Author: Andrew Wheeler

All young comics protagonists are
special, even if they don’t know it yet. In manga in particular, they’re likely to protest loudly that
they’re just “a normal kid” and to squirm at the thought of being separable
from the vast thundering herd of undifferentiated humanity in the slightest
way. But it doesn’t matter what they say;
we see that they’re all uniquely wonderful — maybe special snowflakes, maybe
purple children. Maybe wizards! Maybe mutants! Maybe the feudal lord! Maybe the
rightful ruler of the entire world, and the dashing fated love of that gorgeous
other character, and, and, and EVERYTHING!

This week, I have three books like
that, with young people who are deeply, utterly special.

X-Men: Misfits, Vol. 1
Story by Raina Telgemeier and
Dave Roman; art by Anzu
Del Rey Manga, August 2009,
$12.99

Telgemeier and Roman take the
standard X-Men set-up – which is
already, in its full Claremontian flowering, completely full of adolescent
longing, fear, and obsession – and twist it about 90 degrees into the world of shojo. The characters come from all over the X-men universe,
with a plot germ from mid-Claremont Era: Kitty Pryde, young and conflicted
about her powers, is given a scholarship to Professor Xavier’s Academy for
Gifted Youngsters in Westchester.

And she finds herself the only
female student there. (Even the female professors are absent for most of this
volume, to intensify the reverse-harem feeling.) The other X-Men characters are
all familiar names, though they’re arbitrarily divided into teachers (Colossus,
Magneto, Storm, Marvel Girl, Beast) and oh-so-pretty boys (Iceman, Angel,
Forge, Havok, Cyclops, and so on). There’s the usual clique of privileged kids,
who are allowed to do what they want and essentially run the school, and of
course they are the prettiest boys and of course they are called The Hellfire
Club. (And of course Magneto is their mentor; Telgemeier and Roman are hitting
all of the X-Men/shojo parallels they can as hard as they can.)

Kitty is torn between the fast
heartless boys and the outcasts – in particular between Pyro (who becomes her
boyfriend) and Iceman (who is unfailingly cold to her, natch). Does she make a
big choice at the end of this book? Does she learn what really matters in life?
Is the Pope Catholic?

X-Men: Misfits is a solid reverse-harem shojo story, but I can’t help but believe that
it’s true audience is men and women of around my age – comics readers of
long-standing who know enough of the X-Men mythology (and I barely do) to
appreciate the changes that are being made to it. Anzu’s art is exactly what
you’d expect for this kind of story, though she does differentiate a large cast
(of mainly pretty, pretty boys – all the same kind of prettiness, too) clearly
and easily, which is not simple.

(more…)

Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays
Edited by Brendan Burford
Villard, May 2009, $16.95

For most of the past fifty years, American comics had been running
through an ever-tightening spiral of acceptable topics – somewhat mitigated by
occasional art-comics eruptions – as superheroes and (ever less and less) other
areas thought acceptable for children dominated ever more and more each year.
And one little-remarked side effect of that spiral was that nonfiction comics,
stories that actually were true, became so marginalized that they practically
didn’t exist. Everything was fiction – even the memoirish comics of the
undergrounds were transmuted into fiction – and the truth was nowhere to be
found on the comics page.

That’s changed in the past decade or so, as a generation of
new or newly energized creators have grappled with their own lives and
histories, bringing forth a host of primarily memoir-based comics, from [[[Perseopolis]]] to [[[Fun Home to Cancer Vixen]]]. And
that flood has brought attention to cartoonists who write about true stories
that aren’t their own, like Joe
Sacco. Slowly, nonfiction is creeping onto the comics shelf – it may be mostly
memoirs now, but I hope that we’ll see ever more biographies (like Rick Geary’s
J. Edgar Hoover) and histories
(like Larry Gonick’s work) and even diet books (like Carol Lay’s [[[The
Big Skinny]]]) and less likely things. Maybe,
if I can be optimistic for once, in twenty years there will be comics (or
graphic novels, or whatever you want to call a couple of hundred of drawn pages
in a coherent narrative) in every bookstore category, filling the shelves with
real stories as well as made-up ones.

