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.

Dungeon, the Early Years Vol. 2

Dungeon, the Early Years Vol. 2: Innocence Lost
by Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim and Chris Blain
NBM, $12.95.

What really strikes me about this series is how it's steadily and almost imperceptibly moved from light parodic farce to dark melodrama. The more we learn about the characters and the more we see of their eventual futures, the more the characters' initial sunny disposition and smart-ass attitude seems like foolish naiveté.

In this case, said naivete belongs to Hyacinthe, the first keeper of the Dungeon. Having donned a dashing secret identity in the first Early Years volume as the Errol Flynn-ish Night Shirt, he quickly finds his ideals compromised again and again as he's placed in one difficult ethical dilemma after another. By the end of the book he's become a corrupt official who secretly leads a dangerous guild of assassins by night, while inadvertently bringing about the destruction of the city he's supposed to protect by day.

If I've made this sound like a dour slog, my apologies. It's anything but. The Dungeon series remains a thrilling, sharp read, in this case thanks largely in part to Blain's stunning art work. Certainly this isn't a good jumping-on point for newcomers, but it's well worth getting through the series to arrive at this point. You'll be surprised where the journey takes you.

Fat Freddy's Cat Omnibus

The Fat Freddy's Cat Omnibus
by Gilbert Shelton
Knockabout Press, $29.99.

For Shelton/underground comix completists only. It's basically a thick collection of one-page cat jokes, a little saltier than your average Garfield to be sure, what with the constant references to litter boxes and defecating in shoes, but it's cat jokes all the same. The longer stories are the best, as Shelton gets to engage in a bit of satire that's notable mainly in the way it careens from subject to subject like a pinball. I liked, for instance, how a story about the cat's battle with the apartment cockroaches becomes first a cold-war satire, then whiplashes to Hollywood, then just goes balls-out crazy. That was fun. But in between those fun stories are a lot of tired cat jokes. And I'm honestly not that crazy about cats.

Joe and Azat
by Jesse Lonergan
NBM, 104 pages, $10.95.

A young peace corps volunteer heads to a vaguely authoritarian Central Asian country and becomes friends with one of the locals, an ever-optimistic schlub, who's always coming up with get-rich quick schemes. And, as you might imagine, it's through this relationship that the volunteer learns about himself and the wide world outside his safe home.

The book suffers somewhat from Longergan's vague descriptions of the country and culture, so that no real sense of place is ever conveyed, and Lonergan isn't a skilled enough artist to provide a lot of background detail that might enrich the story's telling.

That being said, this is still an entertaining book, mainly due to Longergan's deft characterizations, both with Azat and his extended family, especially his abusive drunkard of a brother. Lonergan may be vague on a number of details, but the dialogue nevertheless rings true. The fact that it doesn't overstay it's welcome helps too. It gets in, makes its points and leaves. I wish more comics would follow that example.

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.

The story itself (adapted from a novel by famed French crime writer Jean Patrick Manchette) is simple: an innocent, middle-class man who leads a life of little consequence finds that a pair of violent thugs are trying to kill him. He and the reader don't know why initially. It's only about 3/4 into the book we are able to piece together the various threads from the story's opening and find out why our hero George Gerfaut has become a target.

Before that point, we watch the man go through an almost literal hell, enduring tragedy after indignity after tragedy before coming out the other side changed, but stuck in stasis; transformed but unable or unwilling to do anything but return to his old ways. It's noir by way of existential hell, which, let's face it is very French.

This is certainly an admirable book, tightly plotted and full of great cartooning moments. Tardi has certainly never been one to shy away from violence and the key scenes have a gory, brutal energy that's as powerful as it is upsetting. But I think the book suffers a bit in that Gerfaut, despite his ordeal, never comes across to the reader as anything more than a cardboard stand-in. Tardi draws him with the same bored expression at the beginning and end of the story, with little variation in the middle except for moments of extreme fear or disgust. As a result, it's hard to empathize or delve into Gerfaut's character too much. Despite his journey he seems to remain in the same emotional stasis at the end that he was in at the beginning. No doubt that's part of the point, but it's hard to find such a character identifiable, much less likable, making Blues seem more like an exercise or treatise than a story.

You Are There

A much more lively a protagonist is Arthur There, from You Are There, a seminal graphic novel Tardi did with cartoonist and writer Jean-Claude Forest (best known for Barbarella) that apparently was quite influential on a generation of artists when it was first published in 1979.

There is an easily perturbed young man, given to wearing a long morning coat and bowler hat, who lives atop a narrow but labyrinthine wall that snakes along and divvies up a countryside known as Mornmont. There's ancestors originally owned Mornmont but lost the property to a group of distant cousins, leaving There with little to do but engage in perpetual lawsuits with the landowners and operate the gates that allow access in and out of the area, charging a toll in some twisted form of revenge.

