Andrew Wheeler

Maria M. by Gilbert Hernandez

Reviews
March 2, 2021

If you are me, you will have noticed that this post is not tagged “I Love (And Rockets) Mondays,” and that it is not appearing on a Monday. If you are not me, you did not notice and do not care.

But that tiny, silly issue of nomenclature is at very central to this book — Gilbert Hernandez’s full-length graphic novel Maria M. is not a “Love and Rockets” story. But it is a meta-Love and Rockets story, a comics version of a movie from his L&R world, like his previous stories Chance in Hell and The Troublemakers and Love from the Shadows . (And then there’s Speak of the Devil, which is really weird — supposedly the “true story” of the events that inspired a movie of the same name within the L&R world, so the true fictional version of something that we previously half-saw a fictionalized fictional version of.)

So this is a version of the story we’ve already seen part of in Poison River – but Hernandez is specifically telling us it is a packaged story, designed for a purpose, turned into fiction and cleaned up for a particular audience. I think it’s meant to be a ’90s movie set mostly in the ’60s, something from the Goodfellas era, in a world where that gangster era was more Latin than Italiano.

And, of course, all of Hernandez’s graphic novels are fictions. But the level of fiction in them is clearly important to him: that some are the “real” story and some are the sensationalized movie version. This one is a movie version, but Maria M. looks to be a relatively big-budget, moderately prestigious picture – probably not made with serious expectations of Oscars, but one that would be reviewed well and remembered fondly, that was a strong stepping-stone for its cast and crew and a sturdy, dependable, engrossing piece of entertainment for its era.

It is is that: Hernandez is good at making fictions that resemble other fictions. (Though, this time out, he isn’t deliberately trying to ape wide-screen images with his panels, the way he mostly did with the earlier movie-books; Maria M. is laid out like a “normal” Hernandez comic, with standard panel progressions and lots of variations in size.)

And the story itself? We are somewhere unclear. From Poison River, we know it’s an unnamed Latin American country, but here it’s left entirely unspecified. It’s probably that same country; it’s probably not the US. We begin in the late ’50s; Maria is a voluptuous eighteen and has no daughters. Unlike Hernandez’s Palomar and Luba stories, Maria M. is not about family – not about that kind of family, not about Maria’s family. It is about family in the way that all gangster stories are.

Over the course of the next couple of decades, she weaves in and out of the lives of a group of pornographers and gangsters, many of whom become obsessed with her. She never accomplishes much, never gets rich and famous the way she wants to be, never really gets out. But she does come to be happy with what she gets, as far as we see, which is not nothing.

The later parts of the story are largely about her relationship with the fictional version of Gorgo – I won’t spoil any of that, but I mean “relationship” in an expansive sense that is not at all equivalent to sitting-around-talking-about-our-feelings. This is a Hernandez book about gangsters, and a crime movie presented on the page: there will be gunplay and ambushes and torture and various horrors along the way. But Hernandez means this to be a movie, and he knows how movies are supposed to be structured: he knows how audiences want movies to end.

Maria M. is the most successful of the Hernandez movie-books, which is unsurprising. It was designed to be the capstone of them to begin with: the book that was actually based on a good, successful movie, with the biggest dramatic sweep and the strongest story. We should not be surprised that Gilbert Hernandez can make a strong, crowd-pleasing story when he sets out to do it; we should remember that he usually sets out to do different things each time.

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

Allergic by Megan Wagner Lloyd and Michelle Mee Nutter

Reviews
February 25, 2021

The thing to remember about young readers is that they’re young. Maybe not everything in the world is new to them (“Wow! Breakfast is oatmeal! I’ve never seen that before!”), but they’re seeing and experiencing new ideas and concepts and situations all the time.

It can be hard for those of us who haven’t hit that concentrated dose of newness for years to remember what that was like, but the best stories for young people embody that sense: they’re stories for people who are living newness all the time, building their selves day by day and figuring out what they think and feel about lots of things all the time.

So I try to keep that in mind with books for that audience: to think they way they would, and not the way I do. I’m probably not as good at it as I think I am, of course. But you always have to try.

