Comic Book Resources

Everyone's A Critic: A round-up of comic book reviews and thinkpieces

Pim & Francie In Golden Days

• The Comics Comics crew are having another cage match, although this time they're calling it a round table, about Al Columbia's Pim & Francie book.

• Curt Purcell continues his examination of the Blackest Night event, this time looking at some of the tie-in books.

• Ng Suat Tong examines the pleasures of owning original art and how that can change our appreciation for a particular cartoonist.

• Also at HU, Noah Berlatsky looks at the psychosexual underpinnings of the superhero genre, and how it's shifted over time.

• NPR's Linda Holmes talks about why Neil Gaiman's Sandman series matters: "[It] remains one of the most literate, imaginative and intricately plotted accomplishments in long-form comics storytelling out there."

• Sandy Bilus recommends Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms: "The book never feels preachy, but it certainly forces the reader to focus on this issue and raises his or her level of understanding about what the people of Hiroshima have endured."

• Joe McCulloch compares/contrasts the new Astro Boy movie with the original Tezuka manga.

• Johanna Draper Carlson reviews the first volume of The Lizard Prince: "This manga, a romance in a magical fantasy setting, has enough humor to make it an enjoyable read for the young and young-thinking."

• Tangognat on Vol. 5 of 2oth Century Boys: "Everytime I pick this series up I’m reminded again how great it is."

Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs: Al Williamson's Flash Gordon

Al Williamson's Flash Gordon: A Lifelong Vision of the Heroic

Al Williamson’s Flash Gordon
Text by Mark Schultz; Stories by Larry Ivie, Al Williamson, Archie Goodwin, Bruce Jones, Mark Schultz, and others
Illustrated by Al Williamson
Flesk; $29.95

The third volume of Checker’s reprints of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon is proving difficult to track down (unless I want to spend $70 for a used copy on Amazon, which I don’t), so I’m taking a break from that series until it becomes available again. In the meantime, Flesk helps fill the void with an excellent collection of Al Williamson’s Flash material.

I grew up reading Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson’s Star Wars strips and I was always impressed with how real Williamson’s characters looked without looking exactly like the actors. His use of models sometimes meant that figures looked posed and static, but it also leant credibility to the fantastic stories he and Goodwin were telling. As did his talent at creating lush, detailed worlds. It was almost like these were the real adventures of my favorite Rebels and Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford were just actors playing the parts.

I’d never read Williamson’s Flash Gordon stuff before this collection, but the same traits are all there. If you like his Star Wars stuff, there’s no reason you won’t enjoy this too, especially with Archie Goodwin joining in on some of the writing. But what surprised me about the book was its diversity. All the stories share some common Williamsonisms (giant mushrooms and alien animal life decorating the landscapes, for instance), but it’s interesting to see the different ways of doing things that Williamson employed depending on the particular project.

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Robot reviews: hodge-podge time

Cold Heat 7/8

Cold Heat 7/8
by Ben Jones and Frank Santoro
PictureBox Inc., 48 pages, $20.

This may be my favorite issue in the series so far, and I'm not sure I can easily articulate why. It's hard at times for me to talk about this series without coming up with empty, awkward phrases and stumbling cliches. There's something about hitting the time travel/memory wipe/reset plot button that appeals to me though, as protagonist Castle finds herself back at home and romancing a overly eager British music critic, though little has actually changed and dangerous aliens and evildoers are still lurking about.

Hitting that button must appeal greatly to Jones and Santoro as well, as they seem to be firing on all cylinders here. There's an ever so slight shift in tone that brings plot and dialogue a little farther up center than it had been before, though little of the series' sublime weirdness has been abandoned. Santoro offers some of his best compositions yet here; there's more than a few pages here that are quite striking. I like how he tries to think of the page as an entire unit and not a collection of separate tiny panels that tell a story. Too few contemporary cartoonists, indie or otherwise, follow that example. I also like how he uses overlapping lines to suggest a character's inner emotional state or provide different perspectives of the same scene. Meanwhile, Jones continues to show off his gift for hilarious, idiosyncratic dialogue. Twenty dollars may seem like a high price point (it's due to a limited print run) but you know what they say about no good comic being too expensive? It's true here.

Reviews of Dungeon and more after the jump.

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Robot reviews: Two by Tardi

West Coast Blues

West Coast Blues
by Jacques Tardi and Jean Patrick Manchette
Fantagraphics Books, 80 pages, $18.99.

You Are There
by Jacques Tardi and Jean-Claude Forest
Fantagraphics Books, 196 pages, $26.99.