And, as you might guess by this point, we're a long ways away from the blunt simplicity of West Coast Blues. Indeed, You Are There is a heavily dense and convoluted book. A variety of subplots abound, many of them intersecting with There's own woes, such as Julie the weird but lovely girl There falls head over heels for, and the president and various politicians who attempt to use Mornmont as a pawn in their attempts to maintain political power.

All this is presented with a decidedly absurdist and surreal air. There's imagination frequently manifests itself in quite literal fashion, so that, for example, when he talks about "perking up an ear," we see a giant human ear blocking his path along the wall. Then there's things like There constantly talking to his mother on a phone that doesn't work, or the fact that his lawyers happily collect their fees in a big trash can. You Are There constantly skirts the edge of comedy -- it knows the language and does the dance -- but never becomes the outright farce it so clearly and consistently hints at evolving into.

Still, I liked You Are There, even if, despite it's manic behavior (and again, as in Blues), I felt a bit distanced at times from the proceedings. Several publishers over several decades have attempted to bring the glory that is Tardi to the philistine Americans. It's nigh-impossible to say if this newest attempt will stick at all. I can easily see readers dismissing work like this as "too arch" or  "too French" just as much as I can see them embracing thick, sloppy, black style and detailed compositions. I certainly hope it's the latter. Whatever flaws these two books might posses, they and Tardi remain too interesting and rich to be easily dismissed.

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.

Even dedicated Bloom County fans may be surprised to discover the number of strips, especially in the early years, that up till now have never been collected. Apparently the strip's initial publisher, Andrews McMeel, was rather picky about what could and couldn't be published. The newly discovered material, therefore, not only gives fans a chance to find strips they haven't read in years, if ever, but also provides a useful glimpse into the strip's early development.

What's interesting to me is how long it took Breathed to find the right cast and tone for the strip. The first volume is filled with characters who make their appearance, tell a joke or two, and then quickly bow out to make room for the next hopeful. Remember Mr. Limekiller? Pops Popolov? Major Bloom? Bobbi Harlow? Ashley Dashley III? Otis Oracle? Of course you don't. Milo and Steve Dallas are here and fully developed, but it would take awhile before Breathed would have Opus, Binkley and the rest of the cast firmly cemented into place, and you can sense a bit of flailing about here (which Breathed fully cops to).

In many ways, the strip was the definitive child of the '80s, and these early strips drop tons of references to events like the Royal Wedding, the air controller's strike, and the dread possibility of nuclear war. Thankfully, Breathed and the editors leave helpful notes in the margins to aid readers unfamiliar in such things as, for instance, Dr Pepper

Despite the pop culture references and Breathed's furtive searching for a place to land, the strip remains fun and witty despite the passage of time. By the end of the book you can see the strip starting to coalesce and close the cover knowing the best awaits.

The Family Circus Vol. 1

You can't really say that about the Family Circus. Whatever merits the strip initially had have been drowned in a mire of utsey-cutesy mannerisms, mispronounced words, dotted line paths, dead grandpas and "Not Mes." Now largely put together by Keane's grown-up kids, it feels more like a placeholder on the comics page than anything else.

But hey, here's a surprise! In its first few years, the Family Circus was not only good, it was downright funny! Keane proves to be a witty and observant cartoonist and based upon the material in this first volume it's not too hard to see why it gained such popularity.

It's also interesting to note the differences between this strip and what it became. The dad is not a bespectacled Keane stand-in but a half-lidded, big nosed, perpetually weary nine-to-fiver who seems just as annoyed and perplexed by his kids as delighted in them, if not more so. Though Mom looks more or less identical to her current self, she's a lot more curvaceous and top-heavy, a cartoon style of the time perhaps.

As for the kids themselves, they remain initially a nameless, effervescent bunch, not necessarily prone to mischief as much as a tad hyperactive and eager to explore their world, rules be damned. Much of the gags then, deal with the parents desperately trying to maintain some semblance of order only to be constantly upended by their progeny. In some ways it's a gentler version of Doug Wright's Nipper strips, and revels in the same sort of observational humor. It's not as funny as Wright's work, perhaps because Wright goes for the jugular a bit more and he's a more talented craftsman, but these early Family Circus strips are for the most part a funny and sharp bunch, easily comparable to the best magazine gag cartoons from that period. If nothing else, we should be grateful to IDW for pointing out just how good this strip once was.

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 ...

The Book About Moomin

The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My
by Tove Jansson
Drawn and Quarterly, 20 pages, $16.95.

I'm a sucker for die-cut books -- anything that plays upon the whole "Oh, it looks like it's part of the page, but look closely and you'll see it's a window into the next one" thing gets extra points from me. And D&Q has already won me over on Jansson with the wonderful job they've done reprinting her Moomin strips, so it's not like I had to be won over with the company's first entry in their new kids Enfant line. The only real surprise here is Jansson's lovely use of limited color and composition on these expansive two-page spreads. So yeah, it's a great book that will be sure to please the young and old at heart. Buy it, read it, enjoy it.

