my comic stack was Batgirl, a book I’ve been enjoying since issue #1. Issue #17 features a team-up between current Batgirl (Stephanie Brown) and Robin (Damian Wayne) in a story that Bryan Q. Miller delivers with equal parts humor, adventure and character. The team-up is driven by Batgirl’s first official Batman Inc. assignment. It’s definitely the lightest of the Bat-books, but strong enough to leave you wanting to read more in a hurry.

Superheroes, Strip Artists, & Talking Animals

I’m also making my way through the anecdote-laden Superheroes, Strip Artists, & Talking Animals book by Britt Aamodt. Published by the Minnesota Historical Society, this book covers Minnesota’s Contemporary Cartoonists. It doesn’t limit itself to just mainstream comic books (and thereby the work of luminaries such as Dan Jurgens, Peter Gross, Doug Mahnke, and Pat Gleason) it also looks at the comic strip artists that call the North Star State home. Aamodt does a nice job of letting each artist – mainstream, independent, or comic strip – have a few pages of glory, including more than one sample from most of the artists. It’s a black-and-white book, but the art reprinted here translates well to grayscale life. The book itself has the heft of one of TwoMorrows’ Companion books, and the quality of the material within is pretty darn close to TwoMorrows’ standards.

The last thing I’m reading is on my iPod touch. I haven’t committed to a Kindle, iPad or other such reader device yet, but I have decided to experiment with the apps and my Touch. I’m reading The Inner Circle by Brad Meltzer. The book just hit the stands (digital and deadwood) on Tuesday past, but I’ve been able to bust out the iPod Touch while waiting for kids at dance or swim, or heating up my lunch at work. This has given me the chance to pack an extra seven chapters of reading into a week that wouldn’t normally allow such an extracurricular activity. The book is standard-fare from Meltzer, playing close to his Decoded show while investigating the National Archives in more detail. Beecher White is an archivist who happens upon a secret that may or may not be tied to the President of the United States of America. From there, assumptions are made, conclusions are jumped to, and adventure busts forth. As he has done in previous prose works, Meltzer peppers the story with comic book-related winks and nods. It’s a page-turner at this point, and I’ve found myself unlocking the Touch to read one more page quite frequently.

As for what’s waiting for me next, well, I just checked out Ed Brubaker’s Rise and Fall of the Shi’Ar Empire from the library. I haven’t done much X-Men reading in the past few years, so I’m looking forward to an interstellar adventure with Nightcrawler, Havok, Polaris, Marvel Girl and Warpath. That will be waiting nicely over to the side as I finish one of these other books.

But in his upcoming book The Cardboard Valise, due out on March 8 from Pantheon, Katchor takes a journey beyond his customary imaginary American-urban setting. This collection of strips culled from a variety of publications tells the loosely intertwined stories of two men dealing with our increasingly small world in two very different fashions: One is a literal travel addict who can’t stop visiting distant lands and cultures; the other proudly and loudly denounces the very notion of differing nations and customs, seeking to wipe out the physical and psychological borders that divide the world. Unsurprisingly, Katchor proves himself just as adept at chronicling the dislocations of travel and internationalism as he is at showing us (to use the subtitle of one of his books) the pleasures of urban decay.

As part of Robot 6’s second anniversary spectacular, Katchor allowed us to pick his brain about his new book, the allure of exoticism, the danger of nationalism, print vs. digital, and making the impossible possible.

Sean T. Collins: I’ve long associated your work with New York City, or a “New York City of the mind” at any rate, so I was surprised to see that The Cardboard Valise is largely set in the conspicuously “foreign” settings of Tensint Island and Outer Canthus. What made you decide to head abroad? Was there something you could do there that you couldn’t in a recognizably American setting like The Cardboard Valise‘s third major location, Fluxion City?

Ben Katchor: My interest in the Julius Knipl series was to invent a fictional American city that might have existed just before my birth. I began to understand that slight extrapolations of the urban texture I knew resulted in equally plausible details.  This interest led me to consider all of the exotic ideas and feelings I had about foreign locales and how much of this exotica was self-generated. I started The Cardboard Valise to examine the tension between these invented cultural artifacts and the supranational impulses of modernism.

Certainly much “exotica” is “self-generated,” as you put it, but in The Cardboard Valise, at least, it seems that the foreign locations we visit are heavily invested in perpetuating their own air of the exotic. I’ve certainly gotten the sense when traveling to popular places that tourists and their destinations almost have an unspoken agreement: The tourists come expecting a certain thing, and the destinations deliver. It sounds like you’d place the blame for this chicken-and-egg cycle on the tourists?

You’re right, it’s a vicious circle that ends up with historic places being turned into touristic gift-shop towns, but the root of this behavior lies in the 19th century movements for national identity and purity –  all based on pure fantasies. Rather than attributing a perfume to a particular perfume maker, it became French perfume and that sort of nationalistic generalization leads to trouble.

The Cardboard Valise stars two main characters: Emile Delilah, an avid traveler addicted to experiencing other lands and cultures; and Elijah Salamis, an eccentric city-dweller devoted to obliterating the very notion of separate nations and customs. How’d you come up with these two opposite numbers? Do you ultimately feel that either of their credos is a superior prescription for modern life?

As I mentioned, this conflict was at the root of The Cardboard Valise.  As the world is now a very small place, I am an internationalist. I don’t feel particularly attached to the culture in which I grew up. In fact, I attribute all of the most dangerous delusional behavior to these ancient cultural ideas being played out in pathetic displays of nationalism and religious belief. The few valuable things developed over history are the exceptions and can be attributed to a small number of people — everyone else is just riding on the coattails of rare musicians, chefs, inventors, etc.

That’s interesting, because there seems to be a fine line between delusional displays and genuine, worthwhile individual expression in your work. To me, the two stand-out “performers” in The Cardboard Valise were the ice-cream-licking artist and the bogus evangelist; the former seemed to be a statement about art being a rarefied and underappreciated commodity, and the latter is obviously one of those pathetic displays of religiosity you cite. Do you feel like you give voice to the “rare musicians, chefs, inventors, etc.” who help develop things of lasting value in your work, or do your interests lie elsewhere?

There’s an element of delusional behavior behind both types. My interest in the picture-story is to imbue all of these occupations with an entertaining poetic logic — just to demonstrate that’s it’s possible.

I’ve always been smitten with the way you construct spaces on the page. I feel like you use odd angles and dramatic body language to convey the three-dimensionality of the buildings and streets your characters visit and inhabit — I practically feel like I’m in there with them. It’s very different from the proscenium-stage panel layouts one frequently sees in comic strips. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about your approach to constructing environments — is it something you feel meshes with the stories you’re telling, as well as just being a visual flourish?

The spatial composition of my picture-stories is pre-photographic (and pre-cinemagraphic) and more closely related to the theatrical space of a stage, in that I’m always striving to described a precise spatial drama without the flattening and random cropping of photography. When comics began to emulated films and the analysis of motion, spatial description and a description of the richness of the moment became less important. My approach is to construct a palpable space. Whatever happens in that space becomes believable. I also favor the sketch aesthetic that results in a kind of drawing that’s imbued with my handwriting and is, as a result, as far from the conventional symbols of text (language) as possible. Playing with that full spectrum of meaning, eight panels, or so, is usually enough to evoke a believable fictional world.

I don’t want my readers to be lulled into a long alluring narrative dream. I prefer to throw them back into their own lives after eight, or so, panels. Therefore, the long-form picture-story doesn’t interest me.