If that does happen – and I hope that it is
possible – Brendan Burford’s [[[Syncopated]]] will become a signpost on the way to that new world. Syncopated has sixteen original stories by sixteen
distinctive voices (Burford among them), on various nonfiction topics. It splits
fairly neatly in half between memoirs and personal reminiscences on one side
(seven pieces, by my count) and works of history and current events outside of
the artist (also seven pieces), with two portfolios of drawings, by Tricia Van
de Burgh and Victor Marchand Kerlow, to finish up.

(more…)

Famous Players: The Mysterious Death of William Desmond Taylor
By Rick Geary
NBM, August 2009, $15.95

No one does murder like Rick Geary. For more than a
decade he’s been regularly creating slim books in this loose series, each depicting
a separate, horribly violent crime of passion in his inimitable crisp and
detailed style, each with enough Geary detachment and subdued whimsy to keep
the blood from being too much. This is the tenth – not including an earlier,
larger-format [[[Treasury of Victorian Murder, Vol. 1]]],
which had shorter stories and served as a dry run for the later books – and Geary
is still at it. As usual, he’s digging into once-scandalous events from about a
century ago; the series was explicitly “Victorian” until last year’s [[[Lindbergh Child]]], and this book examines a murder case in the early
days of Hollywood.

After a few pages of scene-setting – and no
one does scene-setting better than Geary, one of the very few cartoonists who
routinely incorporates maps and schematics into his comics pages, and makes
them fit perfectly – Geary focuses his story on 1922, when the star director of
the highbrow but very successful Famous Players studio was William Desmond
Taylor, a man of middle years who – as it turned out – was not really named William Desmond Taylor, and who had a
complicated hidden past. That all came out after the morning of February 2^nd,
when his cook/valet found him dead on the floor of his apartment. Police
science was not advanced at that point, and the power of the studios was, so the crime scene was tampered with by various
people – both random sightseers, hangers-on, and reporters as well as possibly
culpable parties such as Famous Players’ “troubleshooter” and two of Taylor’s
colleagues, whom Geary shows moving, concealing, and removing evidence. (What
that evidence was – and whether it had anything to do with Taylor’s death – is of
course impossible to know now.)

(more…)

Stuffed!
By Glenn Eichler & Nick Bertozzi
First Second, September 2009, $17.99

Eichler writes for Stephen Colbert’s show, which is
why [[[Stuffed]]]! has a prominent Colbert quote on the cover – and,
perhaps, why it was published at all. It’s a graphic novel that wants to be
satirical, particularly about the modern touchiness surrounding race, but it bogs
itself down in bland talk without ever quite pushing its satire to become
really funny or really dangerous.

Tim Johnston is a mid-level bureaucrat at an
HMO, one of the faceless thousands responsible for denying healthcare whenever
possible. But one day he gets a call he doesn’t expect: his estranged father is
dying. Soon, Tim has to deal with his father’s death – and his inheritance from
the old man. Johnston senior had a small storefront – The Museum of the Rare
and Curious – in which he displayed various odd items to the very few people who
ever bothered to come look at it. Most of that “museum” is easily disposed of,
since it’s nearly all junk. But then there’s “[[[The Savage]]],” which Tim refers to as a “statue” of an African tribesman – about a hundred years old and dressed in a leopard-print loincloth in best Republic serial fashion.

(more…)

The Photographer
By Didier Lefèvre, Emmanuel
Guibert, and Frederic Lemercier
First Second, May 2009, $29.95

Lefèvre was a French photojournalist – he died, unexpectedly
and too young, in 2007 – and this book is an unusual combination of drawn
comics and [[[fumetti]], telling the true
story of part of his life. In 1986, Lefèvre took the first of several trips
into Afghanistan with the group Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF, aka Doctors
Without Borders), to report on the work of the MSF during the Soviet
occupation, particularly on one particular mission to set up a field hospital
in Zaragandara in the Yaftal valley up in the mountains of the north.

