Author: Andrew Wheeler

Ralph Azham, Vol. 1: Black Are the Stars by Lewis Trondheim

Ralph Azham does not live in the same world as Dungeon . We’re pretty clear on that; this is not Terra Amata. But it’s the same kind of world: whatever Joann Sfar brings to the mix for Dungeon, that style of fantasy seems to be the way Lewis Trondheim operates. (There are some lesser similarities to his “McConey ” books, too.)

So: we have a central smartass in a big, complicated world, full of anthropomorphic people who plot and scheme, with magic that really works and can do world-changing things but has very specific rules that need to be learned by trial and error. We have authorities who are corrupt or outright evil or just low-key incompetent – this is no surprise, since everyone is out for themselves, pretty much all the time.

Ralph Azham is our central character: another vaguely duck-like hero, like Herbert in Dungeon Zenith. He grew up in an isolated, unnamed mountain village out in the wilds of the kingdom of Astolia, the son of an engineer, Bastien, who moved there to help the locals prepare for a potential attack by the Horde of Vom Syrus. (We don’t know a lot about the Horde or its leader: they’re clearly real, and have been rampaging around the outskirts of this kingdom for decades, but we don’t know who Syrus is or what his goals are. I have a very strong suspicion at the end of this book, though.)

In this world, some children turn blue on the night of a double moon – this is a sign they have a magical power, and are Chosen Ones, or potential Chosen Ones. In Astolia, Couriers take those children off to the capital, but they don’t generally seem to come back.

Ralph is blue. He can tell, infallibly, how many children someone has had. It seems to also include knowing who else was involved in the creation of those children, even if they were never born. And a Trondheim smartass can get himself in a lot of trouble, especially in a small village, knowing who knocked up who, who had a quiet abortion, who had older siblings that are now dead, and so on.

Ralph was taken by a Courier. He came back, a failed Chosen One – so he thinks. Since then, he’s become the village scapegoat and annoyance – he hasn’t helped this at all, to be honest, but he’s not treated well at all. The truth about Chosen Ones, though, is much worse, for a lot of people.

Ralph Azham: Black Are the Stars  collects the first three album-length books of the series. There have been twelve books in French, published between 2011 and 2020, and, as far as I can tell, that’s the complete story: this is not something open-ended like Dungeon. The first book, Why Would You Lie to Someone You Love? , was published in a slightly altered form by Fantagraphics in 2014, but this volume is the first time the rest of the series has been translated into English. Three more English omnibuses are already scheduled, through next March: if all goes well, the whole series will be published within a year. (But the lesson of every Trondheim comic is: things never go well.)

What I’ve just told you covers roughly the first half of the first book. From there, the Horde does come, and violence ensues, as always in a book like this. Obviously, Ralph will leave his village to see the wider world. He will meet other Chosen Ones, and learn what happens to Chosen Ones. There will be magical items with very specific uses that are deployed in inventive and surprising ways. Ralph will learn that he has another, larger power, and two other people from his village – a kid, Raoul, and Claire, who is Ralph’s age – will also turn blue and travel the path of the Chosen One. There will be powerful people who are not who they seem, or who are corrupt and scheming, or both at once. There will be antagonists who are very hard to kill, and ordinary people who are far too quick to die.

The story is about Ralph’s family, maybe. Or about what it means to be a Chosen One. Or the usual overthrowing-the-corrupt story of epic fantasy. Or maybe just surviving in a dangerous world full of people with weapons and magic. This is only a quarter of the way through: it would be premature to say what the whole thing means at this point.

But it’s prime Trondheim: smart fantasy adventure with a sharp edge, pitched only slightly less cruel than Dungeon, accessible to smarter, slightly older kids but with depths only adults will recognize. I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of it.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Goldilocks and the Infinite Bears by John McNamee

Discovering something creative that you like is fun. Learning that it’s over is sad. But what if you’re not sure if it’s over or not?

Pie Comics was (is?) a strip by John McNamee. It used to be on GoComics . It used to update regularly on Tumblr . The Tumblr page mentions a website that doesn’t resolve. But there have been three collections of the series, all of which seem to have come out after the last update to the Tumblr page.