It makes perfect sense that Fantagraphics would want to start their introduction (or should that be re-re-introduction) of French cartoonist Jacques Tardi to American readers with the release of West Coast Blues. The book, is after all, a tightly-plotted little crime noir, just the sort of thing that today's discerning comic book readers seem to be interested in these days, given the proliferation of crime books recently.

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Everyone's A Critic: A round-up of comic book reviews and thinkpieces

Footnotes in Gaza

• Tom Spurgeon once again beats everyone to the punch with a review of Joe Sacco's new book, Footnotes in Gaza: The first good news to report ... is that the cartoonist is in top form throughout." He also has good things to say about Prison Pit.

• Christopher Allen offers 60 ways of looking at Watchmen.

• Critics critique critics -- Robert Boyd reviews Bart Beaty's Unpopular Culture: "This is a thought-provoking book, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in comics-as-art."

• David Welsh gets schooled in college manga.

• Rob Clough calls MK Reed's new book, Cross Country "the most complex, ambitious and visually interesting of her comics."

• Perhaps if I link to Sean Collins' review of Refresh, Refresh, he'll forgive me for accidentally (I swear) stealing the title of his review feature.

• Nina Stone enjoyed the first issue of Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love: "All the pieces of the story just started to fit together perfectly."

• Grant Goggans declares The Art of Osamu Tezuka "very highly recommended."

• Finally, Kristy Valenti looks at a 1999 graphic novel drawn by Mia Wolff and written by acclaimed sci-fi author Samuel Delany.

Robot reviews: Bloom County and Family Circus

Bloom County: The Complete Library, Vol. 1 hardcover

Bloom County: The Complete Library, Vol. One: 1980-1982
by Berkeley Breathed
IDW, 288 pages, $39.99.

The Family Circus Library, Vol. 1: 1960-61
by Bil Keane
IDW, 240 pages, $39.99

As more and more publishers realize that comic fans are interested in rummaging though the works of yesteryear, more and more of them are releasing sizable hardcover collections of allegedly classic comics at a breakneck pace. Some of those releases may cause question marks to rise above the heads of persnickety collectors. Take IDW's new volumes focusing on Berkeley Breathed's Bloom County and Bil Keane's Family Circus. Isn't the former readily available in easy-to-find collections in libraries and used bookstores across the country? Isn't the latter rather, well, overly precious and saccharine? Does this material really need to be reprinted in such lavish volumes? The answer, surprisingly, is yes and yes.

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Robot reviews: Another kids' comics round-up

Nancy Vol. 1

Nancy Vol. One
by John Stanley
Drawn and Quarterly, 128 pages, $24.95.

When faced with the challenge of adapting Ernie Bushmiller's classic comic strip to longer comic book format, John Stanley's response was simple and economical: Turn her into Little Lulu.

That's the only conclusion I can come to after reading this collection of stories in D&Q's ongoing "John Stanley Library" project. Nancy is pretty much Lulu with frizzier hair, Sluggo is a thinner and slightly more benign Tubby. There's even a snotty rich kid and bratty little boy similar to Wilbur and Alvin. Stanley even repeats one of his Tubby stories involving a burglar almost note for note.

That doesn't make Nancy a bad book by any stretch of the imagination. Mediocre Stanley is still miles above most people's best work. The best stories here though are the ones involving Oona Goosepimple, an odd, Wednesday Addams-type girl who supernatural antics cause no end of anxiety for poor Nancy. It's those stories where Stanley -- freed of the Bushmiller formula -- really gets inventive and inspired. If the ratio of Oona stories increases as the volumes do, then I'll keep buying these books as long as D&Q are able to get them out.

Reviews of Moomin, Amulet and more can be found after the jump ...

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Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs: Hunter's Fortune

Hunter's Fortune #1

Hunter's Fortune #1
Written by Andrew Cosby and Caleb Monroe; Illustrated by Matt Cossin
Boom!; $3.99

It's comics like that this that are the exact reason I started this column.

I love treasure hunter stories. That probably started with Raiders of the Lost Ark, or maybe Treasure Island long before that, but ever since I was a kid I've loved stories about people trying to find hidden treasure. Whether it's a chest of gold, a lost artifact, or a hidden city doesn't really matter. It's just the whole spirit of adventure; striking out on little information to try and discover something that may or may not exist.

My biggest fear when starting a new treasure hunter story is that it's not going to live up to its concept. Maybe I won't like the main character. Maybe the clues will be too easy to figure out. Maybe the villains will be unoriginal. Maybe the banter will be more annoying than witty. Maybe it just won't have the sense of wonder that it should. There are dozens of things that can go wrong and often do. I'm so happy that none of that's the case with the first issue Hunter's Fortune.