I have this very vivid memory of going to Disney World with my family as a child and being suddenly awed when I saw that it someone’s job to clean ONE particular restroom or sell food at ONE particular stand near ONE particular attraction in ONE particular area of ONE particular theme park out of the many that comprised the whole giant complex, and that this was multiplied countless times over until every task in the whole of Disney World got done, day in and day out. That’s when I realized that for every task in every place on Earth, it’s someone’s job to do that task. This is my lengthy way of saying that that’s the feeling I get from all the imaginary, impossibly specific and picayune jobs you invent in your strips — the guy who buys a man’s lint-stained pants for a museum collection of accidental art, the guy who’s made an art form out of licking ice cream cones, the black-market uneaten-toast peddlers. Even though none of these jobs actually exist, I always feel that reading your comics gives me a sense of the boundless (and at times pointless) complexity of the world. I’m curious if that’s how you see it too.

I think that all serious investigations of how the world functions must take place on a near-microscopic level — that goes for fiction as well as science.

This response and your previous one made me realize something. Obviously your preference for the strip format and your depiction of life on the “near-microscopic level” are a natural fit–but at the same time, the strips comprising The Cardboard Valise and the detail they contain eventually accumulate into a satisfying novel-length “story,” for want of a better word, with a unified theme and effect. At least to me they did! Was this your intention from the start when developing Delilah, Salamis, and their world?

Although I wanted the reader to feel as though each weekly installment was self-contained, I knew that some vague structure was taking shape through accretion over the years. The book reader, taking it in at one sitting, probably gets a better sense of the fragility on the narrative and of how it was improvised week by week, or page by page.

Another anecdote: When I first graduated college I worked in New York as a production assistant in film and television, which mostly consisted of traveling around Manhattan running errands for the production companies. I was constantly catching glimpses of lost businesses as I roamed around–I remember one vendor of something or other had set up shop in a third story of an office building that still had antiquated pneumatic message tubes running here and there throughout the space. I found myself feeling nostalgia for something I’d never even actually experienced. With your comics–whether it’s the workers of Fluxion City or the tourist attractions of Tensint Island–I find myself feeling nostalgia and wanderlust for things I not only haven’t experienced, but couldn’t possibly ever have experienced, because they don’t exist! Am I on the right track as to what you’re up to by conjuring up these places?

Those feelings of nostalgia for things you never knew are proof that all human culture is invented and should not be accepted as being inevitable. I hope that my picture-stories make people aware of the arbitrary nature of the social and economic structures they see around them and give them an incentive to change those things that seem wrong.

I think that they did in The Cardboard Valise even more, perhaps, than your other comics, in large part because it so markedly was NOT a city that “existed in a time before my birth,” as you described your comics earlier — digital technology is mentioned, as are specific post-millennial dates, and a laptop figures prominently right at the end of the book. Why did you choose to so clearly differentiate this world from the world of the past?

In the Knipl series, I made use of so many real-world historical details that readers felt as though Knipl was their uncle leading them through a unified urban mythology. The Cardboard Valise was a reaction against this cozy world-view. I wanted to evoke a feeling of cultural senselessness and dislocation. The laptop episode is there to remind readers that print and digital technology are both high tech inventions.

Also — and this is a bit less grand of a question — in that laptop strip, which concerns the difference between printed travel brochures and their online equivalents, I couldn’t help but think of the dichotomy between print and digital comics. Do you have strong feelings in that regard?

I’m now accustomed to seeing my work on a large hi-resolution monitor. The printed image looks like a poor reduction. Regardless of how the strip is presented, all the elements of drawing, writing and composition must be functioning on a certain level to hold my interest. I like the immateriality of digital delivery — it’s like handling snowflakes.

X'ed Out

X’ed Out
Written and Illustrated by Charles Burns
Pantheon; $19.95

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

I’m sure I’ve used that quote before when talking about serialized comics. One nice thing about trade-waiting is that you tend to get complete stories and I’ve grown used to that. And like being used to it. To the point that when Pantheon sent me a copy of Charles Burns’ X’ed Out, I didn’t read it right away because I knew it was only the first chapter in a continuing saga. The instinct to hold off until it was done kicked in right away and I put it on my shelf unread. And then all the accolades started pouring out of my computer screen.

When Chris Mautner told me it was his favorite comic of the year, I finally caved. Chris and I don’t have exactly the same tastes, but they cross over enough that when I realized I had his #1 pick for 2010 just sitting there unread – and it’s pretty short – I figured I’d end the year with it. What could it hurt?

Little did I know. The bastards.

I figured it would be a decent book to talk about for this column too, since no one can talk about it without also mentioning Tintin, one of the most famous adventure comics of ever. I’d been told that there’s a lot of Tintin homaging going on in X’ed Out and everyone was absolutely right about that. And also about how good it is.

The first squiggle of a line in the comic is an impression of Tintin’s familiar haircut. As the lights come on and the story begins, it becomes obvious that this isn’t Tintin, but damn if poor Doug doesn’t look exactly like him, only with dark hair and a classic, x-shaped, cartoon bandage on his head. In fact, Burns’ style in this opening sequence is very Hergé-esque and not much like what I became familiar with through Black Hole, except maybe for the weight of his lines and my God the details (like all the little divots in the bricks making up the wall of Doug’s room). Okay, actually, the room is very Burns-like. Only Doug looks different. Which immediately raises questions and puts me on edge, which is also quite Burnsian.

Doug’s first comment is that he’s lost some memory. “This is the only part I’ll remember,” he says. “The part where I wake up and don’t know where I am.” That sets the tone for everything that follows. The buzzing that comes from a hole in his wall. What he finds when he crawls through it (horrifying in content; so, so beautiful in the way it’s drawn, which is also classic Burns). The jumps in and out and between events that may be happening out of order or all at once.

I’m making it sound more confusing than it is. Burns is skilled enough that I never felt lost, even when I had no idea what was going on. He grounds the story in Doug, his relationships, and his desire to follow in William S. Burroughs’ artistic footsteps. I may not know exactly who Doug is or how he ended up having bizarre dreams in which he looks like Tintin, but I know that I like Doug and want him to figure it all out. Because Doug is trying to use his dream to untangle his past, confusion plays a large part of the story, but it’s just linear enough to keep me engaged and interested in putting the puzzle together too.

The real Doug (I think) looks much less like Tintin and more like someone Charles Burns drew. He does have a large part of his head shaved though, so that from his right side his hair kind of sticks up and gives him that familiar silhouette. The bandage is no longer small, cartoony, and x-shaped, but a large piece of gauze taped to Doug’s head. Has he had brain surgery? What relationship does that have to his bizarre dreams and lack of memory?

There are adventuresome elements to X’ed Out, especially in the dream portions with their lizard-men, desert cities, and caches of huge, spotted eggs. But it’s mostly a mystery, and as such, there are a ton of clues to help the observant reader piece things together. Some of Doug’s dream-imagery correlates directly to things he’s seen – or thinks he seen – in real life. I enjoyed piecing together what I could from my single reading, but I know there’s more to keep me busy through repeat trips. Which is good, because this is only the first part of the series and it ends on a cliffhanger just like you’d expect from any monthly issue of Detective Comics or Spider-Man. Now I’ve got to wait for the next installment.

I thought I’d left behind that part of my comics reading experience, but they sucked me back in. The bastards.

Aboard the CBR mothership, Alex Dueben talks to Black Hole author Charles Burns about his new book X’ed Out, in stores this week from Pantheon. And by the sound of it, the book — the first in a trilogy — is thoroughly indebted to Belgian comics master Hergé’s timeless Tintin tales, from the cover to the coloring to the format itself:

There’s certainly a very strong Herge influence. If you just think of the Franco-Belgian style of creating comic albums in that format, the way those European make them which is the 64 pages, 48 pages. A hardbound albums with continuing characters. I was one of those rare kids of my generation who grew up reading Tintin and it had a very profound effect on me, so this is the way that I can kind of reflect on that and play with some of those ideas.