Outlaw: The Legend of Robin Hood
by Tony Lee, Sam Hart and Artur Fujita
Candlewick Press, 21.95.

This is a rather odd and needlessly dark and depressing retelling of the Robin Hood tale. Honestly I'm really not quite sure what to make of it. Are kids really clamoring for some sort of gritty, psychological portrait version of this story? Isn't the whole point of Robin that he's carefree and dashing and not burdened by guilt? Shouldn't the art be featherlight, colorful and fun, with detailed, intricate backgrounds that convey a sense of place instead of having everyone constantly drawn in half-shadow or worse and clumsy coloring that seems splotched on by a computer? Maybe it's my own nostalgia talking, but I can't imagine young readers preferring for an instant this version of the character over one of the countless other variations that already exist, both in and out of comics.

Amulet, Vol. 2

Amulet Book Two: The Stonekeeper's Curse
by Kazu Kibuishi
Scholastic, $21.99.

There's nothing particularily surprising or original in Kibuishi's ongoing fantasy series. It follows the plot and themes of countless other young adult books -- there's an evil dictator , a bad guy who's conflicted about the side he's working for, a talisman that grants its user fabulous powers, assorted wise men, amusing sidekicks and two plucky kids who find themselves tested by an inheritance they'd rather not have.

But if Amulet treads upon familiar ground, it nevertheless remains a captivating and enchanting read, largely due to Kibuishi's skills as an artist and storyteller. He paces the tale exceedingly well, gives his characters just enough detail and back story to make them seem more than cardboard cut-outs and never gets so bogged down in the mythology of the world he's created that the reader becomes bored or disinterested. Really, Amulet is an excellent lesson in how to deliver a satisfying genre exercise that both stands apart and with the crowd. If I were interested in creating something similar I'd be studying the hell out of this book.

Vermonia Vol. 1: Quest for the Silver Tiger
by YoYo
Candlewick Press, $9.99.

As if to underscore my point about how the importance of execution comes this dull, confusing, ill-thought-out manga about a group of skateboarding teens who turn out to have the necessary power or inheritance or what-have-you needed to save a lost world. The whole thing is a muddled, inane mess, and really only serves to show just how much effort and skill went into Amulet.

Stone Rabbit: Deep-Space Disco
by Erik Craddock
Random House, $5.99

This, on the other hand, I liked quite a bit. It's got a nice, manic energy and Craddock has a clean, crisp style that suggests many years spent in the animation trenches. It's basically about a put-upon rabbit who constantly gets ridiculous capers. In this particular case that means getting mistaken by space aliens for a dangerous interplanetary killer while the real killer assumes his identity on planet Earth.  It's replete with the type of one-liners and non-sequitar jokes you find in most children's cartoon TV programs these days, but thankfully it doesn't feel the least bit pandering or smarmy. Plus, the jokes are actually kinda funny.

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 ...

Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu, Vol. 1

Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu: Vol. 1
by Junko Mizuno
Last Gasp, $17.95.

Mizuno's style can best be described as "Hello Kitty with fangs," or, perhaps more accurately, "Hello Kitty disemboweling Keroppi." Her attractive, super-cute art works at cross purposes with her more savage content, usually involving predatory, mentally disturbed women on the make for husbands, raw meat or babies, or perhaps all three.

Pelu is the start of what looks to be Mizuno's longest work yet, at least in English. It's the episodic story of a tiny puffball/ovum (that's right, I said ovum) who leaves his planet paradise in search of true love and perhaps the chance to procreate. From then on it's a series of sad/darkly funny adventures as Pelu encounters one dysfunctional woman after another, more interested in abusive boyfriends or unattainable dreams than poor Pelu. A lot of these tales generate a genuine pathos for their characters and there's a not-so-subtle critique of gender roles going on here, though Mizuno is too good an artist to keep her work from becoming strident or didactic.

Certainly it helps that she's got a decided appreciation for the grotesque and downright bizarre. How many other comics vomiting a veritable tsunami of stomach acid over a cliff, thereby destroying the much valued poodle ranch next door and bringing misery to all? I would hope the answer to that question is none. Though I haven't read Gotham Divas lately.

The Color of Heaven

The Color of Water and The Color of Heaven
by Kim Dong Hwa
First Second, $16.95 each.

This is fast shaping up to be the the front-runner in the "most underrated series of 2009" category in the "Things I Give A Damn About" awards. I can't say I'm terribly surprised. As I noted in my review of the first volume, Hwa's tale of a young woman's sexual and romantic awakening is too risque to appeal to the teen manga-reading audience but too coy and elusive to attract serious adult readers.