Allergic is a graphic novel for young people. If you’re dismissive, you could call it an “issue book.” But everything’s an issue book if it resonates with something in your life: an issue is just a thing that actually touches you. And this is a book that will touch a lot of people — there are a lot of kids who suddenly realize they’re allergic to something, when that something comes into their lives for the first time.

It could be peanuts or pollen or penicillin or a bee sting. It could be life-threatening, or annoying, or barely noticeable, or anywhere on that spectrum. It could be obvious, or sneaky and hard to track down. It could be something that kid loves, or something that kid wasn’t that interested in anyway.

So it’s a big “issue,” that a lot of people need to worry about on a daily basis.

Writer Megan Wagner Lloyd and artist Michelle Mee Nutter have taken those facts, and an understanding of that young audience, and built them into a story about one girl — because we all respond better to good stories, we all want to see someone else working through things to understand how we could do it ourselves.

Maggie is young — just turning ten as the book opens. She’s wanted a puppy for a while: she’s planning to be a vet when she grows up; she loves animals, though entirely from afar up to now. And you can guess that it doesn’t go the way she wants. She has a strong allergic reaction to pet dander. After a few tests, it turns out she reacts badly — rashes, swelling, itching — to just about any animal with fur.

So she goes through all the usual stages: anger (at her parents, at the world), denial (which doesn’t last long; her skin gives her away if she’s near a furry animal), bargaining (as she runs through a list of non-furry animals and finds them all wanting), and finally acceptance. She meets other young people, at her school and elsewhere, who are allergic, to other things and in other ways. She learns what we all learn: you need to find the ways your life can go around the roadblocks and detours every life throws up, to make the life that’s the combination of what you want and what you can get.

Maggie’s in a good position; she should have a good life. She has a loving family, good medical support, a new understanding of this annoying way her body works. And her story will resonate with a lot of other young people, struggling with allergies or other issues — Lloyd and Nutter tell her story well, and tell a wider story than I’m focusing on. Maggie has twin younger brothers and her mother has a new baby on the way; she has friends at school and other activities. She has a life, and Allergic is about her life, not just this annoying skin reaction she has.

This is obviously mostly for young people: that’s what it’s for, that’s what it does well. But if you have the care of a young person with an allergy, or any medical/personal issue that could be similar, you might want to take a look at it for yourself, and for that young person.

Note: I’m actually ahead of publication on a review, for the first time in a long time. Allergic officially goes on sale this coming Tuesday, March 2nd. If you order it right now, your bookstore will probably be able to have a copy for you that morning. (Or you can use my link and have a exploitative hegemonic megacorporation deliver it directly to your home: your choice.)

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

Peter Bagge’s Other Stuff

Reviews
February 24, 2021

Peter Bagge is a world-class grump, and I have to respect that. I tend to connect that to his libertarianism, but the direction of influence is unclear and it’s not as if comics isn’t full of grumpy loners outside of libertarians, either. But Bagge has had a long career both making comics about fictional grumpy, obnoxious people and making comics about how he is libertarian and so entitled to be grumpy personally about such-and-such, so he’s been leaning into it for some time now.

Although, come to think of it, the last decade of his work, focusing mostly on biographies of strong-willed but not necessarily libertarian people of the past, might show him starting to walk down a path of slightly less grumpiness — and I emphasize slightly.

But here I am looking at Classic Bagge, the man who spent more than a decade making a comic book called Hate and meant it the whole time. So expect every page to be pickled in bile, to mix my metaphors.

Peter Bagge’s Other Stuff is the odds-and-sods collection from the Hate era, gathering stories he did with other creators (mostly as the writer) or for other purposes, most but not all of which appeared, first or eventually, in the quarterly or annual Hate comics of the ’90s and ’00s. It is absolutely chock-full of grumps and cranks and losers and weirdos of all types: you would be hard-put to find a single functional human being on any page of this book.

So this may be a book best read in bits rather than straight through. Bile and spleen can be fun, but too much will curdle. And there’s enough here to curdle the strategic federal cheese reserve.