[...]

“Black Hole” was always conceived of as being a book that would be all collected together. I’m not conceiving of this as, “Here’s three books that will eventually be collected into one book.” When I get interviewed by the French and Belgian press, I won’t be answering this question, because it’s a different tradition. I’m kind of emulating that tradition by doing a series of books in this manner. For example, when I was doing a signing in Southern France, there was someone who came up to me and who explained that he was really hesitant to buy “Black Hole” for a long time because it just seemed too foreign to him, this idea of this big volume. He wasn’t used to that idea of the graphic novel format, whereas now, it’s really been assimilated over there and popular over there as well. Here, the questions I get asked are, “Gee, this seems like a really slender volume for a graphic novel.” It’s not trying to pass itself off as a big graphic novel. It’s a different style of storytelling.

Unfortunately, Hergé passed away before he could ever release a graphic album in which he processed the influence of Charles Burns. Too bad — I would have liked to have seen Captain Haddock grow a small but strangely erotic vestigial tail.

The Search for Smilin' Ed

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.

A rotten sinus cold/upset stomach plus an ungodly amount of day-job work has kept me from event attempting to work on Comics College. Thankfully, the ever-erudite Bill Kartalopoulos graciously volunteered to write this month’s entry, about the legendary underground cartoonist Kim Deitch. And it just so happens that Bill’s the perfect person to write about Deitch and his legacy, as he curated a show featuring the artist at MoCCA not too long ago and also wrote the intro for Deitch’s latest book, The Search for Smilin’ Ed.

So with that, I’m going to take some Advil and lie down. I leave you in Bill’s more than capable hands.

Why he’s important

Shadowland

Kim Deitch is an enormously vital and prolific cartoonist who was also one of the charter members of the underground comix scene that changed comics in the 1960s and 70s.  Even before underground comic books were popularized with the 1968 publication of Robert Crumb’s Zap #1, Deitch was part of a group of cartoonists contributing early underground comic strips to countercultural newspapers like the East Village Other. From the beginning, his style showed the influence of early American animation, and his stories featured wild flights of fancy rooted in comics’ satirical traditions, tinged with psychedelia, and shot through with an earnest sympathy for the human character in all its eccentricity.

More than forty years later, Deitch stands as one of the few underground cartoonists who has steadily and consistently produced a large body of important work, spanning every available format from the alternative weekly comic strip to the graphic novel. Even more strikingly, Deitch has built upon each successive story to spin a complex, career-spanning yarn of interrelated stories that refer to and amplify one another, while mixing fact and fiction to include Deitch himself as a character in his own narratives. These comics are all rendered in brilliant, heavily cross-hatched black and white artwork, and his frequently mind-blowing page compositions pulsate with radiant intensity. In recent years most of his major works have been collected and reprinted, making it possible for readers to explore this significant body of work by one of this country’s great cartoonists.

Where to start

The Boulevard of Broken Dreams

The Boulevard of Broken Dreams is Deitch’s most immediately accessible major book. Starring his signature character Waldo the Cat, Boulevard is a historical fiction revolving around the early animation industry of the 1920s and 1930s. Featuring some brilliant sequences that play with the formal distinctions between animation and comics, the book follows several generations of characters to meditate on the human and cultural legacies of industrialized art. Collected in a beautiful hardcover edition by Pantheon several years ago, this book unfortunately seems to be on the brink of slipping out of print, but remains findable for now.

From there you should read

Although all of Kim Deitch’s comics work together to highlight different aspects of his vast fictional world, there is no true beginning or endpoint. Alias the Cat isn’t exactly a sequel to The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, but it’s a major (and majorly underrated) graphic novel that, among other things, will catch readers up with Waldo’s more recent exploits. The book itself plunges Deitch — the character — more directly into his own story, and includes a comic-within-the-comic, a fictional silent film star acting as a pacifist superhero, high seas adventure, and a journey to the heart of old Midgetville. The book also exhibits Deitch’s fascination with Victorian illustrated literature, featuring an illustrated text interlude and fine crosshatching throughout that shows the graphic influence of wood-engraved illustration.

Alias the Cat

Anyone wondering just who — or what — Waldo is, and why he keeps popping up, must read A Shroud For Waldo, originally serialized in an alternative weekly newspaper (and presented in a page-by-page episodic format). Shroud details the strange, surprisingly familiar origins of this apparently immortal anthropomorphic cartoon cat. This information will come in handy later. Guest starring Jesus Christ.

From there, you’ll want to explore the other major strand of Deitch’s work beginning with his graphic novel Shadowland. This book extends Deitch’s exploration of the backstage world of American popular entertainment to the pre-cinematic era, tracing the history of medicine show impressario Doc Ledicker and his extended family, and spiraling outward into a weird science-fictional world that treats history as entertainment and entertainment as history. This slightly oversized book is a great showcase for Deitch’s detailed artwork, and includes a full color fold-out section in the back.

Although it’s not Deitch’s most recent work, his most recent book collection The Search for Smilin’ Ed, among other things, brings the various major strands of Deitch’s world together. Deitch’s quest to discover the fate of a (quite real) 1950s children’s television show host sets the stage for the inevitable meeting of Doc Leidicker, underground comix stalwart Miles Microft, Waldo the Cat, and, indirectly, Deitch himself. This book also features a stunning full-color double-gatefold image of “The Kim Deitch Universe,” conveniently labeled for ease of use.

Further reading

Pictorama

Deitch’s most recent collection of all-new work, Deitch’s Pictorama, isn’t exactly comics, but explores the concept of the “graphic novel” by featuring a suite of heavily illustrated short stories by Deitch and his two brothers, Seth and Simon, in various configurations. This book nearly flips the typical text-to-image ratio of most illustrated novels, featuring some beautifully chaotic nearly full- and double-page images by Deitch that rival the greatest drawings of his career. The showstopper story “The Sunshine Girl” depicts Deitch’s encounter with the (fictional) afterlife of his titular underground comix character, and sows the seeds for his current work in progress, a full-on landscape-format illustrated novel that’s sure to be a knockout when it’s completed and published.  (For those on Facebook, Deitch has been posting some preview images here.)

For a different kind of Deitch story, I’d recommend his sensitive comics reportage piece “Ready to Die!” about the last days of a death row inmate, originally published in Details magazine and later anthologized both in McSweeney’s #13 and The Best American Comics 2006.

Ancillary material

Beyond the Pale

Beyond the Pale collects several of Deitch’s best short underground and post-underground comics. It’s a bit of a grab bag, but it provides some of the funkier flavor of his earliest comic book stories (including an epic Miles Microft saga from his underground comic book Corn Fed #2) and there are many gems here, including some great stories from Arcade, an amazing gatefold image called “Anthropomorphism,” and “Two Jews From Yonkers,” an autobiographically-based account of his early cartooning career that was also his first foray into heavily illustrated fiction.

Beyond the Pale includes a nice introduction by Deitch in which he discusses his early history and career in comics up to that point. For a truly massive career-spanning interview, you’ll want to pick up the book-length Comics Journal #292, which is almost entirely devoted to interviews with Deitch, his father, animator Gene Deitch, and his two brothers. Much shorter but also very much worth reading is Deitch’s interview with Zak Sally in Comic Art #5.

Before A Shroud for Waldo, Deitch’s first weekly serial was Hollywoodland, a kind of love note to old Hollywood that chronicles some strange doings surrounding the La Brea Tar Pits. The story features ex-screen star Larry Farrell, a minor character in several of Deitch’s other works. It’s only tangentially connected to Deitch’s other narratives, but is, as always, a really fun, imaginative story.