My theory – which is mine, and what it is too – is that McNamee did this strip regularly in the mid-teens, and collected it mostly after it ended, and that there will be no more. But I’d be very happy if that theory were wrong.

(I also can’t find anything else by McNamee since the last Pie collection in 2020, so I hope he’s working on a bigger story that will come out very soon and make us all happy and laugh and rejoice.)

I’m thinking all this because I recently found the first collection, Goldilocks and the Infinite Bears , semi-randomly in my library’s digital-reading app and just read it. (The other two, unfortunately, are not also in the same app, so I’ll have to search for them elsewhere.)

So: yay! This is funny and neat, in a vaguely Tom-Guald-ian way – McNamee’s art style and his tone are both in the same vague space that Gauld has been working – and collects a hundred or so comics, mostly single-pagers (with a few epic two-pagers), mostly four-panel, and entirely about fairy-tale, folkloric, and other fictional creatures.

(Note: the Judeo-Christian God does show up a few times. I stand by my immediately previous statement.)

McNamee has a simplified, fun style that makes everything more amusing, and his writing is zippy and smart, too. I am happy that there are two more books to search out, and mildly optimistic that McNamee (who seems to still be pretty young – he references being in college in the Aughts) will do more Neat Stuff in the near future. If you, too, like funny comics about fairies, wizards, Godzilla, zombies, dragons, demons, Death, unicorns, Superman, and their ilk, you’ll want to check it out.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Skulldigger and Skeleton Boy by Jeff Lemire, Tonci Zonjic and Steve Wands

Nigrum Malleoleum est omnis divisa in partes tres.

Some Black Hammer books have numbers in the title: those are the main series. Before the book I’ll be complaining about today, there’s been Secret Origins , The Event , Age of Doom 1 , and Age of Doom 2 .

Some Black Hammer books have the words “Black Hammer” in the title, but no number: Streets of Spiral , the Justice League crossover . These are side stories about the whole team.

(Black Hammer ’45  is deeply confusing in this schema, but it actually fits in the next category. The “Black Hammer” referred to in the title is not the same as the other books, for maximum what-the-fuck-age.)

And some Black Hammer books are about other people in the same world, whose stories may intersect the main gang of mopey superheroes or may not obviously do so. (This is superhero comics: all stories intersect in the Grand Summer Crossover eventually.) Before this book, there was Sherlock Frankenstein , Doctor Andromeda , and The Quantum Age .

Skulldigger and Skeleton Boy , as the title implies, is in the third group. For those who weren’t counting along on their fingers, it’s the eleventh collection. It is written by Jeff Lemire, creator and co-owner of the whole shebang, with stylish gritty art by Tonci Zonjic (often breaking into double-page spreads, which are gorgeous and well-designed but made me wish I wasn’t reading the whole thing on a tablet) and lettering by Steve Wands.

Skulldigger asks the superhero question: “what if the Punisher instead used a metal skull on a chain to kill people, instead of guns? Wouldn’t that be totally awesome?!” It is perhaps the most ’90s idea ever to have been thought up twenty years later, and would have fit comfortably into either DC or Marvel’s mid-90s grim and gritty eras – which, of course, is the point of all of the Black Hammer comics: they’re meant to seem like that stuff you read long ago while at the same time being new stuff you can buy on Wednesdays.

(The argument about how all superhero comics have been doing this more and more consistently for roughly the past forty years is left as an exercise for the reader.)

Now, in any realistic universe, Skulldigger would be shot dead extremely quickly, but so would Batman, so he gets the same dispensation. At the time of the 1996 of this story, he’s been around for maybe a decade, and is seemingly the preeminent crimefighter in Spiral City.

So he’s not-Punisher. There’s also Detective Reyes, who is not-Rene Montoya (literally: tough female detective, lesbian, always fighting with her captain, olive skinned – I do wonder if Lemire does that on purpose or just can’t be bothered to change the details), one of the other viewpoint characters.

The third viewpoint character is Matthew. He’s twelve, and we see his parents get murdered in front of him in the first scene, with a particular overhead view that will make you think they just came out of a Zorro movie. (Black Hammer is many things, but it is never, ever subtle.)