What you will find in Other Stuff:

four stories about young hipster Lovey and her horrible friends
the Musical Urban Legends series, and a couple of related rock ‘n’ roll stories
a large section of collaborations, with work by both Hernandez brothers, Alice Cooper (writing), Adrian Tomine, Alan Moore (writing), Daniel Clowes, Johnny Ryan, Danny Hellman, R. Crumb, Rick Altergott, and a few others
six single-page biographies of scientists
several other assorted “true” stories, some of them vaguely reportage
a dozen-and-a-half strips of “The Shut-Ins,” early-Internet super-adopters and shunners of the outside world, created to appear on a website promoting Adobe products
and a couple of even weirder things

This is very varied and odd; the section with collaborative work is possibly even weirder than the stuff I gave more attention to above (a R. Crumb Cathy parody! Ack! Dilbert as a Muslim terrorist, offensive in so many ways I can’t even catalog them!). Bagge is a creator seemingly unafraid of letting out every idea he has ever had, which is good for the breadth and depth of his work but also can result in some what-the-hell?! moments. This book has more than a few of them.

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

Naturalist: A Graphic Adaptation by Wilson, Ottaviani, and Butler

Reviews
February 18, 2021

When you’re talking about people who have an inordinate fondness for insects, you probably mean either God or E.O. Wilson. And only one of them is a person you can actually have a conversation with. (Well, Wilson is 91, and probably still busy enough that it would be tough to get some of his time — but you know what I mean.)

Actually, you can differentiate them a bit more than that — God is said to like beetles better, and Wilson was always an ant guy. Just in case the distinction becomes important in your life.

Edward O. Wilson is the towering biologist of the 20th century, which is particularly impressive since that was such a physics-heavy century. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for books he wrote, is responsible for hundreds of scientific papers and possibly the foundational biological theory of the era, and is one of the pillars of the conservation movement. Naturalist was his memoir — the story of how he grew up, got interested in ants, got into science, and navigated most of his career. That book came out in 1994, when Wilson was 65, and just a couple of years before he retired from active teaching at Harvard — but, as I said above, he’s still going strong now at 91, and has published as many books since Naturalist as he did before it. So the idea probably was that Naturalist was going to be basically the story of his life, but he may need to add a second volume at this rate.

Naturalist has had a strong life, and has been particularly influential on young readers interested in science — obviously those kids who like bugs, but also the ones who end up going into chemistry or physics or possibly even (gasp!) engineering. [1] So clearly someone — maybe even Wilson himself, since he’s obviously a smart guy with a lot of ideas — thought it would be good to do one of those new-fangled “graphic novel” versions of Naturalist, since all of the kids love them these days.

(I may be deliberately making this sound silly for comic effect. But it was a good idea.)

However it happened, Island Press — the nonprofit that publishes the prose edition of Naturalist — found Jim Ottaviani, the premier and almost only writer of science in comics form, to adapt Wilson’s book into comics and cartoonist, illustrator, and cartoonist C.M. Butzer to draw it. Colors are by Hilary Sycamore, but the pre-publication proof I read only features color for the first seventeen story pages, so I can’t really speak to her work here as a whole. The graphic adaptation came out last November, and is widely available now — so now there are two versions of Naturalist available to be handed to a budding scientist, one of which features lots of pictures of ants to go with Wilson’s words.

As usual with Ottaviani’s work, there are lots of caption boxes and dialogue — he likes to get in as many of the real words of the books and scientists he’s adapting as possible. So this will be a denser graphic novel than many readers are used to: I’d say that’s no bad thing, since science is demanding and full of details that require close attention. Anyone looking for something quick and surface-y is not cut out for a life in science to begin with.

And, of course, this is the story of a life, and one intertwined with field exploration, collaboration with other scientists, and writing — some of it is about external action, but most of what was important in Wilson’s life happened in his thoughts, as he examined ants around the world, thought about them back in Massachusetts, scribbled ideas on a board with colleagues, and bounced their theories off the real world to make sure they actually worked.

I wish there were more graphic novels like this, and fewer about punching people, but that’s the world we live in. Intellectual activity is always less popular than punching. But this one is out there, and it’s really good at what it does. If you know someone who could be a scientist eventually, this would be a good book to give her.

[1] Note: your present writer’s son is a budding engineer, in the second year of a five-year undergraduate ChemE program, and so he kids because he loves.