Nearly twenty years later, after hearing stories of that
trip many times, Lefèvre’s friend Emmanuel
Guibert, a well-known cartoonist and graphic novelist, turned that trip into
comics form, using Lefèvre’s words and photos.
As this book credits itself, it’s “A story lived, photographed, and told by
Didier Lefèvre, written and drawn by Emmanuel Guibert, laid out and colored by
Frederic Lemercier, and translated from the French by Alexis Siegel.” (I think
that means that Lemercier did the panel breakdowns from Guibert’s script – for
those who obsess about comics workflow – but that’s not completely clear.)

So every page of [[[The Photographer]]] is a comics page, with captions, panels, borders
and word balloons. But many of those pictures are not Guibert’s drawings, but Lefèvre’s photos – used as panels (wordless; the
captions and balloons never overlie the photography) or in strips of film to
convey time passing or just the atmosphere of a scene. It’s a style that
quickly fades into the background, but it gives The Photographer the power of a documentary – we see these people’s
real faces, and the real landscape they inhabit, as well as Guibert’s versions
of them.

(more…)

Superheroes have been the default setting for American comics for so long – more than forty years; long enough for two generations to
grow up – that they’ve been hybridized and cross-pollinated more than wheat,
with not just the usual revisionist, retro, neo-retro, counterrevisionist,
revolutionary, postmodern, primitivist, and reactionary strains from the usual
sources, but odder, wild strains growing far from the fields of Marvel and DC.

I have two books like that in front of me now; two
books from AdHouse that never could have existed without that long
long-underwear mainstream, but which also never come close to that mainstream
themselves.

Ace-Face: The Mod with the Metal Arms
By Mike Dawson
AdHouse Books, April 2009, $6.95

[[[Ace-Face]] is close to that “mainstream,”
with stories about the exploits of Colin Turvey, the British-American costumed
adventurer called Ace-Face. Colin has the requisite silly “secret origin,”
being born without arms but with a mad-scientist uncle who fitted him with
hulking, superstrong mechanical arms. But then most of the stories about Colin
here – they’re mixed in with other stories, which I’ll get to in a moment – don’t
focus on his exploits as a superhero, but use that superhero status – as if we’re
already intimately familiar with Ace-Face – to delve deeper into his
psychological life, dramatizing scenes from his childhood and retirement.

Dawson also intersperses slice-of-life stories (based
on his own life, I suspect) of Colin’s son Stuart, and his travails as a Park
Slope apartment-dweller. And then there are also a couple of stories about the superpowered
kids Jack (a telekinetic) and Max (a teleporter), who – in the typical fashion
of brothers – use their powers almost entirely to annoy and fight with each
other.

So the book Ace-Face is mostly made up of stories set in a world with
superheroes, but which don’t focus on superheroics. That’s nothing new, of
course – the “ordinary person in superhero society” has been an undertone of
spandex comics since at least Marvels (and possibly much longer, depending on whether we want to think about
Snapper Carr). Dawson doesn’t seem to have planned this book as a coherent work
– there’s no listing of previous publications, but I’m sure I’ve heard of the “Jack
and Max” stories appearing elsewhere first – and so there’s no real continuity
from one story to the next. Colin bounces around in time, and his story never
really comes into focus. Jack and Max are simpler characters, so they work
better in one-off stories; like the Looney Tunes, they exist to cause havok and
then have the curtain dropped down on their heads. (more…)