Anyway, the story here is: random thug kills Matthew’s parents. Skulldigger arrives, kills random thug. Matthew becomes non-verbal at witnessing his parents’ murder, doesn’t respond to any questioning by cops including Reyes, is institutionalized. Reyes is obsessed with finding and stopping Skulldigger; her boss literally says “he’s killing the right kind of people, don’t waste time on him.”

Look, do I need to give all of the story beats? Skulldigger gets a sidekick. If you’ve been paying any attention, you know who that is. It’s not a good idea, but he at least seems to be devoted to training the kid so he doesn’t die immediately.

Oh, and meanwhile, an ex-superhero – formerly the Crimson Fist, now civilian Tex Reed – is running for mayor, on a “let’s get back to happy superheroing” platform. (He’s an unpowered guy, maybe a bit more Moon Knight than Batman, and now fiftyish and retired for ten years or so.) The Crimson Fist’s old nemesis Grimjim – who is not anyone in particular from another superhero universe, but is deeply in the Batman Villain template, something of a mash-up of Joker and Ra’s al Ghul conceptually and Killer Croc visually  – has to break out of not-Arkham Asylum to cause trouble.

Tex and Grimjim and Skulldigger have hidden connections, of course. Every superhero story is about the same people tripping over each other over and over again; there’s never anyone new.

It is grim and it is gritty and it is violent: this is supposed to be a 90s-style story, from the dark and decadent age of superheroing. We are meant to deplore that at the same time we revel in it.

Frankly, this is one of the most successful Black Hammer stories to date, in my mind: it tells a specific story, beginning to end, without getting caught up in extraneous crap. It isn’t burdened with the core series’ weird reluctance to move from the initial premise, and has the strengths of the whole series to date: Lemire’s naturalistic dialogue and strong plotting, and great storytelling art.

It’s still a pastiche grim-n-gritty Punisher/Batman comic that has no good reason to exist, mind you. But it’s successful at the things it sets out to do.

One last point: the descriptive copy for this book describes it as a tragedy. It is not. Not in any traditional sense, not in any way. “Tragedy” here seems to mean “a story in which sad things happen,” but that’s most of them. This is not a tragedy, not for Skulldigger or Skeleton Boy or Det. Reyes, or even for Grimjim. And a tragedy has to be a tragedy for the main character.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Delicates by Brenna Thummler

I don’t want to say there’s always a sequel…but, these days, it’s the way to bet. Anything that has any degree of success will have a follow-up, telling more of the story or doing as much of the same thing as possible.

So when Brenna Thummler’s first graphic novel, Sheets , was an unexpected success a few years ago, what would her next project be?

Yes, obviously: the direct sequel Delicates , which came out three years later (in 2021). And, though I might sound dismissive, Delicates does all the things a good sequel should: it starts from the end of the first book (rather than rehashing the same story/issues/ideas), adds more details and richness to the world, examines slightly different (but related) concerns, and moves the overall story forward.

Sheets took place, in retrospect, in the fall of Marjorie Glatt’s seventh-grade year. (We didn’t know then exactly how old she was; we did roughly know the time of year.) Delicates jumps forward a bit, to the start of another school year. Summer is ending: Marjorie is about to enter eighth grade.

In the wake of the events of Sheets, Marjorie has a new friend group, mostly because the boy she has a crush on, Colton, is part of it. The rest are all girls, and at the center is Tessi, a mean-girl-type who controls the conversation and is low-key angry most of the time. Tessi has her own issues, mostly with a mother who is trying, in a well-meaning way but not one that has much chance of luck with the terminally sour and image-obsessed Tessi, to engage and lighten up her daughter. But we’re not really on Tessi’s side – we don’t have an antagonist here as we did with Mr. Saubertuck in Sheets, but she’s pretty close.

Wendel the ghost is still Wendel, still basically the same. That’s usually the deal with ghosts, of course. If you want to change, you have to do it before dying.