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

Superman Smashes the Klan by Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru

Reviews
February 17, 2021

A note to copyeditors of the future: the radio story from 1946 is “The Clan of the Fiery Cross,” styled in roman within quotation marks and spelling Clan with a capital C. The 2020 graphic novel loosely based on that radio play is Superman Smashes the Klan , in italics and spelling Klan with the K used by its namesake.

One suspects the relative political power of that real-world Klan, and possibly of the corporate entities that owned (then) National Periodical Publications and (now) DC Comics, are responsible for the switch from C to K. But that’s outside my remit here.

That radio story has been mentioned as a major factor in the waning power of the real-world Klan in the post-war years. I’m not a historian, but it makes sense to me — they are not generally called out as strongly active during the main civil rights era beginning the next decade, so the timing, at least, makes sense. And it’s a comforting message to superhero fans: See! we can do good work in the world, and not have to make any effort at all! Just being a fan of Superman makes the world better!

This graphic novel is not driving that message. Stories themselves generally don’t; stories are about action, not feeling good about yourself for liking those stories. The active verb in the title is there for a reason: this Klan of the Fiery Kross needs to be smashed, and it will not go away quietly by itself.

And, while Superman is the subject of the title sentence, he’s not alone here: Superman alone cannot smash the Klan. That takes more people: a Black police detective, some familiar reporters named Lois and Jimmy, the members of the Lee family at the center of this story, and even a local white kid at first hostile to his new neighbors. One might even say it takes a city, or a village.

The Lee family are moving to a leafy Metropolis neighborhood in 1946 at the beginning of Smashes the Klan, moving out of Chinatown largely because the father, Dr. Lee, is taking a job as chief bacteriologist of the Metropolis Health Department. They meet their new neighbors, who are mostly friendly — especially once it’s clear son Tommy will be a big asset to the baseball team fielded by the local interfaith Unity House. But our viewpoint character in the Lee family is daughter Roberta, who is less sure about their new neighborhood and home.

Tommy’s rocket arm dislodged Chuck Riggs, previously the star pitcher, from that position, which does not leave Chuck happy. Chuck’s Uncle Matt is also coincidentally — this is a Superman story — the local Grand Scorpion of the Klan of the Fiery Kross, so he seizes Chuck’s grievance and the Lees mere presence in their neighborhood as reason for an old-fashioned cross-burning and fire-bombing.

The Lee’s house is saved by quick action by Tommy and by neighbors, including that Black detective, Inspector Henderson. (Whose help Dr. Lee at first does not want, when he thought Henderson was just a random local Black man.) Daily Planet reporters arrive the next morning to report on the situation — of course it’s Lois Lane and Clark Kent, since the Planet has never had any other reporters in seventy years of operation.

But Superman is dealing with assimilation issues of his own. The day before, he fought a Nazi would-be supervillain, Atom Man, and kept him from destroying the Metropolis Dam. But Atom Man is powered by a strange green crystal — anyone who has ever consumed any Superman story is nodding right now — and that gives Superman first a strange wave of nausea and weakness, and then continued hallucinations of two figures who claim to be his real parents, aliens who rocketed him to Earth from the doomed world Krypton. (Well, they’re not that succinct and specific to begin with. But we know the story, and it is the same story.)

Tommy gets in more danger, the Klan continues to foment violence, and that green crystal will of course come back. Dr. Lee’s employer, and some of his co-workers, turn out to be quite different than what we had expected.

In the end, Superman Smashes the Klan. But he can’t do it alone. And he can’t do it without confronting his own past and understanding who he is: without publicly claiming his place as an immigrant and alien. His story — an immigrant, coming to a new place, and wanting to be friendly and helpful — is explicitly twinned with Roberta’s, and with all of the other people the Klan hates.

This is a story for younger readers, and a story about Superman, so you can be assured everything will work out for the best, and only the most unredeemable will be smashed — anyone who can be brought around will be. Writer Gene Luen Yang will make sure of that, as he also makes his story deeper and more resonant than a Superman tale for pre-teens had to be. Art team Gurihiru gives it all a modern, clean, manga-lite look — easily readable and dynamic.

This is a book a lot of Americans should read: there are far too many Chuck Riggses out there, unthinkingly racist and led by family members or friends or media to believe evil things and, in far too many cases, to do evil things. This story says that most of them are redeemable; I would like to believe that. But they have to want to be redeemed. They have to want to smash the Klan.