The story opens with Hunter Prescott being kicked out of his apartment on the same day that his car's repossessed. Hunter's a young kid - early 20s - and his only support is his best friend Trip, who's only slightly less worse off than Hunter. "You can totally crash at my place," he tells Hunter. "With both of us, I bet we can even afford to turn my power back on." Thanks to Matt Cossin's art, Hunter is a good-looking, likable kid and Trip is all starry-eyed and optimistic. Caleb Monroe's dialogue also helps enormously to make these guys real people and not annoying clichés. Hunter's down on his luck, but he's got Trip, whose cheerfulness in the face of adversity makes him a huge asset. Even if Hunter doesn't always totally appreciate it.

Secret keys, beautiful villains, a legendary artifact, and a bear-fighting Russian after the jump.

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Robot reviews: Another manga round-up

Ooku Vol. 1

Ooku: The Inner Chambers
by Fumi Yoshinaga
Viz, $12.99.

As story hooks go, Ooku's got a great one: A strange plague during the Edo period of Japan kills off more than three-quarters of the country's male population. As a result, the culture and gender relations end up going all topsy-turvy, and succeeding generations find the women ruling the roost and men being protected and prized for their ability to produce offspring. This is especially in the Shogun's harem, or Inner Chambers, where the story takes place.

It helps that the story is by Fumi Yoshinaga, who, in books like Antique Bakery and Gerald and Jacques, has proven herself to be more interested in gender relations and identity issues than mere yaoi squickiness (although she certainly likes that too. Certainly the fact that Ooku won the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize in its home country has led to a certain amount of anticipation among some manga fans.

Unfortunately, while Yoshinaga remains an excellent and expressive artist, the series stumbles out of the gate. One of the main problems is the translator's decision (no doubt motivated by an attempt to approximate a certain Japanese dialect) to have everyone speak in a formal, Renaissance Faire-like manner, with lots of "thees" and "thous" and "didsts." It has the unintended effect of coming off as forced, and distancing the reader from the characters and the story.

Beyond that though, Yoshinaga doesn't really seem to do much with her idea, at least so far. She seems more interested in conveying the various back room politics and romances that take place in the inner chambers than giving thought as to what such a huge change in the population would do to a culture. Would the fashion still be identical to what it was in the real world, with men shaving their heads and women wearing long gowns? Wouldn't that change somewhat drastically? Would a female shogun really keep a male harem and if so, would it be so identical in structure to what the real Edo shoguns had? This may sound like nit-picking, but makes the story seem more than a bit facile, as though she just swapped everyone's sex and that alone would be interesting enough. It may well be that I'm not giving Yoshinaga enough credit and that she's actually considered these issues and will explore them in more depth in future volumes. But so far, I'm not encouraged.

Reviews of Red Snow, Pelu and more after the jump ...

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Daring to defend The Dark Knight Strikes Again

from Frank Miller & Lynn Varley's The Dark Knight Strikes Again

It started with a dare. Here at Robot 6 a week ago, I posted about how comics legend Frank Miller has been posting comments at the blog of neoconservative pundit Victor Davis Hanson. This inspired a comment by James B. Elkins II that casted skepticism on my bonafides as a Miller fan. Since Miller is in fact my all-time favorite comics creator, I responded by daring any and all comers to challenge me to defend what is, to many readers, Miller's most indefensible work: The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Miller and colorist Lynn Varley's sequel to their seminal revisionist-superhero classic The Dark Knight Returns. I've always loved that book, but I'd never written about it at length. Well, David Brothers of The 4th Letter went ahead and took the dare and laid the challenge at my feet.

The result? I wrote a review of The Dark Knight Strikes Again for The Savage Critic(s), another one of my blog-homes away from blog-home. The piece, part of series of posts I'm doing on my all-time favorite comics, places Miller & Varley's much-maligned, much-misunderstood comic in the context of similarly bright and brash works by cartoonist Ben Jones, comedians Tim and Eric, the "glo-fi" subgenre of indie rock, and more. Do check it out--then swing by The 4th Letter for David Brothers's own two-part review of the book, which tackles it from a very different yet equally positive angle.

Everyone's A Critic: A round-up of comic book reviews and thinkpieces

• David Welsh asks the people who know what sort of scary manga they'd recommend for Halloween reading. As expected, his panel comes up with a lot of good picks.

• 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.

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Robot reviews: Stitches & Monsters

Stitches: A Memoir

Stitches: A Memoir
by David Small
WW Norton, 336 pages, $24.95.

Monsters
by Ken Dahl
Secret Acres, 208 pages, $18.