Goats: Infinite Typewriters
Jonathan Rosenberg
Del Rey, June 2009, $14.00

It’s not true that every webcomic will eventually have a
book, even if it seems that way. There are some projects that even [[[Lulu]]] will
choke on; some things that are too short and obscure and just plain pointless
to be immortalized in cold print. But, with magazines and newspapers running
around like the proverbial head-chopped chickens – all the while conveniently
neglecting to mention the fact that newspapers had the most profitable two
decades of their existence right up to a handful of years ago, and collectively
blew those profits on buying each other out and paying off the families who
were smart enough to take huge wads of cash and toddle off to do something less
glamorous, like badger sexing – webcomics are beginning to look like the only
good game in town, so even staid book publishers – like Del Rey, the science
fiction imprint of Ballantine, which, despite being part of the massive,
serious, Bertelsmann/Random House empire, has made buckets and bushels of money
over the past thirty years from [[[Garfield]]] books and even less likely drawn items – are surfing heavily from work, calling
it research, and drafting up big-boy contracts for cartoonists whose work has
only previously appeared in shining phosphor dots.

(And, now that that
sentence has cleared the riffraff out, let me get down to specifics.)

The house most active in snapping up webcomickers is the
comics publisher Dark Horse; I don’t believe they intended it that way, but
they’ve taken a strong line in signing up nearly all of the webcomic creators
that I read and appreciate on a regular basis. What does that leave for other
publishers? Well, it’s a big web, and God knows – despite my occasional
pretense otherwise – I’m not the Czar of Online Comics (though that would be a great job to have – mental note: give BHO a
call later to see if it’s possible), so there are almost certainly dozens of
damn good comics online that I don’t already read.

Which is a really roundabout way of saying
that I wasn’t familiar with [[[Goats]]] – even though Rosenberg has been doing it since the end of April 1997,
and the entire archives (including the strips reprinted in this book) are all
available online, costing no more than a few cents for electricity and an
attention span unusual in any web-surfer. If you don’t believe me, have a link – that goes back to the very first
strip, which, in usual daily-comics fashion, bears very little resemblance to
the strips reprinted here.

(more…)

Stop Forgetting to Remember
By Peter Kuper
Crown Publishing, July 2007, $19.95
 

[[[Stop Forgetting to Remember]]] is the autobiography of “Walter Kurtz,” a fortysomething cartoonist born in Cleveland and resident in New York City, who worked on a strip about two color-coded spy-types for a satirical magazine popular with teen boys, and who otherwise has an immense amount in common with Peter Kuper. But he is not Peter Kuper – or, rather, he’s different enough from Kuper to provide any plausible deniability that might become necessary.

Kuper worked on [[[Stop Forgetting to Remember]]] for at least ten years, 1995-2005, and the final product is loose-limbed and discursive, a collection of autobiographical stories folded into the “present-day” obsessions and concerns of Kurtz. The present-day material is all in gray tones, with the flashbacks and similar imaginative scenes drawn in a maroon like a day-old bruise. Each chapter does make a connection between present and past, but Stop Forgetting reads like a collection of shorter biographical pieces rather than one graphic novel. (That ten-year span means the book isn’t quite the way either the 1995 Kuper or the 2005 Kuper would have made it. It ends up being loosely organized around the life of Kurtz’s daughter Elli, but it’s not about her; she’s just there, growing up, and her life gives Kurtz things to reminisce about.)

Prose novels sometimes show the signs of too much development time, but there it’s typically an overworked surface, like a miniature painting from an obsessive, with every tiny detail written and rewritten and re-rewritten until it’s completely airless and self-enclosing. By contrast, comics that have been worked on too long get disjointed; it’s much more difficult to rework a ten-year-old comics page than it is to rewrite a ten-year-old novel chapter, so the comics page gets a few tweaks or a new panel pasted on top where the prose chapter would get rewritten from beginning to end. Stop Forgetting to Remember has a mild case of this; there’s a sense that Kuper had an overarching idea for this book – or had more than one, at different times – but that idea doesn’t come through cleanly, so the book becomes a series of glimpses of a life.

(more…)