For those who do, this book is there for you. And if you’re in a position to put this book in front of a Chuck Riggs, someone who might be amenable to it but does not, right now, want to smash the Klan — doing that would be a very good thing.

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

Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang

Reviews
February 11, 2021

I’m no more the obvious audience for this book than Gene Luen Yang was the obvious creator for it: neither of us cared all that much about basketball. The difference, I guess, is that Yang got interested in sports because of his community and a specific story at a specific time, and then created this graphic novel to tell that story and his involvement in it. [1]

Yang was a math teacher at Bishop O’Dowd, a respected private Catholic high school in Oakland, California. The men’s varsity basketball team there, the Dragons, had a strong program: they’d been among the best in the state (and California is a big, competitive state) on and off for a couple of decades. But they’d never won the state championship — coming into the 2015 season, there were 0-8 in that big game.

Yang was coming off his previous graphic-novel project, 2013’s double-barreled Boxers & Saints , and was still semi-aimlessly casting around for his next big personal comics project a year later. Of course, at the same time he was also negotiating to do more writing of other people’s properties, which Yang puts into this story as a secondary plot or background flavor. [2]

So my guess is that this was a more general period of “what do I want to do with the rest of my life.” Yang shows himself with four young children, and dividing his time in three: comics, teaching, and family. Turning comics into a day-job allowed him to simplify that down to just two divisions, which has to be appealing. His soul-searching over the Superman job is connected in this book to his being a teacher at the school: this is a book about the school and its basketball team, with Yang as the viewpoint character, rather than a story essentially about Yang’s career and life, with the school as a main setting.

But that’s what was behind it all. Yang wanted new projects, was probably already thinking on some level about needing to quit teaching to focus on comics fully, and wondered what the big deal was about the Bishop O’Dowd Dragons. So he went to talk to a fellow teacher, head coach Lou Richie.

And out of that conversation, and the events of the next year, he made Dragon Hoops , the story of primarily the 2015 team and secondarily about Yang learning about the history of the Dragons, about the players on the team in 2015, and about Richie. And then, tertiarily, about Yang himself and his career decisions — those are the least connected to the team, so Yang keeps them appropriately less important. (There’s also a minor thread about how Yang tells the story: there’s one loose, unfinished thread of this story that he didn’t want to include — but the fact that he mentions possibly not including it tells we sneaky readers that he already has included it.)

Again, Yang is the viewpoint character, and our lens into this world: this is a sports book largely for an audience that doesn’t deeply care about sports a lot of the time. But it’s not his story, and he’s not trying to make it his story. It’s the story of Richie and his players: superstars Ivan Rabb and Paris Austin, younger players like Arinze Chidom and Jeevin Sandhu, and a half-dozen others. It’s a book organized by the rhythms of a season: preparing ahead of time, early practices, the games of the season in order, and then (of course) the post-season, culminating in that big championship game again.

Yang was lucky in his story: teams fizzle out everywhere, every year. The Dragons could easily have ended up out of contention. It’s the danger of starting to write about a story before the ending is clear — Yang was something like a reporter telling this story, building blocks of how he wanted it to go while never being sure it would end the “right” way.

I won’t tell you what the ending was, or even the middle: the Dragons played a lot of games that year. And the women’s team, also called the Dragons, had some games that come in here. The story of whether or not the Dragons won is important, but more important (to Yang, at least, if not to many of the readers) is who these players were, how they worked, what they accomplished together, and how they came from different backgrounds to be part of something larger while still staying specific people.

Yang has always been interested in representation — most obviously with Chinese-Americans like himself — and Dragon Hoops is a book where he broadens that view to look more deeply at other ethnic groups in America. Most obviously, since this is about basketball and Oakland, Black Americans are central to Dragon Hoops. It was published in March of 2020, and so finished months before that — the specifics of the American racial-justice landscape have shifted hugely since that point, though not in any way that damages Yang’s story and understanding here. He is on the side of hyphenated Americans and ethnic Americans of all kinds, wanting them to have secure, real places in the world that are not reliant on the good will of white people.

