Author: Andrew Wheeler

Changing subjects entirely, today I took off from work, and most of what I did was bop into the city to do some book-shopping. (I had a vague idea of doing Xmas shopping as well, and even walked quickly through part of that agglomeration of festive selling huts in Union Square, but that portion of the day’s festivities was not successful.)

First I hit Forbidden Planet — pretty much as an aperitif — which I hadn’t been in for several years. (My mental map of FP is from the days when they had back issues in the basement — yes, that long ago.) I got issues of two comics for the boys, and also two extremely different graphic novels:

<img src=”https://comicmix.com/2011/12/14/incoming-books-brodys-ghost-monsters-art-decco-and-more/”” width=”140″ height=”200″ border=”0″ />Brody’s Ghost, Vol. 1, the first in a new series (teen-focused, I think) by Mark “Akiko” Crilley, about a guy who discovers secret supernatural powers.

And Ken Dahl’s Monsters, a highly acclaimed 2009 semi-autobiographical book (by a guy who now goes under a different name, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on) about herpes.

After that, I headed down the block to The Strand, which was the whole point of the trip. (Speaking of mental maps, when I was there, I was shocked to see that they don’t check bags anymore and then reminded that the childrens’ section used to be in the basement — so my standard of what the Strand looks like is also a good decade out of date.) There, I got many more books, mostly used or remaindered or otherwise non-standard:

<img src=”https://comicmix.com/2011/12/14/incoming-books-brodys-ghost-monsters-art-decco-and-more/”” width=”153″ height=”200″ border=”0″ />Art d’Ecco, collecting comics work by Roger Langridge (along with his brother, Andrew) from around twenty years ago.

Proof of Life on Earth, an old collection (1991) of Roz Chast cartoons

Your Mother Is a Remarkable Woman, a similarly vintage (1992) book of Sam Gross cartoons

<img src=”https://comicmix.com/2011/12/14/incoming-books-brodys-ghost-monsters-art-decco-and-more/”” width=”138″ height=”200″ border=”0″ />Love From the Shadows, an original graphic novel that came out earlier this year from the indefatigable Gilbert Hernandez, which has a loose (and probably indescribable) connection with his Love & Rockets material.

Martin Amis’s recent novel Yellow Dog, which was the first new book of his I didn’t read since London Fields — entirely because his prior novel, Night Train, was such a gigantic stinker — and which I used to have, in first edition hardcover, before the recent unpleasantness. (more…)

John Wayne Cleaver is not a serial killer; he wants you to know that up front. He’s also not, sadly, a typical American teenager, though he somewhat wishes that he could be. Thirdly, he’s not officially a sociopath — that diagnosis can only be given to an adult, and John is only fifteen. What he has is instead called Antisocial Personality Disorder — he has an almost complete lack of empathy, simply not understanding what other people’s emotions are or connecting with them directly.

So John has to work his way through life by intellectually building models of what he thinks people are feeling, and of how he should respond to those feelings, and continually adapting his models to get closer to reality. He’s not all that good at it at the beginning of I Am Not A Serial Killer, the first novel he narrates, but give him a break: he’s a fifteen-year-old boy from a small town, and his brain doesn’t work the way everyone else’s does.

To make matters worse, he’s obsessed with violent death and with serial killers — and he’s smart enough to have noticed that he has all of the standard characteristics of a serial killer: a distant, abusive father who abandoned him, high IQ, frequently bullied, a fascination with fire, even bedwetting. And he doesn’t really want to get too far away from death — the most soothing thing in his life is helping out his mother and aunt in their family business, the mortuary downstairs from their apartment. But he definitely doesn’t want to kill people, and has built up a regimen of rules and avoidance techniques to keep the thoughts of torture and death at bay.

But then a real serial killer starts stalking John’s home town — Clayton, North Dakota [1] — and John can’t help but follow the case, working up his own profile of the killer. It gets worse when John accidentally sees the killer in action — and realizes not only that the murderer is his friendly elderly neighbor, Mr. Crowley, but that Crowley is some kind of supernatural creature, taking body parts from his victims to replace his own deteriorating organs and limbs. (more…)

They were announced this past weekend at the World Fantasy Convention (where else?), held this year in beautiful, sunny San Diego.

Since I’ve been a judge for this award (a few years back now; the scars have completely healed), I’ve got a higher regard for the winners, and now I really need to track down a copy of Who Fears Death.

Congratulations to all of the winners. And, to the judges: you can relax now, and read something you want to, for a change.

Novel: Who Fears Death? by Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)
Novella: “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” by Elizabeth Hand (Stories: All-New Tales)
Short Story: “Fossil-Figures” by Joyce Carol Oates (Stories: All-New Tales)
Anthology: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, edited by Kate Bernheimer & Carmen Gimenez Smith (Penguin)
Collection: What I Didn’t See and Other Stories by Karen Joy Fowler (Small Beer Press)
Artist: Kinuko Y. Craft
Special Award, Professional: Marc Gascoigne for Angry Robot
Special Award, Non-Professional: Alisa Krasnostein for Twelfth Planet Press
Life Achievement:Peter S. Beagle and Angélica Gorodischer

I have not read as many books as I wanted to this year, nor have I written about as many of the ones I did manage to read. (I didn’t manage to save as much from the flood as I would have liked, either; it’s a low-batting-average kind of year.) But the year is not over, and I can catch up on one of those fronts very quickly, viz:

I’ve devoted several thousand words over the past few years to the “Best American Comics” series — see my posts on the 2006 and 2007 and 2008 and 2009 editions — so perhaps I’ll be forgiven for not diving as deeply into the Neil Gaiman-edited 2010 edition. (Particularly since the 2011 book is out now, all shiny and new, so this is terribly old news.) Each editor shifts the material somewhat — Gaiman’s volume leads off with a long excerpt from the Jonathan Lethem/Farel Dalrymple/Gary Panter Omega the Unknown, the first Big Two story in the series, which feels significant — but the core of each book is very similar, drawing from the same group of major mid-career “alternative” cartoonists, from Gilbert Hernandez (here represented by a story done with his vastly less-prolific brother Mario) to Ben Katchor to Chris Ware to Peter Bagge to Bryan Lee O’Malley to C. Tyler to Robert Crumb. As usual, the series editors, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, picked a hundred notable works from their year — September 1, 2008 through August 31, 2009 — and sent those to Gaiman, who chose from them (and, possibly, from a few things he discovered on his own) to make this collection. Gaiman’s introduction makes it clear that this isn’t the “best” comics of the year — nor even the best “American” comics of the year, whatever that may mean — but it is a big collection of a lot of very good comics (and a few clunkers, though precisely which ones are clunkers may be a matter of personal taste) at a reasonable price. The whole series is a great way to discover what’s going on over on the more interesting, less punchy side of the modern comics world, so I recommend this book, as I do its predecessors, for people who like stories told in comics form, though probably not for the kind of people who like the things that draw in the crowds of maladapted boy-men every Wednesday. (more…)