Monthly Archive: April 2008

I was talking to Alex Robinson recently about a new book he’s doing about teenagers, and he said it was more challenging than he expected to write scenes with teens, because he wanted them to be as real as possible – not like the Hollywood stereotype.

In their new graphic novel Hazed, writer Mark Sable and artist Robbie Rodriguez head in the exact opposite direction. They start with the Hollywood cliche and give it a good shove further along into self parody.

The story follows suit, a mix of Heathers and Mean Girls with a dose of amphetamines. Ileana is a high school girl who hates the role sorority girls take on at college (as she sees it), but after going to college she decides to join a sorority and tear it apart from the inside.

This involves plastic surgery (extreme!), while those not picked for the sorority literally kill themselves (even more extreme!). The point that Sable wads up and crams down our throats is that sororities are awful institutions, unintentionally transforming women into image-obsessed sluts.

There is some kernel of truth to that, although the sorority girls I knew through college were nothing like the "sorostitutes" (my term) of Hazed. While the book is an interesting excercise in excess, it’s disconnection from reality (and some poorly constructed plot points) puts it in the company of Thomas Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, another book that failed in its aspirations to pull back the curtain on collegiate misbehavior.

You can read the first chapter of Hazed at MySpace Comics.

There are three stories in the new Little Vampire collection from First Second ($13.95). In the first, the little vampire makes friends with a living boy, Michael. In the second, the two overcome a bully. In the third, they protect a pack of dogs.

If those sound simplistic, they should. The stories spun by the French cartoonist Joann Sfar are quite basic in structure, making Sfar something of a European corollary to James Kochalka.

Inevitably, though, Sfar’s stories take on a rich feel, their depth created in a thousand little interactions among the characters and in the seemingly endless details scratched into the margins of panels.

Those details might strike some parents as shockingly severe. The monsters inhabiting little vampire’s home are more frightening and gruesome than cute (think Beetlejuice or Nightmare Before Christmas). And their actions mirror that ugliness.

One monster is obsessed with poop and even pushes around a wheelbarrow full of it (which eventually becomes a minor plot point). In the story of the bully, the monsters actually kidnap and eat the bully that has terrorized Michael (acting out MIchael’s dark fantasies). The story then becomes about using ghostly powers to return the bully to life.

Sfar uses those types of complications to add another layer to the rote tradition of story as parable, twisting cliches in ever more unexpected directions. He doesn’t treat children as innocent or naive, putting his many children’s books more in the tradition of the original fairy tales, not their Disney-fied reincarnations.