Dragon Hoops never says the words “white supremacy.” But Yang writes about it nevertheless: from his own point of view, and from the lives of the Black young men who make up most of the Dragons. There are several scenes of bigotry here, directed at the Dragons — mostly trash-talking audiences at road games — and Yang picks up the way hate grabs onto anything to demean and attack, that there will always be something that those bigots use, no matter who they’re yelling at this time.

Because this is a real story. And a real story about a real basketball team of mostly Black teenagers in 2015 America is going to include some racial slurs. Maybe there will be a year when that won’t be the case. Yang hopes so. I hope so. The Dragons players hope so. But we’ll have to see.

[1] I frankly still don’t care that much about basketball: even when I did care about sports, it was the one I never got into. But I liked the book, he said brightly!

[2] Everybody’s got to eat, and everyone wants to do work that personally excites and speaks to them. So, if what Yang really wants to do with his life is write a bunch of stories about Superman punching things better, that’s great. I generally have very little interest in punching-things-better stories, though, so those background negotiations can feel to me, and readers like me, like he’s getting pulled into a sadder, lesser world after making personal stories and teaching for a living.

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

Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye (2 vols.) by Jon Rivera, Gerard Way, and Michael Avon Oeming

Reviews
February 4, 2021

I’m sure the creators will all insist that this is totally not a superhero book, that it’s much cooler and obscure and indy and retro and hand-crafted than that. But it’s a big DC Comics book with Superman in it, whose hero is a guy with a mysterious, technologically-advanced eyeball with unexpected and plot-convenient powers, who leads a team of people in jumpsuits and drives a weird vehicle with a silly name.

So, yeah, it’s absolutely a superhero book.

Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye was a twelve-issue series — I’m not sure, at this late date, if it was meant to be mini- or maxi- or ongoing, and frankly I don’t care — from 2016-2017, about the very minor DC character of the title, who had previously appeared in some forgettable ’60s stories and a few random crossovers. It was part of the “Young Animal” line, which was an attempt to recapture the sales magic of Vertigo without the benefits of time, a deep bench of British writing talent, a healthier market, and (most importantly) Karen Berger. And, as I understand it, the Animals Which Are Young was modestly successful, but has not been a long-term sustainable thing — not that very much in guys-in-tights-punching-each-other comics is “a long-term sustainable thing” this decade to begin with.

That twelve-issue series was collected in two volumes: Going Underground (ha ha ha) and Every Me, Every You .

Cave’s adventures were written by Jon Rivera and Young Animal guru Gerard Way, and drawn by Michael Avon Oeming (whose work I haven’t seen regularly since Powers, but who is still quirky and organic, even if I think his psychedelic extravaganza fight scenes are hard to follow and not his best work). The twelve issues all make up one long story, in which Our Hero (renowned spelunker Cave Carson) and his spunky teenage daughter Chloe steal the original version of his tunneling machine, the Mighty Mole, to chase the evil spelunking team led by the eeeevil heads of the company Cave used to work for, because they are pursuing the eeeeeevil plan of an extradimensional EEEEEEEEVIL monster that intends to eat the multiverse, more or less.

Cave’s dead wife — every superhero has a dead wife or three in the fridge; it’s standard issue — turns out to have been the princess of a secret advanced subterranean race, because of course she was, and so Chloe is the heiress to Vast Powers and Responsibilities, including the only possible way to stop the aforementioned monster from snacking down on all of the worlds with Cave Carsons in them.

It gets weirder and more bizarre from there, in best Young Animal fashion, and there’s a large cast of characters mostly so Rivera and Way can kill off lots of them in ways that make readers struggle to remember who they were and why we should care. (Was that jump-suited person still on Team Evil, someone who defected once Team Evil’s evilness was clear, or an OG do-gooder? Does anyone care? Does anyone besides me find that several of them look distractingly like Ron from Kim Possible?) The large cast tunnels through the ground of Earth-DC (or maybe Earth-Young Animal?) and then through the contiguous grounds of several other alternate Earths, meeting a Cave Carson Jr. and eventually his father. Doc Magnus appears, and is even more of a dick than usual, while still not being particularly interesting as a character.

In the end, the multiverse is indeed saved from being eaten, as we all knew it would be. DC would not stop publishing umpty-zillion comics just because Cave fucking Carson couldn’t save its bread and butter, now would it?

