Comic Book Resources

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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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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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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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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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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Robot reviews: Prison Pit & The Squirrel Machine

Prison Pit Book One

Prison Pit Book One
By Johnny Ryan
Fantagraphics Books, 120 pages, $12.99

The Squirrel Machine
by Hans Rickheit
Fantagraphics Books, 192 pages, $18.99.

These are not nice books. They are not for children. Or people with easily upset nerves. Or stomachs. Or are prone to nightmares. Or who hang paint-by-numbers pictures of kittens with big eyes on their walls.

You get the idea. These books do not want to be your friend. They do not seek your approval, or love. They do hope to entertain, though not at the expense of having to be friendly or pleasant. Mainly what they seek to do is freak you out. If you're the sort of person who likes being freaked out (and I am, on occasion), or can admire craftsmanship and artistry despite the high proportion of freak-out material (and I can), then perfect. If not, oh well. You were warned.

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Robot reviews: The Big Kahn

The Big Kahn

The Big Kahn
Written by Neil Kleid, art by Nicolas Cinquegrani
NBM, 176 pages, $13.95.

Here's the thing. I have a friend who fell in love several years ago with a wonderful, intelligent woman. His parents, however, refused to recognize their relationship and threatened to disown him if he married her. Why? Because she didn't practice the same religion they did. Eventually they thankfully relented and embraced his now-wife, but it resulted in several years of ugly tension and discomfort for everyone involved, to put it mildly.

I have another friend who has two sisters who were both disowned by their father because, you guessed it, they married outside of the church. In the one case the sister married a Mormon. In the other, she just abandoned the church altogether. My friend has told me several times that her dad's decision all but rendered her family asunder and caused scars that are still linger these many decades later.

So when one of the main characters in The Big Kahn, an up-and-coming young rabbi, has this huge guilt complex because in a moment of weakness he slept with a gentile girl, I'm not really feeling his pain. In fact, I want to punch him in the nose.

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Robot reviews: Crumb's Book of Genesis

Crumb's The Book of Genesis

The Book of Genesis Illustrated
by Robert Crumb
WW Norton, 224 pages $24.95.

It's a pretty safe bet that whatever book you pictured in your feverish little brain when you heard the phrase "Robert Crumb adapts Genesis" will never match, or perhaps even compare to, the actual product. When surrounded by as much anticipation and hype as this book has been, (virtually every blogger on the block has declared this the de facto "book of the year," or at least the "book they're most looking forward to") there is bound to be some disappointment.

That's especially true if what you were expecting was anything more than the all-too-literal, note-for note interpretation that Crumb has ultimately produced (indeed, except for a phrase here and there, he seems to have left the sacred text intact). If you were hoping to see some sort of sly, satirical take on the Bible, sorry, but that's not here. If you were expecting googly eyes and big feet, go elsewhere. There is the occasional bit of flop sweat, but otherwise, Crumb keeps his cartoony vibe in check. There's not so much as an ounce of irony to be found.

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Robot reviews: Another lightning round

Love and Rockets New Stories #2

Comics, comics, comics. Lots of 'em. Teetering in a pile. Let's try to whittle it down a bit.

Love and Rockets: New Stories #2
by The Hernandez Brothers
Fantagraphics Books, 100 pages, $14.99.

For the first time in a really, really long time, Gilbert's contribution to this venerable series left me completely cold. Oh, the first story -- involving Guadalupe's now teen-age daughter -- is decent enough. I liked how Gilbert told the story obliquely, using only dialogue from before and after the critical events to let the readers figure out what's going on. The main story though, Hypnotwist, is a bit of a dud. It harkens back to his experimental, Fear of Comics days, but has none of the juice or disturbing oddity of those works. it's just a series of seemingly interconnected, but ultimately random images, that never gains any narrative steam or acquires an ability to captivate.

Jaime's contribution on the other hand, is a whole 'nother kettle of wax entirely. I've gone on record several times here saying how much I love his Ti-Girls saga and how it seems to "get" the superhero genre in ways that the Big Two just don't seem to anymore. All that holds true here and more, with a wonderful, fitting ending for our heroines. I wonder what he'll do for an encore.

Reviews of Fables, Flight and more after the jump ...

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Robot reviews: Superman: Secret Origins #1

Superman: Secret Origins

Superman: Secret Origins #1
Written by Geoff Johns. Art by Gary Frank and Jon Siball
DC Comics, 48 pages, $3.99

This is what, the third or fourth time that DC has attempted to update or revamp the Man of Steel's origin? Is it just me or does that smell like a bit of desperation on DC's part, like they really don't know how to get more people to read the Superman books and are madly flinging stuff to the walls in the hopes of getting as wide a readership (within the comics-reading public of course) as possible. "Maybe it will work this time!" Either that, or they just really don't care and wanted to throw Geoff Johns a bone seeing how he's a fan favorite and all these days.

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Robot Reviews: Those wacky Asian countries and their crazy comical books

X-men: Misfits

X-Men Misfits Vol. 1
Story by Raina Telgemeier and Dave Roman. Art by Anzu
Del Rey, 192 pages, $12.99.

Grafting the X-Men onto a shojo manga template isn't a half-bad idea, considering the soap opera antics of the series back in its heyday (and indeed, even today). The problem lies in that Telgemeier and Roman have grafted too much of the template onto this comic, so that none of the characters have any room to move beyond their narrowly defined roles. It's way too slavish to shojo cliches -- Anzu apparently never met a chibi she didn't like. There's some amusement in seeing Angel gussied-up Bishonen style or Beast looking like Totoro's second cousin, once removed, to be sure. But its adherence to shallow formula is just as bad as the dull exposition and fight scenes that make up most modern X-Men comics. Too bad. I was really hoping for something that blended the best aspects of both Western and Eastern comics, not something that swapped out one set of cliches for another.

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Robot Reviews: Thrizzle and Red Monkey

Tales Designed to Thrizzle, Vol. 1

Tales Designed to Thrizzle, Vol. 1
by Michael Kupperman
Fantagraphics Books, 160 pages, $24.99

The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book
by Joe Daly
Fantagraphics Books, 112 pages, $22.99.

It's tough to be a humorist these days. Time was when simply pointing out the money-grubbing crassness of our culture in a clever way was enough to ensure laughs. Not no more. These days we're well aware the stuff we like is junk. We're far too hip to be told that the emperor wears no clothes. Surrounded by an increasing array of banal and inane pop cultural detritus, what can the modern satirist do but mock the utter absurdity of it all?

That's the path taken by two cartoonists in the Fantagraphics stable -- Michael Kupperman and Joe Daly, though they travel down that path in very different ways.

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Robot Reviews: From Wonderland With Love and Why I Killed Peter

From Wonderland With Love

From Wonderland With Love: Danish Comics in the Third Millennium
Edited by Steffen P. Maarup
Fantagraphics Books, 176 pages, $29.99.

Why I Killed Peter
by Alfred and Olivier Ka
NBM, 112 pages, $18.95.

Sexual abuse, particularly pedophilia, is a tough subject to handle in any medium, let alone comics. It requires a delicate touch, a sympathy for the victim and the supporting cast (though not necessarily the perpetrator), an understanding of all the conflicting emotions involved and a willingness to go for broke -- to express the sheer horror of being violated both mentally and physically at such a young age in as honest and unflinching a manner as possible.

Two recent (or relatively recent at any rate) comics attempt to broach the unbroachable, but in wildly different ways. That both are successful has less to do with the grave severity of the subject matter than the particular talent involved and the unique perspectives they bring to their stories.

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