And there’s a new central character: Eliza, the girl on the cover. She’s the oldest daughter of a favorite teacher at this middle school, has just been held back to repeat eighth grade, and is clearly on the spectrum somewhere. (No specific diagnosis is given in the book: she’s just who she is. But she has obsessions and verbal tics, and I may just be more prone to notice those things.) Her particular obsessions are photography, ghosts, and their overlap: she spends a lot of time trying to photograph ghosts.

She doesn’t know ghosts are real – or, rather, doesn’t know how ghosts actually work in Thummler’s fictional world. She’s pretty sure ghosts are real. I don’t know if she pictures them as Charlie Brown kids-in-sheets, but that’s what they are here.

Delicates is partially a book about fitting in: Eliza is too weird, too specific, to really fit in, Marjorie is weird but can cram herself into a shape Tessi & crew will be friends with, and Wendell only really has Marjorie, so he hates any ways she changes that makes her less friendly to him.

It’s also, like Sheets, a book in which death looms, always off the page and never specifically mentioned, but there all the time. All of Marjorie’s family is still dealing with her mother’s death: her father is engaging more with life now, but seems to be running around trying to do all the things his wife used to do, to keep all the old plates spinning, and to tightly control the few things he feels competent to control. Her kid brother Owen is doing something similar, on the level of a first-grader. And Marjorie, of course, is trying to be a “normal” teenager – have a friends group, be part of the group, maybe have a boyfriend if she can ever figure that out.

By the end, they’ll all have to be themselves instead of the people they’re trying to be. This isn’t exactly a book with a moral, but the story it’s telling aims in that direction: be who you actually are, and let other people do the same. Those are excellent things to remember, and Thummler tells a good story around them.

This is most obviously for people around Marjorie and Eliza’s age – the ones figuring out who they are, alone and with their parents and with their friends and with any potential boy/girlfriends. But, like all good YA, it’s a fine story even for those of us who have been pretty sure who we are for a few decades now, since we sometimes can still tend to forget.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The Girl from the Sea by Molly Knox Ostertag

Morgan Kwon knows exactly how her life is going to go. She’s going to get through highschool, being exactly the person she seems to be now, with exactly the same friends, and then she is going to get off Wilneff Island forever, go to some big city, and begin her real life as the person she really is. All she has to do is keep everything packed up in the right boxes until then, and everything will be fine.

Narrator: everything will not be fine

Morgan is at the center of Molly Knox Ostertag’s mid-grade graphic novel The Girl from the Sea , and I think every reader – even those on the young and thoughtless end of that age-band – will sense that Morgan protests too much, that she can’t keep all of the boxes separate. Her parents have already separated when the story starts, so that’s one box broken up…and that, of course, is the point: she’s trying to control the things she thinks she can control, because something so central to her life was just totally uncontrolled.

In the opening pages of Girl from the Sea, Morgan slips on some rocks and nearly drowns. She’s saved by what she thinks is a cute girl, Keltie. And, if we readers are paying attention, we notice one very big box that she’s trying to keep separate and closed: that she likes girls. She thinks that’s got to stay hidden until she gets away, that it can only be a piece of her eventual adult life.

But Keltie is not just a cute girl: she’s something more special, and already loves Morgan. She’s loud and pushy and wants things and can show Morgan different ways of viewing and living her life.

Some of that is a metaphor for coming out. But a lot of it is literal: Keltie is a selkie, transformed from seal to girl, and with a lot of the traditional folkloric issues. (Ostertag plays a bit with reader expectations for some of these, I think, especially Keltie’s skin, but she’s not retelling any specific story or doing the usual folkloric stuff here.)

So: this is a story about whether Morgan will let herself unbend, if she will let herself break through her own boxes and be the person she actually is right now. And what will happen along the way: do her friends and family react the way she fears they will?

Oh, and Keltie has something pretty important she needs to do, too – she’s not in human form for nothing. Oh, sure, she’s crazy about Morgan, too – that definitely is part of it – but she has a mission for her people as well, and that’s not optional.