For visual kicks, readers may want to seek out Pictopia #2, which includes a Boulevard-related story that didn’t make the final cut, as well as some amazing, full color pseudo-animation cells from Waldo’s “career” as an animation star. (There’s also an animated version of the story online here.) Additionally, Deitch’s three-page story in the massively oversized Kramers Ergot 7 offers a bit more background detail to his “Sunshine Girl” story and retells some of those events from a slightly different perspective — but this time at large size and in full blazing color. Deitch has also done some fun work for kids (some may recall his “Southern Fried Fugitives” series for the late Nickelodeon Magazine), including the full-color story “These Cats Today!” collected in Big Fat Little Lit.

Avoid

All Waldo Comics

I hope it’s clear by now that even Deitch’s minor works often illuminate some glimmer of his massive fictional universe, and anyone who’s been seduced by this work will want to read it all. As such, I’m reluctant to suggest “avoiding” anything, but if I have to pick something for this category I’ll suggest that all but the most dedicated readers can skip the slim book collection All Waldo Comics. Which isn’t to say that the book doesn’t have some things going for it, including a great cover, some fascinating sketches, and a fun, sharp looking Waldo story from RAW that hasn’t been reprinted elsewhere. However, the book also includes an illustrated text piece about the inspiration for Waldo that was later reprinted as an opening sequence in The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and a prelude to A Shroud for Waldo that may only be of interest to devoted readers. For true “Deitch-ologists,” the real interest here may be an early Waldo saga called “Deja Vu” that reveals at least one major fact about Waldo the Cat. However, the story was originally printed in a beautiful three-color process in Gothic Blimp Works, to which the black and white version in this book does no justice. I hope that some day this piece of arcane Waldo lore will be reprinted the way it was originally meant to be seen. In the meantime, I’m grateful that the last ten years of comics publishing has produced such a bounty of Kim Deitch books that we get to pick and choose.

Next month: Kevin Huizenga

Bill Kartalopoulos teaches courses including “Reading Graphic Novels” and “Comics History” at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. He is the Programming Coordinator for SPX: The Small Press Expo and the Programming Director for the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, is a contributing editor for Print Magazine and a comics reviewer for Publishers Weekly, and sits on the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF). This year he curated R. Sikoryak: How Classics and Cartoons Collide at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. In 2008 he curated Kim Deitch: A Retrospective, also at MoCCA, and more recently contributed a lengthy introduction to Deitch’s 2010 graphic novel The Search for Smilin’ Ed.

It’s always exciting to get the quarterly publishing catalogs from Random House in the mail and see what Pantheon, the best of the major New York City-based book publishers when it comes to graphic novels, has in store. And yesterday’s special delivery of the Spring 2011 catalog to “Fort Collins” was a real doozy: Major new works are on the way from a pair of alternative-comics titans, Wilson‘s Daniel Clowes and Julius Knipl‘s Ben Katchor.

First up is Daniel Clowes’s Mister Wonderful, a collection of the Eisner Award-winning serial strip that kicked off The New York Times Magazine‘s Funny Pages comics section. What’s new about this, you ask? How about fully 40 pages of new material, according to the publisher? That’s practically a whole new strip. Looks from the cover image in the catalog like the work’s being reformatted from broadsheet to landscape, too — which is maybe where some of that new page count is coming from, come to think of it. But either way, I’m excited to revisit the story of a lonely middle-aged man and his too-good-to-be-true blind date, which was sort of the genial GoodFellas to Wilson‘s brutal Casino. The book retails for $22.95 and hits in April 2011.

Next is Ben Katchor’s The Cardboard Valise, the acclaimed cartoonist’s first book in over ten years (!). Instead of the slightly more fantastical version of New York City found in much of his previous work, Katchor’s constructing an entire new country for this one: Outer Canthus, a strange region inhabited by travel junkie Emile Delilah, the exiled king Boreal Rince, and globalist Elijah Salamis. Together they explore, and I quote, “a vast panorama of humane hamburger stands, exquisitely ethereal ethnic restaurants, ancient restroom ruins, and wild tracts of land that fit neatly next to high-rise hotels.” That’s our Katchor! There’s really nothing else out there like Katchor’s inky, off-kilter explorations of the spaces people build, inhabit, and forget, and I can’t wait to get my hands on this one. The Cardboard Valise can be opened for $22 when it arrives in February 2011.

Maus Vol. 1

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.

Today we’ll be traipsing through the body of work of one of the most significant (if not exactly prolific) American cartoonists of this modern age, Art Spiegelman.

Why he’s important

Even if his pen never touched paper again, Spiegelman would have his name etched in comics history until the sun swallows the Earth for Maus, his memoir/biography concerning his father’s harrowing time spent first hiding from the Nazis in Poland and then suffering in the Auschwitz concentration camp. It’s a complete tour de force from start to finish and one of the few unanimously agreed-upon entries to enter the modern comics canon.

Thankfully he has continued to make and champion comics, however, producing work that, if not equal in stature to Maus (and what really could be?), are often thought-provoking and invigorating nevertheless. A constant cheerleader for the medium, he has (along with his wife, Francoise Mouly) has fought the good fight to get comics to lose their red-headed stepchild status, both by trumpeting a variety of important cartoonists in anthologies like Raw magazine (which he edited with Mouly), and as a critic, scholar and speaker.

Where to start

The Complete Maus

Well duh. There’s a reason Maus won that Pulitzer Prize and all those accolades. Even in the almost twenty years since its completion, the book remains an astounding accomplishment, a thoughtful, emotional examination of both the Holocaust and Spiegelman’s relationship with his difficult father. It seamlessly blends straightforward narrative with an almost avant-garde visual style (its key conceit being that the Jews are drawn as mice, the Germans as cats). For many newcomers, young and old, Maus often serves as their starting point into the world of comics.

If you can find a copy, and you can play Hypercard files on your computer (and if you do, isn’t it time to get a new computer?) you should also try to find The Complete Maus CD-Rom, a nice addendum of notes, photos and assorted research materials used to make the book. (The rumor is a DVD version is in the making.)

From there you should read

The recently re-released Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist As a Young %@*$! provides a glimpse into Spiegelman’s early (sort of) years, and highlights his more  formalist, experimental side. It’s smart, genre-defying stuff, and those who love seeing the boundaries of the medium get prodded, poked and pushed will especially enjoy what’s on display here. Look closely enough, and you can see many of the techniques that he’d later employ in Maus. Originally printed in the late ’70s, Pantheon re-released the book in 2008, along with a new, lengthy introduction from the author that sheds some more light on the material and his own personal make-up.

Breakdowns

After Maus, Spiegelman’s other “big” work is arguably In the Shadow of No Towers, his response to 9/11. It’s a series of one-page, landscape formatted essays that combine Spiegelman’s interests in the visual underpinnings of the medium and autobiography. Visually, the book is a wonder, full of panels that zig-zag. criss-cross and tumble around one another  in an attempt to convey the inner chaos the author felt immediately after the attacks. Thematically and textually, the book is a little weaker, which is not helped by the fact that Spiegelman’s strips end at the halfway point and the rest of the book is padded out with a collection of early 20th century comic strips. Still, while Shadow has its faults (and certainly its fair share of critics), it remains, I think, the most logical next step for those interested in exploring his work.

Further reading

Comix, Essays, Graphics and Scraps: From Maus to Now is a nice collection of the artist’s work during the 1990s (and before), featuring a variety of illustration and little-seen comics work, including his striking covers for the New Yorker magazine. The book’s out of print and a bit hard to find, but it’s worth tracking down.

In the Shadow of No Towers

Spiegelman has also written two children’s books, Open Me, I’m a Dog and Jack and the Box (the latter done for Mouly’s line of young reader comics, Toon Books). Kids will likely enjoy both, though of the two I probably prefer Dog.