But for those willing to walk that line between the two extremes, Hwa's story remains compelling right up to its happy but slightly bittersweet ending. There are moments of real, genuine eroticism here, such as when young Ehwa has a dream of chasing her loved one as his clothes slowly come off, or an even more daring sequence where she learns the joys of masturbation via a friend, But the books never feel smutty or pandering. And if its sexual metaphors seems (a man diving into a cool pond; a hammer striking a bell) seem more than a bit obvious at times, Hwa invests his characters with a good deal of heart and thought, so that the relationship between mother and daughter, as well as between the daughter and her suitor, feel true. For all of it's flower metaphors and sidelong glances Hwa's trilogy is as honest a depiction of sex, adolescence, parental relationships and downright longing as I've ever come across in comics.

Red Snow
by Susumu Katsumata
Drawn and Quarterly, 248 pages, $24.95

A woman falls in love with the spirit of a chestnut tree only to see it chopped down. A traveling monk becomes the unwanted play thing for a group of lonely house wives. Anothe rmonk dreams of sexual conquest. A battered wife puts up with her husband's alcoholism and abuse because that's the only time he can sexually gratify her.

As my poor attempts at encapsulation suggest,, this collection of short stories by the late gekiga artist Katsumata deal with the give and take between the sexes, set against the backdrop of a rural, feudal Japan. Katsumata makes no bones about the second-class status and hardships that women in this particular culture must endure, but has no interest in being one-sided. The women here can be just as abusive and manipulative as the men, they just aren't always as successful in getting their way, and their fall can be a lot greater.

None of this is overt. Katsumara delivers all his stories in sleight-of-hand style so that the book's themes only seep into your brain slowly, and with multiple readings. This is a book I'll be pulling off my shelf and musing over for some time to come.

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.

Stitches is about author David Small's peculiar and rather bleak childhood. The child of emotionally distant and withdrawn parents, Small found himself constantly trying to maneuver around them, avoiding their wrath, particularly that of his mother, who seemed to capable of deep, dark and ugly mood swings. A sickly child, Small was frequently subjected to x-rays by his radiologist dad, which, in his teen years resulted in his contracting throat cancer. The amazing part is that Small's parents let it go untreated for three and a half years and, worse still, kept the nature of his illness a secret from him.

It's his parents' seeming indifference to his plight, both physical and mental, that mark this book and give it its heft. Small's later anger at his folks when he discovers their duplicity as a teen is palpable, and it's clear a lot of that anger still lingers in sequences where his mom goes on a shopping spree, while he gets steadily more ill.

If there's a problem with the book it's that Small pulls up too many loose threads. Issues, like his awkward relationship with his father, are brought up but never explored satisfactorily. His older brother surely must have had some influence on his upbringing, but he's barely a supporting character. He hints at being bullied by classmates, at the demons that hounded his mother, and even his maternal grandmother, but he keeps a certain distance from direct revelation. That does give the book a sense of mystery, of terrible family secrets best left unexplored, but it also can make for a frustrating reading experience .

But if the book feels unfocused at times it remains a captivating read nevertheless. Small has a great visual acuity no doubt honed by his many years as a children's book illustrator, and he is able to offer a number of stunning sequences, particularly when attempting to express his own fragile emotional state at the time. At one point, for example, in attempting to explain how art provided a respite from the outside world, Small draws himself literally diving into a piece of paper. In another he shows his final emotional release with a caring therapist by portraying a rainstorm slowly, over several pages, as it moves across the neighborhood.

It's sequences like those, and many others, that make Stitches ultimately work and worth recommending. Small's story is certainly shocking and moving enough to be draw in an initial crowd, but it's his telling that makes you want to stick around and listen till the end.

Monsters

Ken Dahl's big trauma, meanwhile, happened to him when he was an adult. Monsters, you see, is not about parental problems or awkward adolescence but about sexually transmitted diseases. Herpes to be specific.

As topics go, it's certainly about as intimate and personal as you can get. Few people would want to go public with such a revelation, let alone talk about it over dinner with friends. But Dahl proves to be a fearless and funny storyteller and Monsters makes for a hugely entertaining read.

The book starts by asking the sentence "Imagine never kissing anyone on the lips again" before segueing to Dahl and his then-girlfriend ensconced in young-couple bliss. Soon, however, said girlfriend starts to have problems "down there." A trip to the doctor reveals it's oral herpes. Worse yet, Dahl probably gave it to her, possibly through the frequent cold sores he contracts.

And it's here that Dahl begins his slow, horrible spiral downward, as his relationship flounders and eventually self-destructs. He tries to remain virtuous, and avoid sexual contact, but the life of a celibate is a tough one (in one of the books best sequences he literally turns into a dog in heat as he watches beautiful women pass by on a park bench). He frustration and self-pity lead him to hooking up with a woman at a party and he conveniently "forgets" to tell her about his little problem. It takes a lot of education, self-flagellation, poor medical choices (one of the concurrent themes of the book is the lack of adequate medical care in America) and frustration before he finally meets a woman willing to see past the disease and accept him. And then there's the final punchline, a bit of delicious irony I wouldn't dream of spoiling.