I liked Girl from the Sea better than Ostertag’s Witch Boy  books – those were fine, but had a slight whiff of formula about them, a sense that they were Teaching Lessons and Being Good Models and all that. Girl from the Sea feels more personal and specific, tied to a specific place Ostertag knows well and centered in a deep but new relationship. I also like the way it implies conflicts that never happen – there are things that are huge in Morgan’s head but don’t really exist in the real world. It’s still very much a book for younger readers, so people even more cynical and world-weary than me might find it too too, but it’s the kind of book I love to see for young readers, the kind that tells them they can be exactly the people they really are and that they have good, loving places in the world that they just need to find or make.

That may not always be true, in the actual real world. But it’s an important story, and it needs to be said as often as possible.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Paris by Andi Watson & Simon Gane

I read this for almost entirely extraneous reasons, if that matters.

I’d seen the original edition of Paris  when it was first published, and wrote about it for ComicMix. (Be careful with that link; much of ComicMix’s back catalog seems to have been infested with hijackers, and there may be malware lurking about.) I vaguely knew that there was a newer, slightly longer edition, and had a perhaps even more vague idea of reading it, eventually, since I’ve been re-reading Andi Watson’s books over the last few years.

This is written by Watson, by the way, but the art is by Simon Gane. It’s the only time they’ve collaborated so far; Watson usually draws his own books. (Though they do have a new book together, Sunburn, coming up this fall.)

None of that is why I read Paris. And, looking back, it’s completely random that I did read it, only five days after this new edition was released.

I was browsing through Hoopla, the app my library uses, trying to find something to read that day. I’d just come back from a movie The Wife dragged me to. Now, it was not a bad movie, in any sense, but it was predictable and obvious and thuddingly normalizing in all sorts of ways: a well-executed thing that I didn’t mind watching but cared almost exactly nothing about. So I wanted something of a palate cleanser: something like that in superficial outlines, but more subtle, with better storytelling, and maybe something subversive about it. To be blunt, something with a bit of romance, maybe set in Paris in the 1950s, maybe without a moral of “common people are magical beings who make everyone’s lives better with their cheeky clear-headedness”.

Thus Paris. My original review covers the story (assuming you can navigate the “click Allow now!” pop-ups to read it): young American painter Juliet is in Paris, studying at the Academie de Stael in genteel poverty. Young British heiress Deborah is also in Paris, chaperoned by her horrible Aunt Chapman and having the most boring time possible in that city.

Juliet is hired to paint Deborah; they have a spark. Circumstances intervene to snuff out that spark, possibly before many readers have realized it is a spark, and not just a friendship. Will they meet again, and re-connect?

That’s the story. There’s some additional complications, such as Juliet’s lusty roommate Paulette and Deborah’s swishy brother Billy, but it’s a story about these two women, and whether they can manage to get together despite everything.

Gane has a very detailed style, that, to my eye, is influenced by both mid-century illustration and the lanky grace of high fashion. I don’t know if he always draws like this, but it’s a lovely choice for this story, making the City of Light a place of glamor and bustling life, real in its own way but idealized, the perfect vision of a romantic city of the past.

Like most of Watson’s work, the story here is low-key; you need to pay attention. It also helps to know a little French, since some phrases are untranslated until a set of notes at the end. But they’re all clear in context to readers who do pay attention.

The first time around, I thought of Paris as minor Watson, but I’ve revised that estimation upwards this time around. Gane’s art adds something unique and wonderful, and Watson is at his most subtle and allusive here, trusting his readers to see this story and not need to be told everything. You may need to read Paris twice to properly love it, but you don’t need to wait fifteen years between readings as I did.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Girl by Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo

There’s all kinds of ways to build a creative program, but the two big ones are to follow a specific editorial plan (superhero comics, TV shows for teens & twentysomethings, R&B music) or to work with a curated group of popular creators and let them do their thing.

The first is most common; you tend to see the second in more highbrow media areas, like prestige publishing imprints and classical music…and, maybe, that means they’re already in a sub-genre, but just don’t like to think of themselves that way.

In the ’90s, DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint was undergoing a slow-motion transformation. It formed out of a cluster of very popular comics that were mostly Type One (superhero comics taken seriously!) but were often presented to the public as Type Two (all British writers! all the time!). But the core superhero universe was on its own path to take itself seriously, in a very different and much more tedious way (pouches! grimdark! no captions!), and the premise of Vertigo was being undermined by that, and by the relentless demand for ever-more-complex and ever-more-consistent continuity everywhere.