You can also see some more of his all-ages work in the Little Lit series of books he edited with Mouly Big Fat Little Lit offers a nice “greatest hits” collection of the anthologies, though really all of the three initial books are enjoyable.

Ancillary material

Spiegelman is equally well regarded for his work as an editor, particularly on Raw magazine. I could write a dozen other posts about that anthology’s significance and influence, but suffice it to say that if you want to discover its wonders for yourself, track down a copy of Read Yourself Raw, which collects the first three issues, and/or the three chunky volumes of the Penguin series that followed afterward.

Those looking for more “behind the scenes” type work should check out Be a Nose! a trilogy of sketchbooks from the 70s, 80s and 00s, published by the McSweeney’s folk.

For those interested in Speigelman’s scholarly side, check out Jack Cole and Plastic Man, a loving tribute to the Golden Age cartoonist, ably and somewhat frenetically designed by Chip Kidd.

Finally, there’s Art Spiegelman: Conversations, which, as the title suggests, compiles various interviews he did over the years in one fat book.

Avoid

Unsure of what to tackle after completing Maus, Spiegelman set his sites on illustrating Joseph Moncure March’s poem, The Wild Party. The illustrations (this is a strictly no-comics affair) are decent, but somewhat bland and obvious. To my mind this is the weakest entry in his bibliography.

Unless, of course, we’re talking about The Narrative Corpse, an interesting but decidedly lackluster comix jam experiment Spiegelman edited, that had cartoonists from all walks of life and genres (Mort Walker, S. Clay Wilson, Will Eisner, etc.) penning three panels of an incomprehensible and ultimately rather dull story of a stick-like figure. It’s the sort of thing that sounds fascinating in concept but quickly falls apart when reality intrudes.

Next month: Eddie Campbell

Continuing our countdown of (in our opinion, obviously) the most important and influential comics of the past ten years, here’s the second half of our list, from #15-1. If you missed it, you can read part one over here, with an explanation of how we put the list together and the (admittedly somewhat arbitrary) ranking. Can you guess what made number one? (hint: it’s not one of the books sampled in the collage above.) Read on to find out!

Complete Peanuts, Vol. 10

15. The Complete Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz (Fantagraphics)
If you believe, as I do, that we are living in the Golden Age of Reprints, chances are The Complete Peanuts is your Exhibit A. Now that we’re some six years and twelve volumes into it, it can be difficult to remember just how controversial the project was. A publisher best known for its co-founder Gary Groth’s shot-to-the-kidney critiques in The Comics Journal and a roster of edgy alternative and underground talents from Crumb to Clowes, republishing 50 years of history’s most acclaimed, beloved, and lucrative daily comic strip, in order, in a series of 25 hardcover volumes, designed in understated fashion by cartoonist/nostalgist Seth, to be released over the course of twelve years? You can count me among the skeptics … to my shame. The series set the standard for how such strip reprints are done — if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, reprint projects from Dick Tracy to Hagar the Horrible should make Groth, Seth, and the Schulzes feel flattered as hell. It also put prime Peanuts back in the public eye just as both the series and the life of its creator came to a much lamented-end, vindicated Seth’s iconic design choices, and not incidentally saved the financial bacon of arguably the most important comics publisher of the last 30 years. Good ol’ Charlie Brown! — Sean T. Collins

Kramers Ergot Vol. 4

14. Kramers Ergot, edited by Sammy Harkham (Buenaventura Press)
Like Blankets, the fourth volume of Sammy Harkham’s avant-garde anthology Kramers Ergot was a big fat powder-blue brick of a book that debuted at the 2003 MoCCA Art Festival in New York City. And like Blankets, it was something many in the comics industry had simply never seen before. From its Mat Brinkman-illustrated cover, a textless piece featuring two massive monsters clashing on a crudely drawn rainbow bridge, to its dizzyingly drawn contents, featuring a cream-of-the-crop collection of young alternative-comics talents spearheaded by members and associates of Providence, Rhode Island’s Fort Thunder underground art, comics, and music collective, Kramers was arguably the boldest, most influential, and most clearly generation-defining comics anthology since Art Spiegelman & Francoise Mouly’s RAW. The presence of collage, fine art, and non-narrative comics gave Kramers a reputation for privileging joyous, anarchic markmaking over storytelling. To a certain extent, that rep is both deserved and something to be celebrated, as it injected renewed attention to visually driven work into an altcomix scene then dominated by the literary comics of Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly stalwarts like Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Chester Brown, and Adrian Tomine. But Kramers has always been about more than eye-melting art — some of the decade’s most memorable alternative-comics stories, from Kevin Huizenga’s “Jeepers Jacobs” to David Heatley’s “My Sex History” to Harkham’s own “Poor Sailor,” appeared in its pages. By the time the gigantic, Little Nemo-inspired seventh volume hit the stands (and made waves on the Internet for its price tag), readers who’d really been paying attention weren’t surprised to see such stalwarts as Ware, Clowes, Tomine, Jaime Hernandez, and Matt Groening right alongside the underground enfants terribles who’d been there from the start. — Sean T. Collins

Art Out of Time

13. Art Out of Time, edited by Dan Nadel (Abrams)
The book that launched a thousand other books! (Granted, many of them were independently in the works, as their editors will no doubt point out, but still.) Prior to the release of this Abrams-published hardcover anthology, most comics’ readers impressions of the medium’s past divided it between the enjoyable but creatively anonymous work of a legion of journeymen and the stand-out breakthroughs of a small of legends. But beyond the established canon of Kurtzmans and Kirbys and Crumbs, Segars and Schulzes and Spiegelmans, there flowered a fertile field of forgotten talents from throughout comics history, cartoonists who’d carved out comics whose artistic ambitions and personal touches were overlooked at the time but were unmistakable to observers today. Ogden Whitney, Rory Hayes, Boody Rogers, Milt Gross, Gene Deitch, Fletcher Hanks: The authors included here read like a murderers’ row of weird, wild, “where the heck did that come from?” comics collections that would emerge in its wake. And they’re joined by many more besides, represented by astutely curated, frequently breathtaking work selected by Nadel. He would go on to produce other riches via his art-comics company, PictureBox, but his place in comics would already be cemented by this great act of reclamation of our lost history. — Sean T. Collins

Daredevil

12. Daredevil by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev (Marvel)
The breakthrough book for the decade’s biggest and most influential superhero-comics writer. Yes, Brian Michael Bendis made his Marvel debut with 2000′s Ultimate Spider-Man, a “scrap it all and start over from scratch” effort conceived by Marvel’s then-President Bill Jemas that proved influential not just in terms of the decade’s many fresh-continuity reimaginings (we wouldn’t have the MAX, All Star, and Earth One lines without it) but also by giving Bendis and his Ultimate cohort Mark Millar the hit-making power they’d eventually use to commandeer the Marvel Universe proper. And yes, he also combined superheroes and crime in his creator-owned series Powers. But Daredevil, along with Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, was the definitive book of the “Nu-Marvel” era, in which Jemas and Joe Quesada okayed a range of series in which talented creators from the edgier reaches of the Direct Market comics industry — your Vertigos and WildStorms and Onis and Images and Calibers — swapped out the traditional, and by that point poorly selling, Marvel Comics feel for as personal a batch work as giant corporate icons are likely to produce. In the case of Bendis and Daredevil, this meant a series in which he was free to explore his creative obsessions: his passion for observing and reproducing contemporary society’s staccato speech, his love of crime fiction, his portrayal of superpowers and costumes as the outward manifestation of deeply personal traumas and life choices.