Dahl balances all these painful, awkward revelations with information about the disease itself (did you know that about 75 percent of people in the U.S. have herpes?). Usually, this sort of dry, "here's the facts" delivery would slow the book to a halt, but Dahl keeps his wits about him and makes such sequences as lively as the more dramatic parts of his story. Anyone looking for ways to discuss large amounts of abstract information in a readable way should closely examine this book.

As with Small, Dahl's visual vocabulary is his main strength. He has a real gift for caricature that serves him well here. Even when he's drawing a party crowd, everyone seems like a unique individual, or goofball as the case may be. He even gives the disease -- which he draws as a spiky little protozoa -- a personality. It chides him, goads him and occasionally completely envelops him, depending upon his state of mind.

Given the nature of its subject matter, Monsters could easily turn into an unreadable self-pity party. But Dahl is too smart -- and funny -- cartoonist than that. It's that sense of humor, and even downright playfulness, that ultimately makes Monsters such a delightful, warm read. And that's certainly something I never thought I'd say about a book about Herpes.

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).

The Upside Down World of Gustave Verbeek brings to light the work of a very early comic strip pioneer; someone who's name and work has been frequently mentioned but -- unless you've got a collection of yellowing newspaper in your closet -- has only been glimpsed at in the occasional Bill Blackbeard anthology.

Verbeek himself has been something of a question mark apparently; little was known about him up till now. The son of Dutch missionaries, he was born and grew up in Japan before emigrating to Paris and later America. As a result of his early travels much in the book is made of the Eastern influence in his work. It certainly is present in his choice of colors and gentle tone, though his work has a decided Western sensibility nevertheless.

The central focus of the book is Verbeek's most well known(at least today) strip, The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffarooo. This was a Sunday strip where the basic premise lay in the novelty of its design. You first read the story normally, left to right, but then had to turn the paper 180 degrees to get to the conclusion. Turned on their heels, the drawings would take on new shapes: Muffaroo would magically turn into Lovekins and vice versa. Clouds of smoke would become a giant bird. A little old man would turn into a monster. Someone climbing a tree would now be falling, and so on.

That was the basic idea anyway. Oftentimes you really have to stretch your imagination and squint a bit to pretend that the "woman in a big cloak and turban" is actually a woman in a big cloak and turban and not the upside-down chicken it looks like. Little Lady Lovkins' hat never looks makes for a convincing chapeau, but instead resembles an upside down pair of pants flailing in the wind. There are occasional visual surprises, but all too often the upside-down trick is all too obvious, or results in an odd blob that resembles neither thing it's supposed to be.

To ensure the strip's constant turnabout novelty, Verbeek followed a pretty simple premise. Lovekins and Muffaroo go walking, they come across something strange, are assaulted by a creature, and then everything rights itself and they go home. There's no character development to speak of, even compared to other strips from the same time. Narrative comes second to the thrill of formalism. In order to carry the strip's central, formalist conceit, characters, dialogue and extended narrative had to give way to a simple repetitive formula. As a result, the strip's charms -- and the strip is charming, make no mistake -- remain fleeting and ephemeral. As fun as Upside-Down is, shapeless blobs or no, it also remains curiously trapped by its premise.

In addition to Upside-Down, the book also contains samples of other Verbeek work, including Loony Lyrics of Lulu, in which a little girl who thinks up amusing limericks about peculiar animals while her father is routinely attacked by them, and Terror of the Tiny Tads, another "kids strip" that ran for much longer and at the time seems to have been more popular than Upside-Down.

The plot in Tads is just as basic as in Lulu and Downs: a loose group of scraggly youths (tweens initially who regress later to tots) come across a strange creature that's some sort of cross-breed between an actual animal and an inanimate object, like the elephantbrella, that either menaces them or becomes their friend, or, on the rare occasion, becomes their meal. Again, as in Upside-Down, the basic conceit is enough for Verbeek to repeat ad infitum, with little variation.

Like most Sunday Press books, this is a lavish affair, printed at the original newspaper size and featuring several essays as well as illustration material Verbeek did for magazines, advertisements and other outlets. The end result is a handsome, high-quality book that will be of great interest to comics scholars both amateur and professional, but will probably not have much of an audience beyond that.

Contrast Verbeek's high-minded, storybook fantasy with that of Frederick Burr Opper's Happy Hooligan. The premise is even more of a fixed constant than in Upside-Down. To wit: Happy attempts to help somebody, say by aiding them in taking off their coat or covering a puddle for a passing lady, only to have it all go horribly, horribly wrong, to the point where even the person he tried to help is smacking him over the head and declaring him to be the most horrible person alive. And then the cops come and drag him away to jail.