I don’t know if Vertigo was consciously looking for a new Type One structure, but they eventually found it in High Concepts, SF and fantastic premises (Fables, Ex Machina, Preacher, Y: The Last Man) that were roughly Classy Television in comics form, typically owned by their creators rather than being sharecropped superheroes, and featuring enough FX that they wouldn’t have been feasible in a filmed medium. It took a while to get there, though, so the ’90s are an interesting period for Vertigo, full of quirky sub-imprints (Vertigo Visions! Vertigo Voices! Vertigo Verite! V2K! Vertigo Pop!), as the editorial team tried to figure out what their remit was and what kind of books they could do that would also be hugely successful.

Girl  was in the middle of that searching: part of the Vertigo Verite burst, it was a three-issue miniseries from 1996 that I don’t think actually got collected until this 2020 edition. Written by Peter Milligan, one of the core Vertigo writers (launch title Shade and a bunch of shorter-run things) and drawn by Duncan Fegredo, the same team from the three-years-earlier Enigma .

It’s not a superhero comic. It’s not fantasy or SF, either: pure realistic drama. And, despite the first issue feinting hard in the direction of “I’ll tell you something crazy, and then tell you what was really going on,” it settles down quickly to a more-reliable narrator, maybe because Milligan realized he only had seventy-two pages or so to tell the whole story. Or maybe not: there are some things here that are “real” at the time but retroactively not, or maybe vice versa.

Simone Cundy is a fifteen-year-old British girl, living in a crappy town (neighborhood? city?) she calls Bollockstown. She’s one of those smart, prematurely cynical kids, and was born into a lower-class family happy to live up to all of the stereotypes. She, though, wants to Change the World, or at least Get Out. Or maybe just Do Something.

She’s fifteen, living in an urban hellhole (at least: that’s how she sees it. Everything here is how she sees it). So it makes sense.

Girl is the story of some stuff that happens to her. It’s psychological realistic, though not necessarily realistic in the pure, kitchen-sink sense. It’s pretty weird, I mean: not weird in the Weird Tales sense, but weird in the “weird kid” sense. Simone is a weird kid – I should say a weird young woman, since her story is largely about sex and death, as such stories often are.

I’m not convinced her story is entirely successful: there seem to be several warring story-structures that pop in and out of place as we go along, and it sprawls an awful lot for something less than eighty pages long. Also, Simone is very much a type, and that type was all over the place in that era: the depressed semi-Goth girl was as common as salt-water taffy for about a decade and a half.

And I’m not going to be any more descriptive about the things that happen to her, or that she causes: if you read this, you should discover them as you go.

Simone has a fun voice, even if it’s a very familiar voice of the era. And this is a short book. So you might as well read it, if any of the above sounds intriguing: the Vertigo transition, the Goth-chick vibe, the weird story structures, the heavily-captioned style that was quickly going away by 1996.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Black Hammer/Justice League: Hammer of Justice! by Jeff Lemire, Michael Walsh & Nate Piekos

In the life of every licensed superhero comic, there will come an especially blessed day: Baby’s First Crossover.

This, my dear hearts and gentle people, is that blessed event for the unnamed super-team of Jeff Lemire’s Black Hammer comics. [1] (See here for the previous volume and here for the first volume, if you’re unfamiliar.) Oh, you may quibble that they have already met quite a lot of other superheroes and villains, fighting and teaming up and generating a lot of Licensable Content. But all of those previous encounters were from Lemire’s universe as well; those calls were all coming from inside the house.

For the first time here, someone else deigned to have a play-date with Black Hammer, to let their toys play with the Black Hammer toys, to touch the dolls’ faces together to make them kiss. Those heroes are the current Justice League, the someone is DC Comics, and it is a bit like Barbie and GI Joe in the hands of an hyperactive eight-year-old.