It also meant he could totally upset the apple cart, unceremoniously deposing the Kingpin and outing Matt Murdock in the tabloids. Yet all the while the book remained of a piece with the storied runs of such creators as Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli, Ann Nocenti, and the still-fresh Kevin Smith, seeming to be a continuation of Daredevil’s story as well as a holy-crap upending of it. Meanwhile, Maleev’s memorable art — a sort of naturalist noir that was dark but never murky, realistic but never stiffly beholden to photoref — became, in a slightly cartoonier form promulgated by everyone from Steve Epting and Mike Perkins to Michael Lark and David Aja, a whole new Marvel house style. And in much the same way, Bendis’s conflation of superheroics and supervillainy with urban crime, and, later, black-ops espionage, would soon become the default setting for the entire Marvel Universe, and beyond. — Sean T. Collins

Blankets

11. Blankets, by Craig Thompson (Top Shelf)
Blankets dropped like a bomb upon 2003′s MoCCA Art Festival in New York City — the sort of smash debut you might use to illustrate the “book of the show” entry in a comics-convention dictionary. And for good reason: Clocking in at just over 580 pages, none of which had ever been serialized anywhere, it was the largest original graphic novel North American comics had ever seen. But while the novelty of its size might have made the first impression, what was found in its pages made the lasting one. An unabashedly emotional memoir, Blankets told Thompson’s own story of first love and fundamentalism, romance and religion, as both discovered and lost by him while a teenager in the snowy northern Midwest. Drawn in a sweeping, inviting style, its sheer loveliness attracted readers from beyond comics’ traditional audience, while the universality of its subject matter and the specificity of Thompson’s experience of it kept them turning the pages. More than any other book this decade (excepting, perhaps, Jimmy Corrigan), it cemented the thick “graphic novel” format as the publishing method of choice for artistically ambitious literary comics, proving that forgoing the more immediate critical and financial rewards of serialization could lead to unprecedented success. Fun Home, Persepolis, Stitches — more so even than Maus, Blankets paved the way for the crossover success of the mainstream-friendly comics memoir. — Sean T. Collins

Fruits Basket, Vol. 22

10. Fruits Basket, by Natsuki Takaya (Tokyopop)
Sailor Moon got the phenomenon started, but Fruits Basket was the most popular shoujo manga of the 00. The graphic novel market quadrupled between 2001 and 2007, and that growth was driven in large part by girls who were getting comics of their own for the first time. Fruits Basket is a good twist on a classic setup—the lone girl in a houseful of boys—but it brought in girl-friendly themes—emotional truth, the importance of friendship, and of course, a love triangle with two very different, but equally hot, guys at the outer corners. — Brigid Alverson

9. Penny Arcade, by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik (self-published)
Penny Arcade started in 1998, but its influence spread far and wide in the 00s, thanks to the attention Holkins and Krahulik paid to turning their audience into a community. The daily strip runs on a combination of in-jokes and topical humor, although many gags are comprehensible to the non-gamer. In addition to making their living from it, Holkins and Krahulik have created the Childs Play charity, which provides toys to children’s hospitals, and the annual Penny Arcade Expo, or PAX. They have also been known for their biting commentary on events within the comics and gaming world, making Penny Arcade not just a comic but an opinion leader as well. — Brigid Alverson

Watchmen

8. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (DC)
We at Robot 6 have little doubt that eyebrows will rise at our designation of Watchmen as one of the past decade’s most important comics. Indeed, various collected editions of Watchmen have been popular virtually since their first printings twenty-odd years ago. However, the fact that Watchmen sales not only increased, but practically snowballed, through the worst economic climate the world has seen in several decades — arguably since the birth of the superhero itself — is a testament to the book’s staying power. Most comics publishers hope that a movie adaptation will produce a modest bump in sales, but the Watchmen movie’s trailer inspired DC to order an additional 900,000 copies into print. When the movie itself premiered, Watchmen was No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller list — not just for comics and graphic novels, but overall. Because it garnered so many new readers, no doubt including some new or returning to comics, we honor Watchmen accordingly. — Tom Bondurant

Fun Home

7. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (Houghton Mifflin)
I’m not sure anyone expected the sort of acclaim and attention that greeted Fun Home, least of all Bechdel herself. Riding on a populist wave of interest in both memoirs and graphic novels (not to mention a growing interest in gay rights), Fun Home swooped in and quickly became the “must-read” book of 2007. Somehow this story of the author’s awkward relationship with her troubled (to put it mildly) father garnered the sort of mainstream attention that creators and publishers have been yearning for years to attain (the fact that a big house like Houghton Mifflin was behind it might have helped matters — in itself a notable feat). Perhaps most notably of all, it was named the Book of the Year by Time Magazine. Not “Best Graphic Novel” or “Best Memoir.” Best. Book. Whether or not you think it deserved that title, I remained stunned to this day that this comic — or any comic mind you managed to attain such a lofty award from an otherwise staid and deliberately average magazine. Fun Home is an important reminder of just how much the times have changed. — Chris Mautner

Identity Crisis

6. Identity Crisis (2004) by Brad Meltzer, Rags Morales and Michael Bair (DC)
Written by suspense novelist Brad Meltzer and drawn by Rags Morales and Michael Bair, this seven (double-sized-) issue miniseries was billed as the other kind of crossover hit — namely, the one which would bring normal folks into the comics shop. Looking back in late 2005, Meltzer told CBR “it was supposed to be a small, emotional story.” Nevertheless, when Dan DiDio and Geoff Johns saw what Meltzer was doing, elements of IdC’s plot were spun out into their own storylines, including other DC events like Infinite Crisis, 52, and Countdown. Thus, DC kicked off a cycle of line-wide Big Events which stretch arguably through Blackest Night. Marvel similarly used the contemporaneous “Avengers Disassembled” arc to cultivate its current string of events, and the result has been an ever-escalating battle over the top spot in the sales charts.

On its own, though, Identity Crisis came to symbolize a new, and not entirely welcome, revisionist approach to fictional superhero history: explaining the old goofiness by retroactively inserting “realistic” elements. Ironically, today’s event comics may well be charged with restoring a calmer, more gentle status quo — one which might not demand the sort of fix Identity Crisis provided. — Tom Bondurant

Jimmy Corrigan. The Smartest Kid on Earth

5. Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware (Pantheon)
And here is the straw that broke the proverbial noncomics-reading public’s back. Maus and Watchmen had sung their siren songs on the rocks and managed to entice the occasional wayward sailor back in the ’80s — someone who had perhaps heard they were doing interesting things with them thar funnybooks — but by and large the great unwashed — or more accurately, the cultural elite and the media at large — remained unimpressed. These were flukes; comics were still the stuff of children and maladjusted nerds. It took Ware’s masterpiece, which he spent years serializing in the pages of Acme Novelty Library throughout the 1990s, to show critics that yes, comics could be just as elegant, knotty, rich, satisfying and emotionally devastating as your prose novel.