This is a loud, flashy, silly, overstuffed comic with some good moments and a whole lot of confusing action. It is somewhat more serious than the standard punch-fest, or at least aspires to be. I did not take it seriously for one second, but I did enjoy pieces of it, and was engaged enough to request the second volume from the library when I hit the end of the first one. And I have enjoyed dunking on it here. So it is not without its pleasures, even if those are highly particular and goofy. Caveat emptor.

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

Royal City, Vol. 3: We All Float On by Jeff Lemire

Reviews
January 21, 2021

Somehow I’m over two years late on this Jeff Lemire comic, despite reading the first two (see my posts on volumes one and two ) right when they came out and liking the series a lot. What can I say? There are too many good books in the world, and keeping up with them all can sometimes be challenging. But I made it to the end eventually.

Royal City is a family story, and Vol. 3: We All Float On is where it all comes together. The first volume brought brother Patrick back to town, to join his siblings Richie and Tara and parents Patti and Peter — and, most importantly, brother Tommy, who died in 1993 but has been haunting the entire family, in very different ways, ever since. The second volume went back to ’93 to show the week of Tommy’s death, and now the conclusion brings in a new, unexpected family member and brings everything to the final crisis.

(No, not the usual comics kind of Final Crisis. The real people living in a real world — well, mostly real, since they’re all seeing Dead Tommy all the time — kind of crisis, where all of the problems peak at once.)

This is an ending, so I don’t want to talk much about the plot — but I will say that it does all end, and it does end well. Lemire is, as always, good at stories about people, especially damaged people, and the Pike family are all damaged in different ways. It does all center on Tommy, as it must, even though he has been dead for over twenty years.

I see that Royal City is now available as a single spiffy hardcover, and that’s probably the best way to read this going forward — it is a single story that happened to be published as individual comics issues and then three trade paperbacks for market reasons, but it would work best as a single book, since it tells a single story.

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

The Brontes: Infernal Angria by Craig Hurd-McKenney and Rick Geary

Reviews
January 15, 2021

In our timeline, the Bronte siblings created several fictional worlds — they started with Glass Town, which grew (mostly from Charlotte and Branwell) into the somewhat separate Angria, while younger siblings Emily and Anne invented the entirely separate land of Gondal. All of those were explicitly set in odd, “exotic” corners of the real world they were familiar with, and peopled with various lords and adventurers and such. And, of course, the three sisters all published novels set in the real England of their day, all beginning with debuts in 1847.

The Brontes: Infernal Angria simplifies this, as fiction often does. There is one land: Angria. It is real, somewhere other than Earth, and accessed, wainscot-style, from the playroom of their childhood house in Haworth. Time works differently there; visitors from England can enter Angria, have any number of adventures, and return at the moment they left…but time can also pass in Angria between visits. (If the reader suspects this is entirely for storytelling convenience, he can hardly be blamed.)

Craig Hurd-Kenney makes the origin of Angria specifically in the children’s isolation and grief, starting in 1825 when their two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died. (And a few years after their mother also died.) But he actually begins this graphic novel with a prologue set in 1861, years after all four of the younger Bronte siblings were dead, in which Charlotte’s widower attends the death of her father, Patrick, and then destroys all references to Angria in the house. This seems to be setting up a later conflict, but it really doesn’t pay off in the current version of Infernal Angria — I suspect Hurd-McKenney originally had a much longer, more dramatic story in mind, and the current 90-page version is what he and artist Rick Geary were able to actually get done in the twenty-ish years they were working on it.

So Infernal Angria is one part secret history — this is what the Bronte children were really up to — and one part unfinished drama. We see the Brontes enter Angria and have adventures and interactions there, but it’s all fairly thin and quick and melodramatic, as one might expect of plot points based on the stories told by a bunch of nineteen century pre-teens — it’s almost a distraction to the real concerns, back in England, which center on whether going to Angria at all is a good thing. The core tension is between the nature of Angria, that time-stopping power which is health-reviving for English travelers, and their father’s religion. Hurd-McKenney is not always clear why these things should be in tension, unless he’s implying Angria is an alternative afterlife. (My understanding is that the Brontes’ fictional worlds were not pagan, so they should be as close to their god in Angria as in England. Hurd-McKinney, or his characters, seem to have different ideas but don’t quite make them clear.)