This happens every single time, without fail. He can be in the U.S. or England, with friends or alone, I think there are one or two instances where he manages to escape capture or his gloomy cousin ends up bearing the brunt of the assault, but those are really the exceptions that prove the rule.

This was the sort of lowbrow humor that the middle classes at the time allegedly frowned upon, preferring more wholesome antics like Verbeek's. Certainly Hooligan, with his Brooklyn accent, precarious tin-can hat and ragged clothing was both a parody and symbol of the new, downtrodden immigrant. Perhaps that identification was part of the strip's appeal though early 20th century readers probably just enjoyed watching him get hit on the head repeatedly.

Of course, then there's the fact that Hopper was an agile, clever cartoonist, who knew how to milk a formula for maximum effect. There's an immediate, visceral delight to these Hooligan strips and that not a lot of strips from that era can match. Verbeek's strips have charm, but they merely amuse, whereas Hooligan's antics are genuinely funny.

Dread & Superficiality

But compare, if you will, Hooligan's slapstick comic strip shenanigans with that of Woody Allen. Yes, that Woody Allen. Believe it or not, but he had a comic strip that ran in newspapers from 1976 to 1984, and has now been collected in a rather hefty coffee table book entitled Dread and Superficiality.

Allen honestly didn't have much to do with the strip, it was the brainchild of one Stuart Hample, an illustrator and cartoonist who knew Allen back in his early, bitter years of struggle, and suggested the idea to him years later when Hample was desperate to get out of his nine to five job.

Like Hooligan and Upside Down, Inside Woody Allen as it was known, follows a pretty rigid formula. Here, though, said formula is almost entirely verbal, emblematic of the changes wrought upon the funnies pages in the ensuing century, where a greater reliance on "intellectual humor," a smaller reliance on artistic craft due to the ever-shrinking space on the comics page, forced cartoonists to simplify.

Hample is a decent enough cartoonist, with a nice, big-nose, big-foot style (think Mel Lazarus with a bit more craft) but he doesn't do anything with his art. The drawings -- most of them spartan in design -- are all secondary to the jokes, which often read like a stand-up routine. Compare that to Hooligan or Upside, where detail crowds the page and everything is in constant motion (with Verbeek it's a lyrical motion, but still).

The strip basically reflects the "early" version of Allen. It's Woody the put-upon schlemiel, the nebbishy loser. It's an image that was starting to wane even in the years this strip was running, as Allen attempted to shed that persona in films like Stardust Memories and Interiors. (Considering that eight years after the strip ended the comedian's image would be tarnished by his scandal with Mia Farrow and her stepdaughter, one would say it came to a close just in time).

In the forward, Hample notes that Allen constantly sent him suggestions, urging him to push the strip in interesting directions, try extended storylines, add more characters, and generally not be afraid to push the envelope. Hample, however, was facing opposite pressure from the syndicate, who wanted a safe strip that played on Allen's familiar qualities but would still be acceptable in America's heartland. Looking over this book, it's easy to see which side won out. Inside Woody Allen is a fitfully amusing, but ultimately bland strip that never varies from its gag-a-day formula. Here is one instance where the insistance upon repitition resulted in rote material.

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.

Let's begin with Prison Pit, which is nothing less than a continuous, no-holds barred, violent assault on the eyes. It is literally one god damned, bloody fight scene after another, with only the barest smidge of dialogue and plot allowed to get in the way. The book's genius lies in Ryan's sheer nerve and imagination in setting up these battles; he constantly ups the ante in the most bizarre and inventive ways possible. It's certainly the first time I've ever seen pus used as a deadly weapon.

The story, what there is of it, involves a convict, known only as C.F., being exiled to a harsh planet. Right away, Ryan sets the tone as C.F. attempts to break out by grabbing a guard and threatening to kill him. "I don't give a shit," the other guard replies. "I hate that asshole."

And then suddenly both guard and convict go spinning Alice-in-Wonderland-like, all the way down the Grand Guginol rabbit hole. Once upon the planet they encounter a world of continuous horror and violence, where the body and its various excretions are mutable things.

Ryan's love of body functions goes into full gonzo mode here. Apparently influenced by some of the more extreme action manga around, each evisceration is merely an opportunity for a surreal transformation. Intestines that wrap you up like snakes or sentient bandages. Semen turns into giant monsters. I already mentioned the pus. Include C.F.'s has an apparent fondness for literally consuming his enemies (when he says "I'm going to eat your fucking face off" he means it) and you've got a book where body horror extends far beyond the repulsive into the truly sublime and inspired.

It's important to note that Ryan is not trying to be cute or funny here. There's humor in Prison Pit, but emerges out of the characters and situation. There's none of the ironic distancing present in Ryan's more well-known series Angry Youth Comics. He's completely serious about kicking ass this time around.