Praise was quick to follow. The book won the Firecracker Alternative Book Award, the American Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award, the first comic ever to do so, a move that was met with some mild astonishment in the U.K. The book threw Ware to the forefront of the art-comix movement (much to his chagrin no doubt). Now he was no longer simply Chris Ware, but now CHRIS WARE, GREATEST CARTOONIST ON EARTH, and has had to deal with all the resulting backlash that unwanted title has come with. That’s not to mention the wealth of imitators, disciples and kids who studied Corrigan like the Bible, hoping to gleam some insight from its pages. Corrigan showed its readers new ways to make comics, new ways to think about comics (flowcharts! timelines! awkward silences!) and the ensuing years saw a rash of inspired cartoonists wearing Ware on their sleeve like a Led Zepplin patch on a jean jacket. In the end though, Corrigan proved without a shadow of a doubt that comics could be literary. The flood gates were let loose and it was anybody’s game from here on in. — Chris Mautner

Naruto Vol. 1

4. Naruto, by Masashi Kishimoto (Viz)
Naruto is the alpha comic; it is the top-selling manga in the U.S. (both in terms of individual volumes and the franchise as a whole) and it outsells most graphic novels as well. Because they were so confident of its popularity, publisher Viz made a radical move in 2007 and again in 2009: They sped up the release schedule, churning out three volumes a month for several months. The flood of Naruto volumes had a noticeable effect, squeezing the sales of other manga but also bringing the U.S. edition closer to the Japanese releases — a strategy that is likely to become more common among manga publishers in the decade to come. — Brigid Alverson

3. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon)
What is it about Satrapi’s memoir of her childhood during the Iranian revolution that earns it such a high place on our list, above arguably more groundbreaking books like Jimmy Corrigan and Blankets? Well, certainly the subject matter plays a role.

Persepolis

The book was introduced to North America at a time when an interest in the Muslim world was at an all-time high due to the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent War on Terror. For many it’s offered a glimpse and insight into a world that heretofore has seemed alien and mysterious to many. On a much more important and political level, however, Persepolis has served as an inspiration for Iranians living abroad and in their home country, as the recent mash-up created by dissidents about the recent election shows.

But Perspolis’ success — indeed, it’s continued success — in a large part is due to Satrapi’s simplistic, bare bones style and direct, unfussed storytelling. The very elements that turn off some, more experienced comics critics are the very things that make it perfect for the unwashed masses. It’s simply a very easy book to engage, about a subject that interests a great many of us. Perhaps I can best sum it up this way: Very few of my non-comics reading friends — family members, co-workers, etc. — ask to borrow my comics. They don’t want to read Watchmen (even if they’ve seen the movie), they don’t ask about Captain America getting shot or even express an interest in Maus. Everyone asks if they can borrow Persepolis. — Chris Mautner

Sailor Moon

2. Sailor Moon, by Naoko Takeuchi (Mixx/Tokyopop)
Naruto is a bigger seller, and it certainly commands respect, but Sailor Moon changed people’s lives. I have seen a lot of women talking online about how it was the first comic they could relate to. Having grown up knowing that girls’ comics existed in other countries (Britain) but that there were none for me in the U.S., I know exactly how powerful that discovery can be. Until Sailor Moon came along (first the cartoon, then the comics), it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that girls might like comics written specifically for them. After the initial success of the anime on American television, Tokyopop (then Mixx) started publishing the graphic novels, and a genre was born. Although the series was first published in 1997, new volumes continued to come out in the early years of the 00s and the manga spread virally among fans, creating one of the earliest fan communities based around shoujo manga; in 2004, according to Wikipedia, there were over 3 million websites devoted to Sailor Moon. Despite its popularity, Sailor Moon was out of print in the U.S. by 2005.

Sailor Moon affected the way people thought, both inside and outside the industry. This whole trajectory I’m on now was launched when I found some of the books at a garage sale and picked them up for my kids, still not really sure what they were — but what the heck, they were 5 for a dollar. That’s the most expensive bargain I ever got, because it set the girls rocketing off into manga-land — they quickly discovered Kodocha, Tokyo Mew Mew, Fruits Basket, even Megatokyo. Suddenly my house was filled with these really foreign, sort of sketchy-looking books. So I started reading them, and next thing I knew, I was writing about manga on the internet. For me, as well as a number of other women and young girls, Sailor Moon was a paradigm shift. — Brigid Alverson

The Muhammad cartoons

1. The Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons
Here’s the thing about all the other comics on this list: They didn’t cause anyone’s death. No one got severely injured because they read them. None of their creators were persecuted or received death threats. No one rioted over Fun Home.

Not so here. In September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, whether to simply provoke or to engage in a discussion about censorship and religion, published a collection of 12 editorial cartoons of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Not all of the depictions were irreverent or nasty, some were respectful, but that hardly mattered to most Muslims since any visual depiction of the prophet, respectful or otherwise, is considered a sacrilege.

Things quickly went downhill from there. Danish embassies in Lebanon, Syria and Iran were set on fire. Some protests resulted in riots and violence, with police firing into crowds and more than 100 total deaths worldwide. Death threats were issued to the people involved.. The whole affair became Exhibit A in the ever-deteriorating relationship between the Western world and the Middle East. And its after-effects continue to plague us today, as the recent attempt on the life of cartoonist Kurt Westergaard proves.

There are many, many lessons (or at least discussion topics) we can draw from the Muhammad cartoons — about the power of images to provoke, issue of religion and free speech, and so forth. — but I think most importantly they should serve as a reminder for the bulk of us, who live comfortably in North America and elsewhere that the price we pay for making and reading comics is only a few dollars and not our lives. — Chris Mautner

• Meanwhile, Ten-Cent Plague author David Hajdu reviews Robert Crumb’s adaptation of Genesis for the New York Times:

Crumb's The Book of Genesis

For all its narrative potency and raw beauty, Crumb’s “Book of Genesis” is missing something that just does not interest its illustrator: a sense of the sacred. What Genesis demonstrates in dramatic terms are beliefs in an orderly universe and the godlike nature of man. Crumb, a fearless anarchist and proud cynic, clearly believes in other things, and to hold those beliefs — they are kinds of beliefs, too — is his prerogative. Crumb, brilliantly, shows us the man in God, but not the God in man.

Over at Comics Comics, Dan Nadel calls BS on Hajdu’s review: “One wonders why an author would persist in writing about a subject he clearly disdains and isn’t interested in actually learning about, but I guess that’s between Hajdu and his own idea of the sacred.”

Go read the whole takedown; it’s fun.

• Once again, Brian Chippendale brings the awesome. This time, he talks about Master of Kung-Fu.

• Over at the Savage Critics, David Uzumeri doesn’t care much for the latest issue of Brave & Bold:
“This comic is like being lectured to by your grandfather. This comic is like a video they put on in history class during a substitute session.”

• Von Marlowe really like Marvel Adventures Amazing Spider-Man #55: “I will be buying the next issue, and the next after that, and the next after that.”

• Paul Gravett, who is always worth reading, talks about Willy Linthout’s The Year of the Elephant.

• Jeff VanderMeer calls Richard Sala’s Cat Burglar Black: “a charming and stylish escapade.”

• Matthias Wivel reviews Asterios Polyp: “The originality of its vision, then, lies not in its portrayal of human emotion but rather in the art of its construction, and in what it leaves to our imagination.”

• Down the Tubes declares The Misadventures of Jane: “another top quality book from Titan that is sure to appeal to aficionados of newspaper strips, glamour art and wartime memorabilia.”

• Both Matthew Brady and Michael Buntag give Naoki Urasawa some love.

• Finally, Derik Badman reviews the first Oishinbo volume and then tries out one of the recipes, which I’ve been dying for someone to do.

A.D. New Orleans

A.D. New Orleans: After the Deluge
by Josh Neufeld
Pantheon, 208 pages, $24.95

Given its subject matter, and the talent of its author, I’d love nothing more than to declare that A.D. New Orleans is an excellent book, but I can’t. While it’s far from a failure and there are compelling moments, there are also too many flaws and awkward sequences to call the book anything more than a grudgingly qualified success.

A.D. opens strong, with a god’s eye view of the city as Katrina sweeps in and leaves untold destruction in its wake. It’s a devastating reminder of just how much damage the storm did.

From there Neufeld moves backward in time to chronicle the lives of five (real-life) New Orleans residents and their different reactions to the coming storm, and it’s here that the problems begin.