I think this is Hurd-McKenney trying to construct a plausible secret history based on real history, and not quite succeeding, to my mind. It’s also possible that the original conception of a longer, fuller story would have had more room to make that conflict clearer and stronger. But, as it is, it feel like the Brontes, as they each sicken and get near death in turn, make random choices about who they feel about Angria and Heaven without quite saying what those choices are and what the stakes are.

So I can’t find Infernal Angria entirely successful. It’s interesting, and knotty, and a thoughtful weaving of secret history. but everything didn’t quite come together the way I would have liked. I should admit that I came to it as a fan of Rick Geary, the artist, rather than as a Bronte scholar or knowing anything about Hurd-McKenney — so the fact that I think the pictures are more successful than the framework they support might just be what was to be expected. Either way, it’s quirky and specific: fans of the Brontes, of secret history, of 19th century literature in general, and of vague religious conflicts will find things of interest here.

(Note: this book is not available from the usual hegemonic Internet retailer, nor from B&N or IndieBound — finding it might be a problem. ISBN is 9781532386244, if you want to do some searching.)

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

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 7 by North, Henderson & Renzi

Reviews
January 8, 2021

This is volume seven of something, I’m coming to it about two years later, and I’m typing this on Christmas day between other festivities. [1] So I expect this will be a short and perfunctory post — those of you who care about Squirrel Girl likely read this book a while ago, and I don’t have high hopes of convincing any of the rest of you at this point.

So, first up, this comes after the previous collections of the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl comic: one and two and three and four and five and six . And also the OGN , which slots in around volume four or so.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 7: I’ve Been Waiting for a Squirrel Like You is written by Ryan North (except one short story in issue 26), drawn by Erica Henderson (except issue 26, though she wrote one story there) and colored by Rico Renzi (who only did part of issue 26). It collects issues 22-26 of the comic of the title and something called A Year of Marvels: The Unbeatable #1 — which is actually written by Nilah Magruder with layouts by Geoffo and final art by Siya Oum — that I think was part of some series of one-offs (maybe to introduce new talent?) that I have never heard of before and which is unconnected to the main story.

The Unbeatable is a perfectly OK sixteen-page story in which Squirrel Girl’s sidekick Tippy-Top (a squirrel) teams up with Rocket Raccoon (from the Guardians of the Galaxy) to defeat a villain in New York’s Central Park, who has brought trees to life and intends to Conquer the World! So, yeah, that’s a thing tacked on the end of this book.

The aforementioned issue 26 is a jam issue — I suspect it was also the “help Henderson stay on track with monthly deadlines” issue, since drawing twenty-plus pages of girls and squirrels monthly is relentless and time-consuming — featuring stories drawn by Madeline McGrane, Chip Zdarsky, Tom Fowler, Carla Speed McNeil, Michael Cho, Razzah, Anders Nilsen, Rico Renzi, and Jim “Garfield” Davis. It has a lot of clever stuff, but — since it’s all officially stories told by characters from the Squirrel Girl comic — it’s also pretty inside-baseball, amusing and fun but slight and entirely for fans.

The main bulk of the book, though, is a five-part story in which Doreen Green (also known as the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl) and her best friend and roommate Nancy Whitehead win a computer-programming contest to go to the Savage Land, the alien-created area of Antarctica where dinosaurs still roam. Complications ensue there, not least the discovery of “Ultron, who is a dinosaur now.” (One might be surprised that it took North, famously creator of Dinosaur Comics, to get dinosaurs into this book.) If you are wondering if Doreen and her friends — including a supposedly-unfriendly programming team from Latveria, Doctor Doom’s homeland — defeat Ultron and save the world, please see the title again.

As always, this is fun and zippy and does not take itself entirely seriously. It is a comic set in a superhero universe featuring a young woman who is a bit zaftig, has sensible hair and a reasonably sensible costume, and prefers to talk to people rather than punch them. Of course it ended: how could such a thing last? (Has she been rebooted with peekaboo cutouts and a tragic backstory yet?)

[1] Not a whole lot of festivities, since it is 2020, but small, sensible, socially distanced festivities.