I sometimes suspect that part of the reason some critics (if I can use that term) are hostile towards the recent spate of comic book (sorry, graphic novel) memoirs is due to a mistrust of the genre itself. There's a tendency when someone is chronicling a dramatic, personal event, to exult praise merely for inherent drama of the story, particularly if it's a traumatic one, than the skill in the telling. Some folks, in other words, get swept up in the idea of the story itself and the bravery of the person in coming forward to tell it, and ignore whether or not the work succeeds as art.

Certainly the success of books like Fun Home and Persepolis has resulted in publishers unleashing a number of bad or mediocre memoirs on the public. So perhaps it's not surprising some folks are wary when a buzz-heavy memoir gets released.

Two such books hit the stands recently, David Small's National Book Award-nominated (but kids only!) Stitches and the Ken Dahl's Monsters. The good news is that both books deserve at least some, if not all, of the positive attention they've been getting.

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Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs: Robot 13 #2

Robot 13 #2

Robot 13 #2
Written by Thomas Hall; Illustrated by Daniel Bradford
Blacklist; $3.99

After I read Robot 13 #1 I wrote that "I hope it's not a surprise or an insult to say that Daniel Bradford is no Mike Mignola. He's very good at imitating the style and the colors, but I think I'll enjoy him more once he finds his own groove. His work already has a sense of humor that breaks the boundaries of his inspiration, so I know it's coming. I'm looking forward to it."

Pleased to say that - if issue #2 is an indication of the direction Bradford's going with his art - that seems to be happening. The work's more detailed this time around and he does some really cool things with the colors, especially in the flames of the giant phoenix that attacks Robot 13. That sense of humor I mentioned last time is on display again too, but even larger. As a couple of guys are watching the robot-bird fight, their faces are almost manga-like in their expressiveness.

The first issue looked like Bradford was working hard to mimic Mignola. Even though he was mostly successful at that, it's great to see him relax with this issue and do his own thing. Robot 13's design will probably always be reminiscent of Mignola, but he's drawn more naturally this time. And because of that, he feels more like a real character.

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Everyone's A Critic: A round-up of comic book reviews and thinkpieces

Exit Wounds

• Eddie Campbell has been offering one great critique after another lately, first on
Asterios Polyp and David Mazzuchelli's ability to convey a sense of place, and then on Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds ("The impressive thing about Exit Wounds is that there is a keen organizing intelligence at work at every single level of it, from top to bottom."

• Jeet Heer ruminates on the concept of the "proto-graphic novel," i.e. graphic novels that were published before the term became ubiquitous.

• It's a few days old, but this review of R. Crumb's Genesis adaptation by Bill Kartalopoulos is still well worth your time.

• I don't always link to Tucker Stone's "Comics of the Weak" round-up, but this one's worth noting, as he mimics the prose of "controversial French writer Michel Houllebecq," which leads to bits like this one on Batman:

Gotham City has but two types of people-those who wreak violence, and those who have violence wreaked upon them. The first type are all men, for the most part, although the occasional lesbian is permitted participation, as long as she has previously received approval from whomever currently holds the title of most cruel. (Said participation is usually considered an important story point, further cementing the little respect or interest that these stories have for women--there are few other places in fiction where "the bitch can stay" is considered interesting or dynamic.

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Robot reviews: Comic strips aplenty

The Upside-Down World of Gustave Verbeek: The Complete Sunday Comics 1903-1905
Edited by Peter Maresca
Sunday Press Books. 120 pages, $60.

Forever Nuts present: Frederick Burr Opper's Happy Hooligan
Edited by Jeffrey Lindenblatt
NBM, 112 pages, $24.95.

Dread & Superficiality: Woody Allen as a Comic Strip
by Stuart Hample
Abrams, 240 pages, $35

The daily comic strip isn't the only art form to rely upon repetition and formula -- plenty of TV shows and films, not to mention pop songs, do the same -- but certainly a lot of strips, both modern and ancient, trade heavily on familiarity to garner interest and appeal. Beetle Bailey will always be a goldbrick and Sarge will always hector him. Dagwood will always get harassed by his boss and have a sexual fetish for overly large sandwiches. The Family Circus kids will always make cute malapropisms and stay under the age of 10. It's not just the simplicity of the base concept that attracts, it's also the fact that said concept will never, ever alter in any broad, significant fashion that charms readers. Blondie may get a catering job, the Family Circus mom may change her hairstyle, but the core concept remains the same. It's that seemingly endless cycle of repetition and the minute variations that cartoonists attempt to find within that limited scope, that seems to keep (or at least has kept until now) people returning to the funny pages day after day.

Three new comic strip collections underlined for me how integral that feeling of repetition and familiarity has been to the inner workings of the comic strip over the years. (At least as regards the gag strip. Certainly more story-based strips like Terry and the Pirates don't rely on such constant repetition of formula, though certainly you could argue it's present, just to a much lesser degree).

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