But it's not just the straightforwardness that's different here. Ryan's whole sense of pacing seems to have gone up a couple of notches. While he never attempts any formalistic tricks that would get in the way of the story, he nevertheless varies his style considerably compared to his earlier works. From tracking shots to full-page spreads to pull-backs and slow reveals, Ryan shows that he's absorbed and acquired a sense of comics pacing and storytelling that few of his contemporaries have. Despite the gore, or perhaps, because of it, Prison Pit is a fantastic, accomplished work.

The Squirrel Machine

But if Prison Pit is open about its display of guts and gore, The Squirrel Machine, would prefer to hint. It's not that it's squeamish, mind you, it has no problem with strewing entrails all over the floor. It would just rather tease you a bit, make you sweat for panel or two before discovering the menace lying just around the corner. Unfortunately, whereas Pit feels like the work of an accomplished artist at the top of his game, Machine feels like the work a relative newcomer, noteworthy to be sure, but lacking a bit in structure and form.

The book deals with two young, eccentric brothers named Edmund and William Topor (note the last name). They live in an unspecified Edwardian setting and keep themselves busy by combining dead animal carcasses with various homemade appliances to create unique musical instruments. The townsfolk obviously tends to look down on this type of thing, especially after the one concert leaves bits of cow strewn across the fairgrounds. What really threatens to drive the brothers apart, however, is not the local bourgeois mentality but two young women, one rich and one dirt poor and possibly a simpleton.

And already you can no doubt mentally line up a checklist of themes to be explored here: Otherness, family, the transformative power of sex, the onset of adolescence and adulthood and how that can divide formerly rock-solid relationships, the artist and his relationship to the outside world, and how obsession can lead to insanity and cruelty.

But the book isn't really concerned with those themes as much as it is with the idea of exploration. Page after page features one of the brothers traversing through some odd, off-kilter landscape, either out in the woods, or, more often, in their home. Between the floorboards and walls seem to exist an endless array of paths and rooms, each cluttered with an endless array of junk, machines and the occasional disturbing, inexplicable oddity. The end result resembles more of an old-style adventure video game than a comic. It's Myst, directed by David Cronenberg.

This is all rendered in exquisite and sometimes exquisitely nauseating detail. Rickheit makes sure to no leaf or shingle or jelly jar label gets missed (you could potentially accuse him of an artistic sort of OCD). That eye for detail only serves to make the more grotesque parts, like when a human head is squished in a press and then has its brains  scooped out with a spoon, that much more nauseating.

Richeit is able to create moments of genuine dread, and he knows how to elevate tension, but the narrative doesn't really build at all. It's just corridor, surreal scene of horror or disquiet, corridor, repeat, the end. That's not to say isn't an artist worth noting -- he is -- but I kept waiting for the images in Machine to build upon each other towards some sort of satisfactory emotional climax, and they didn't. At least not to my satisfaction. Perhaps Rickheit freaked me out too much. Perhaps he didn't freak me out enough.

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.

Because, you see, author Kleid makes it very clear that the character's crime of fornicating outside of marriage is nowhere near as great as having casual sex with a shiksa, and that's something I have a big ethical problem with.

The Big Kahn is ostensibly about a Jewish family who discovers, only a day after his death that their father, an upstanding rabbi and community leader, was not only Catholic, but had led a previous life as a con man.

That's a pretty good hook for a story. I can imagine a number of ways a creator (or creators as the case may be) could examine the emotional repercussions such a revelation would have on a family like that. It would make for quite an engrossing, moving read.

Unfortunately, Kleid and Cinquegrani don't really seem all that interested in making that sort of book. Instead, they have produced a tedious comic where every answer is a foregone conclusion, especially when the question is "Can religion solve all our problems?" Keep in mind: I'm not necessarily objecting to Kleid's desire to cast spirituality and specifically Judaism in a positive light. Far from it. No, what I'm criticizing is his setting up of straw man arguments, his apparent refusal to really grapple with the questions he raises and his seeming inability to examine what the real honest consequences of the father's actions would be and how a real family would react.

I didn't believe a single thing in this book. Not the plot, not the characters, not their dialogue and certainly not their behavior. Ask yourself: Would the con man's brother really interrupt the funeral to announce in front of the entire assembly that their beloved rabbi was actually Catholic? Wouldn't he confront the family before or even after the service? Would the rebellious sister who's always shunned her religion really use this an excuse to rediscover it? Wouldn't it drive her further away? Wouldn't the youngest son act out in worse and more damaging ways than the occasional game of three-card monte behind the back school steps?

But perhaps my negative reaction to this book merely stems from dislike towards the goody-good eldest son and his guilt over not being "spiritually pure" any more. You see, I've seen and heard what the desire to be "spiritually pure" has done to families, and quite frankly, I want none of it. My sympathies lie elsewhere.

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.