The story is Black Hammer/Justice League: Hammer of Justice!, possibly the laziest possible title for this story. (The exclamation point might have taken a moment of thought; thus the “possibly.”) It’s written by Lemire with art by Michael Walsh and colors by Nate Piekos; I imagine someone on the DC side kibitzed editorially to keep the JL on-brand as well.

Amusingly to me, the Black Hammer gang are still their core ’80s incarnations while the JL is the current (I think) modern incarnations. Sure, separate universes don’t need to line up their timelines exactly, but wouldn’t it be more fun if Lemire had used the contemporaneous bwa-ha-ha era League? Or, possibly even better, the Detroit League? Ah, well.

In any case, the plot is the usual: a Mysterious Someone appears to both teams in their normal milieu (the BH gang grumping on the farm; the JL punching Starro) and swaps their places for making-mischief reasons. In a twist that is never explained, the JL immediately believe they’ve been on the farm for ten years, and mope about that, but the BH gang are aware of actual reality and spend most of their time squabbling with other Justice Leaguers.

The plot from there is…well, there’s that squabbling and moping, which takes up a lot of pages, then the inevitable Reveal of the Mysterious Someone, which is played up big but is one of the few obvious candidates and doesn’t really lead to anything, then, finally, as the play-date is ending, all of the dolls need to go back into their respective boxes separately, so they can stay in mint condition for the collector’s market. Lemire does throw out what may be a hook for another story, but it would need to be another DC Crossover, so let’s hope he gets good grades in school and does all his chores, so maybe there will be another play-date.

At the end of the book, we get what seems to be thirty pages of variant covers for the five issues of this miniseries, and I have nothing coherent to say about that.

I cannot take a single thing about Black Hammer seriously for a second, even while reading it. It is so deeply pastiche that there’s nothing substantial about it. If you are less cynical about superhero comics than I am, you may enjoy this on a more normal level. But it’s well-done – the characters talk like human beings and are drawn in a solid modern style – so it amusing on whatever level you can connect to it on. Black Hammer is not bad; it’s never been bad. It’s just deeply pointless and creepily incestuous.

[1] Black Hammer was a guy; he’s dead now. His daughter later becomes the new Black Hammer, and another woman who looks very much like her becomes another version a hundred years later. And I think there was one before the main guy, but Lemire hasn’t told any stories with the old dead one yet. This is superhero comics; names are just trademarks, and trademarks have to be used or they will be lost.

The team, on the other hand, has no trademark, no identity, since they’re drafting on the Black Hammer name and it’s far too late to create something new now, ten books in.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Bionic by Koren Shadmi

Victor is a geeky teenager, mildly bullied by the jockish types at his high school – but also smart and skilled enough to be rebuilding old game consoles to make a serious side income. He’s obsessed with Patricia (Patty), who is gorgeous and rich and blonde, in the way of a million boys before him, and has about as much chance as they do.

Maybe less of a chance, since I’d estimate nearly 5% of the panels of Koren Shadmi’s graphic novel Bionic  are of Victor looking at something, usually Patty, and if he’s not gaping open-mouthed and frozen every time, well, he’s close to it. This is very much a book from the point of view of a tentative young man who doesn’t know what to do, what to say, or even what he actually wants. It’s full of moments of Victor’s confusion and indecision and longing and desire: those moments are the core of the book.

There’s more to Bionic than that, of course, as the title and cover imply. Victor and Patty have an almost-relationship: they sit together for at least one class (this isn’t clear) and he adopts a pet from the shop where she works. That’s probably where it would have stayed, with Victor whining to his friend Gus about his crush and Patty getting deeper into her relationship with probably-not-as-much-of-an-asshole-as-he-seems Brian.

But then something happens.

Patty’s father is CEO of a tech company, and…you see that cover? That’s Patty, after the something that happens. Hence the title. She’s suddenly not as popular as she was: Brian isn’t interested in a half-robot girl, and her former BFF is now a queen bee angling for him and being casually cruel to Patty. But, then: these are all teenagers. They are casually cruel in any case, all of them, almost all of the time. Maybe they will outgrow it eventually, some of them.