Chief among them is that he has a really tough time juggling all the different stories effectively. Half of the cast are quickly introduced only to pack their bags and depart, and apart from the occasional panel they don’t show up again until the very end to offer their thoughts on how the storm uprooted their lives. As a result, it’s nigh-impossible for the reader to develop any sort of connection, emotional or otherwise, to these characters.

Neufeld should have instead whittled the book down to the two characters who opted to stay in the city — the storekeeper Abbas and the counselor Denise. Their stories not only take up the bulk of the narrative, they’re the most compelling  tales as well. Denise’s story in particular, with her and her family stranded outside of the convention center is nimbly handled, making it easy for the reader to imagine how hellish the reality of that situation must have been.

Another problem with the book lies in Neufeld’s depiction of the rich doctor who opts to stay. The doctor is one of the lucky few who manages to avoid calamity; his laissez-faire attitude seems to surprisingly serve him well. But Neufeld can’t mask his class consciousness here. I’m not even entirely sure he should, but his enmity for the doctor is palpable, both in the short amount of stage time he has and in what Neufeld chooses to present to the reader — the only thing the doctor can complain about is the fact that his favorite shrimp dish no longer takes the same. You get a sense that the character is callous in his approach both to the hurricane and other people’s suffering, despite the fact that he opened a clinic and made rounds immediately after the storm. Again, it’s a sense that you’re not getting a fuller picture of the individual and an unfairly colored one at that.

Speaking of color, a word must be said about Neufeld’s odd coloring choices. He’s opted to give the panels a tint that changes from blue to green to red with little rhyme or reason. It’s distracting device and only served to distance myself further from the story. I would have preferred he went with a nuanced gray tone instead.

I honestly feel bad trashing the book in this manner. Neufeld is a likeable, talented fellow and A.D. New Orleans is certainly far from a failure. There are sequences, such as when Denise narrowly misses having her ceiling fall on top of her, that work exceedingly well. But the flaws are too large and glaring for me to recommend this book to anyone who doesn’t have a deep and abiding interest in the subject matter. If you’re really jonesing for a man-on-the-street account of what it was like to live through Katrina, this will fit the bill. But that’s really all it will do.

Asterios Polyp

• The great and all-powerful Ng Suat Tong provides one of the most comprehensive and detailed critiques of Asterios Polyp I’ve seen online yet. Seriously, Tong’s one of the finest critics comics have ever had. The fact that he’s writing again, even if it’s just a one-time thing, is cause for joy.

• Frank Santoro reviews issues #1-4 of Richard Sala’s Ignatz series, Delphine: “The story surrounded me and carried me away to a very real world. It’s a cartooned, exaggerated world, but a real world nonetheless.”

• Johanna Draper Carlson reads a whole lotta vampire manga.

• Graeme McMillan offers 25 thoughts on Wednesday Comics. He also admits to liking X-Men Forever. That’s very brave of you Graeme.

• Similar to our Collect This Now feature is David Welsh’s License Request Day, where he picks manga that haven’t been translated yet, but should. This week he recommends something called Paros No Ken.

• It’s been up for a few days now, but I have to point an arrow towards Katherine Dac’s review of Children of the Sea, which is one of the best takes on the book yet.

• J. Caleb Mozzocco takes in the This Is A Comic Book exhibit in Columbus, Ohio.

• Derik Badman examines Alex Baladi’s Petit Trait, which is about “the voyage of a short line through a series of encounters with other lines of various size, shape, and density.” I’m sold.

• Marc Mason liked the Dan Dare Omnibus: “I felt like a kid again as I pored through the book, and that may be the best endorsement I can give it.”

• Karen Green reads Alice in Sunderland and declares “This book makes you work hard.”

• Noah Berlatsky can’t stop blogging about Wonder Woman. And he even throws in a Twilight reference, just for good measure.

• Finally, Rob Clough reviews a whole bunch o’ minicomics.

Asterios Polyp

Asterios Polyp
by David Mazzucchelli
Pantheon, 344 pages, $29.95.

Asterios Polyp is the type of graphic novel that causes critics like me to rub our hands together frantically and salivate. It’s full of all the juicy metaphors, re-occuring motifs and classical allusions that academics and reviewers alike go koo-koo for. Best of all, they’re all right up front and not hidden in the text, so you don’t have to do a lot of hunting around.

At its center, however, Polyp is a familiar and heartfelt tale of a man, who, halfway through his life, is faced with the realization that he is far from the wonderful person he thought he was and sets about trying to make things right.

It all begins on his 50th birthday, where Polyp, a teacher and architect whose designs have never made it past the blueprint stage, seemingly incurs the wrath of the gods as a freak bolt of lightning sets his apartment on fire. Salvaging just three items from the wreckage (all of which bear significance — as does everything else in this book), he heads as far away from his old life as possible, and ends up at the fittingly named, bucolic town of Apogee, where he befriends a Malaprop-spouting grease monkey called Stiff Major, his Earth goddess wife Ursula and their son.

Mazzucchelli intersperses these segments with flashbacks involving his relationship with his ex-wife Hana and how it all went wrong. An insecure sculptor (Mazzucchelli creates a lovely visual metaphor by drawing her as constantly a hairsbreadth shy of the spotlight) she initially finds herself charmed by Asterios’ forthright, assured demeanor, but it isn’t long before that confidence gives way to arrogance and sours their relationship.

Asterios, you see, has a narrow, dualistic view of the world. Everything according to him is defined by its opposite: things are either functional or decorative, right or wrong, and he instinctively tends to choose the former over the latter. He adores shoes, for example, that are devoid of decoration, ignoring the question of whether or not they hurt his feet.

Thus, it shouldn’t surprise you too much when I tell you that he has a twin. Or that, being the damaged person Asterios is, that the twin died in childbirth but still lingers throughout the story serving as a beyond-the-grave narrator.

This type of hyper-aware formalism runs throughout the book. Images of duality and symmetry abound, and are frequently undercut by say, by Mazzucchelli’s use of color, leaving no question as to what Mazzucchelli ultimately thinks of Asterios’ philosophy.

All this makes for a rich and visually stunning book. Notions of duality are only one of the many ideas explored here. Polyp also examines our relationship with religion, how we interact with each other, classical myths, how we perceive the world and does so in a fluid, graceful visual manner that never once feels like a treatise. Mazzucchelli handles the notion of individuality, for example, by having each character speak in a different font. Asterios for example uses a clipped comic book font devoid of serifs or lower case letters — purely functional.

I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea. There’s not a single wasted line in the book. No one has a name that isn’t significant — even the cat is named after a famous architect. Everything carries some kind of iconic significance. It’s important, for example, that Asterios is Greek. And even that he’s left-handed.

That aids the book in that Mazzucchelli marries the structure to the visual pacing of the book to such a degree that you can’t you couldn’t imagine this story being told in any other medium but comics. But in another way the book suffers from sharing some of Asterios’ mania for function. There’s not a image or word here that doesn’t carry a deeper meaning. It seems a tad ironic that a book that derides mere functionality should be so functional in its structure.

But that’s all just part of the game Mazzucchelli is playing here. More to the point, as clever and playful as Asterios Polyp is, I don’t think ultimately it would all matter very much if you didn’t care about both Asterios and Hana. But Mazzucchelli does a marvelous job of making his cast (with one possible exception) seem like knowable, well-rounded people instead of types. We can see how much Asterios really cares for Hana and by the end are rooting for him to overcome his egocentric nature and reconcile with her.

Obviously those who appreciate craft and formalist games — who like to re-read books looking for hints and portents they missed the first time around — will get more out of this book than those who don’t. But don’t let its academic aspects keep you away. Asterios Polyp is one of the smartest, most entertaining graphic novels you’ll read this year.