That even extends to depicting the level of sex and brutal violence that these stories are so well known for. Surprisingly, for the guy who created the incestuous "Joe Blow," he stays well within an R rating, avoiding any explicit, full-on depictions of genitalia or coitus. He's not afraid to show naked bodies entwined or swords splitting heads, but he refuses to become too explicit, even when the text calls for it -- his depiction of Onan masturbating is shown from the side, with no spurting penis to be found. I suspect that Crumb's reasons for this have less to do with an attempt to cater to the religious audience or even the mainstream market place (they're going to be turned off by the blood and breasts anyway) than Crumb's refusal to pander. The overall tone here is one of respect, not towards the Christian or Jewish religion, but instead to the people and cultures and civilizations that inspired these stories.

The result a rich, introspective, at times frustrating, but ultimately rewarding book, that warrants repeated readings and forces the reader to re-examine their take on the first book of the Bible, as well as their attitude towards the artist himself.

There's a danger here in adopting such a straightforward tone. The book could have easily, without the author's intent, slipped toward the reverential, or ended up as some sort of stiff, Classics Illustrated-style adaptation that added nothing to the original work. And indeed some of the early "Creation" chapters have this "Picture Stories from the Bible" feel. But Crumb's ultimately too good an illustrator and storyteller for any of that nonsense. Even though he holds himself strictly to a mostly nine-panel grid and hardly ever breaks out into one of those full-page or even half-page spreads he's so good at, Genesis remains a compelling, dramatic account.

What Crumb ultimately seems to draw Crumb to these stories is the various inherent dichotomies of the text -- chaos versus order, barbarism versus civilization, secular versus spiritual and, in particular, men versus women. Anyone who's read any version of Genesis knows that despite being a patriarchal text, the women of Genesis play a large and important role. Crumb highlights and emphasizes this role through his art. It may surprise and even frustrate those who continually write Crumb off as a misogynist, but his Genesis offers a decidedly feminist spin. His sympathy is clearly with Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and the other wives in this saga (although he still portrays them in that gap-toothed, voluptuous, taut nippled style he's so clearly enamored of) .

Indeed, in his lengthy (and very insightful) notes, Crumb, in trying to explain some odd or contradictory passages, suggests that many of the notable women in Genesis, like Sarah, might have been priestesses, or come from matriarchal societies. Indeed, he posits that many of the Genesis stories could be myths from a matriarchal society rewritten and reshaped for a new, patriarchal paradigm.

Whether or not that is the case, I do think that these women's stories underline the limited but important role women played in these early societies. My wife has a saying that she likes to use when she's feeling rather irate or put-upon by the rest of the household: "If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy." That's a phrase that could easily see Sarah or Rebekah sputtering out in rage. Reduced to the role of childbearer, their sole importance centered on providing a male heir, it doesn't seem that surprising that these omwen would exert their influence whenever possible, as Sarah does in forcing the banishment of her handmaid Haggar, or in Rachel and her sister Leah's squabbles over their husband, Jacob.

As I suggested before, there's little interplay between the images and text. What the narration describes is usually what you see. If there's any subversion to be found in this book, however, it's in the characters body posture or facial expressions. Crumb is very subtle here, but his it's the minor details that make this book as striking as it ultimately is. If you get a chance to look at the book, notice the eyes of the character, what they're looking at and how. Note the disgust on Joseph's expression when he says "I'm not God am I?" Or how Dinah reacts when she's led out of the House of Shechem after her brothers have slaughtered everyone inside. Or the terror on Rebekah's face when she fears Esau may try to slay Jacob (and Isaac's henpecked look in the following panel, as Rebekah rails at him). It's in moments like these that Crumb is able to convey these character's inner humanity. They no longer seem like unrecognizable archetypes, but real flesh-and blood humans.

The story I found myself the most drawn to is that of Joseph, the boy with the coat of many colors, who is sold into slavery by his brothers only to rise above them all through his cleverness and guile. I found myself surprisingly moved by Crumb's depiction of this lost soul. His anger and pain upon rediscovering his treacherous brothers feels real and honest. The world Crumb portrays in Genesis seems like a harsh and unforgiving one, full of inky darkness and sweat and flesh, where brothers battle brothers, fathers battle sons and life, especially female life, isn't worth much unless you have cattle, grain and water and lots of people to do your bidding. Still, it is not a place devoid of nobility or honor, or perhaps even love, though that last one seems to perhaps the hardest to find.

This is a book that is going to frustrate and annoy many. It frustrated me at times. Crumb is striving for something much subtler here than he's attempted before and coming to it with a certain set of expectations is only going to lead to disappointment. Many critics will no doubt decry the book for going with obvious choices, like making God a big white guy with a long, flowing beard.

But Crumb doesn't seem as interested in completely rejiggering our perception of the text or playing against traditional norms as much as he is in skewing our perspective ever so slightly. There are insights to be gained in this adaptation. But it's all in the eyes.