There are other layers, but that’s the core: cruel teenagers, body transformation, sexual desire, with a bit of technological and capitalist paranoia lurking around the edges. Victor and Patty are both difficult people to like: Victor is horribly passive and whiny; Patty is oblivious before her change and horribly moody afterward. This could have been the story of how two imperfect people helped each other, but that’s not the story Shadmi wants to tell here: it’s much more conventional than that, with Patty as the figure of lust (in spite of her bionics? or, for Victor, even more so because of her bionics?) and Victor as the perpetually yearning horny teen boy.

There are a lot of conventional elements here, I have to admit. I haven’t even mentioned Patty’s relationship with her father, which checks off a couple of clichés by itself. The SF elements are equally as shopworn as the teen-crush plot, though both are handled subtly and well. But if you think you’ve seen this story before, you probably have – it’s that kind of story.

Shadmi has a soft art style, mostly mid-range colors (maybe with colored pencils?) over mostly thin, not overly dark lines. His people are a bit cartoony: the boys, especially the geeky boys, more so than the girls. Or maybe I mean the attractive people are less cartoony.

I don’t think Bionic is as new or different or interesting as perhaps it wanted to be, or thought it is. But it’s a solid story, set in the intersection of teen-drama and SF, that uses its familiar elements solidly and has a lot to admire.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Little Nothings, Vol. 3: Uneasy Happiness by Lewis Trondheim

If I wanted to be dismissive, I’d describe this book as collecting daily watercolor comics pages about French cartoonist Lewis Trondheim’s vacations in 2007.

And that’s not untrue, but it misses the point. The whole Little Nothings series, as far as I can tell, is about quotidian life: small moments in a day that are interesting or evocative or representative. Trondheim didn’t seem to do this diary comic every day, and I haven’t seen any explanation of when he did do it. My guess is that he did it when he wasn’t working on something else: in between other projects, on vacations or trips to comics festivals or just random days at home. Maybe because he did these in small notebooks, so they traveled more easily than his usual art setup; maybe for entirely different reasons.

In any case, he stopped doing these a good decade ago – again, for a reason I don’t know. There were seven books of the series in French, as Les petits riens, and four of them were translated into English. This here is the third one, Uneasy Happiness . I read all four back around the time they were published, lost them all in my 2011 flood, and recently went back to get new copies of The Curse of the Umbrella  and The Prisoner Syndrome .

There’s not a lot to say about the substance of diary comics: each page is a moment in a particular day. Trondheim does regularly construct sequences, especially when he’s somewhere warm on a holiday, but those are 2-5 pages at most, loosely linked with the same concerns, each one again a specific moment or interaction on a different day. It’s like anyone’s life: some things recur, or make us remember what happened yesterday, or we see the same things and have the same thoughts again and again.

Trondheim’s art is quick but assured: I get the sense he did these without fussing about them, and he mostly doesn’t go in for serious page layouts – just individual vignette panels, unbordered, almost scattered across the page, with lines that are never quite straight (I don’t think Trondheim has ever used straightedges or cared about being precise and level) and colors built on top of them.

In this book, Trondheim travels to Italy, Portugal, Reunion Island, and Fiji (including what seems to be some other islands in the same region of the Pacific), as well as Paris and some other destinations within France. He rarely explains why he’s going anywhere – the Angouleme festival each year is obvious, but mostly he’s just off somewhere with someone, and sometimes he shows himself at a signing (so it must be a comics festival) and sometimes he doesn’t (so it might or might not be) and sometimes he shows himself with his family (so it’s clearly a vacation).

The Fiji trip in particular is in company with another cartoonist, who I think is named Emile from some postcards on the last page of the book. Trondheim draws him as a panda, and never explains who he is or why the two are traveling together: was this another festival? did they just both want to go to Fiji and their families didn’t? were they working on a project together and could call this “research” for tax purposes? We don’t know, as we rarely know the details of other people’s lives. We just see some moments, react to it however we do, and then move on.

I found Trondheim a great diary cartoonist, and I wish both that he did more of it and the rest of his diary comics that do exist were published in English. But the things I wish for only very rarely come true. At least we have four books of Little Nothings: they may be little, but that’s not nothing.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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