Author: Andrew Wheeler

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.

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Johnny Hiro

By Fred Chao
AdHouse Books, June 2009, $14.95

There’s a modern style of comics that I don’t think has a name yet – the school of [[[Scott Pilgrim]]], descended equally from Nintendo and the ‘90s autobiographical cartoonists. In those books, psychologically realistic protagonists live in crappy apartments in some city – typically, whichever one the cartoonist himself calls home – toil in jobs far from the corporate hurly-burly, though sometimes with chances for advancement, and find love with cute girls whose hair is held back by little clips. But they also fight evil ex-boyfriends, or the ninjas from a competing sushi restaurant, or something else equally unlikely. These are the autobio comics of a generation that doesn’t feel like separating reality from fantasy, that would rather tell stories about the way they wish their lives would be rather than the way they really are – the magic realism of the kids who grew up on Image comics and [[[Super Mario]]].

[[[Johnny Chao]]] is right in the middle of that genre; the title hero, a twentysomething half-Asian guy living in Brooklyn, works as a busboy for a sushi restaurant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. But he’s a favorite of the owner/chef, Mr. Masago, entrusted with unexpected duties (one might even say missions) for the restaurant. And he’s living with the beautiful Mayumi, who does something in book publishing, probably in editorial. (And she’s doing pretty well there, since she seems to be about Johnny’s age and she already has her own office with a door. But she’s in this story primarily to be the “sexy girlfriend,” as she puts it in her not-quite-fluent English; she’s there to love and support Johnny, not to be an equal part of the story.)

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Love Is a Peculiar Type of Thing
By Box Brown
Self-published, no company name; February 2009, $10.00
 

It’s not often you find a book about someone named Ben created by someone named Box – the standard in comics is the other way around – but this is that book. In case you’re confused by the name, Box Brown is a new cartoonist – he has a series of strips, Bellen!, available online, though he denies that they’re a webcomic – and not the 19th century slave who escaped from Virginia via parcel post.

[[[Love Is a Peculiar Type of Thing]]] collects about ninety pages of comics in a semi-autobiographical vein about a character named Ben. Ben is usually separate from his creator, but the two aren’t always distinct – and Brown draws himself very similarly to Ben in the first place. (But, to be fair, he knows this and points it out in one of the earlier strips in the book.) Ben and Box are both young and somewhat directionless, having gone through a few years in an unspecified corporate rat race before dropping out – Brown to create this book, and Ben to do something that’s unspecified or not clearly separated enough from Brown.

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A Mess of Everything
By Miss Lasko-Gross
Fantagraphics Books, April 2009, $19.99

According to page 119, the heroine of this story writes comics as “Miss Lasko-Gross,” but her legal name (at least at this point, when she’s in high school) is “Melissa Anne Lasko Gross,” and the two last names are from both her mother and father. However, the back cover notes that Mess is semi-autobiographical, which could either mean “a few names and events were changed for various artistic and protecting-the-innocent reasons” or “it makes a better story this way, and good stories are worth it.” Since I don’t know which one is true, I’ll tread lightly on the “autobiographical” and assume it’s all “semi” – that’s safer, anyway.

[[[A Mess of Everything]]] is the story of the high school years of Melissa, whose younger years were previously covered in Lasko-Gross’s debut graphic novel, Escape from “Special.” Lasko-Gross runs through those years in a series of short stories, from single-pagers up to a dozen or so.

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Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files: Storm Front Vol. 1: The Gathering Storm
Adaptation by Mark Powers; Illustrated by Ardian Syaf
Del Rey, June 2009, $22.95

It’s never a good sign when anything gets named “[[[The Gathering Storm]]]” – that’s possibly the most generic title in a world filled with blandness and non-specificity. I suppose it’s more understandable when you’re adapting a novel named [[[Storm Front]]], and you have to call the separate volumes something, and then that phrase rises up out of the collective unconsciousness, and you can’t think of anything better…but, still, it’s a flabby, overused title that needs to be retired for two or three generations to have any hope of not being a laughingstock.

But [[[The Gathering Storm]]] is only the very end of an exceptionally long title, so exhaustion is a plausible excuse. This particular Gathering Storm is the first part of a comics adaptation of the novel Storm Front by Jim Butcher, which itself was the first volume in his bestselling (and now eleven volumes long) “[[[Dresden Files]]]” series. In the books, as in this comic, Harry Dresden is Chicago’s only consulting wizard – he’s a real wizard, doing real magic, and protecting people in his mushy post-Chandler pseudo-PI way from the various supernatural nasties that all really exist in this world.

Though this book adapts the beginning of the first “Dresden Files” novel, it’s actually the second “Dresden Files” graphic novel, since Butcher wrote a comics-only prequel about a year ago – subsequently collected as Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle, and reviewed here by yours truly – which was a pleasant enough monster-of-the-week story to introduce Harry and his world. Syaf was the artist on that first story, so he’s established the look of Dresden and his Chicago for this series. He’s a solid modern mainstream comics artist – his people look consistently the same across different pages and from any angle, and he can draw them in different clothes when necessary (unlike so many folks drawing steady paychecks). He’s good at facial expressions, which is very important for a book like this that’s as much about talking as it is fighting supernatural monsters.

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The Collected Doug Wright: Canada’s Master Cartoonist, 1949-1962
Edited by Seth and Brad Mackay
Drawn & Quarterly, May 2009, $39.95
 

Some claims come with the seeds of their own mocking built right in, and I’m afraid that “[[[Canada’s Master Cartoonist]]]” is right up there with “the premier crimefighting vigilante of the Quad Cities area” – it sounds impressive briefly, and then there’s a lull while we all wait for the punch line. Doug Wright is indeed an excellent cartoonist, and also Canadian – quintessentially Canadian, even, having spent his entire career in Montreal working on strips for purely Canadian markets – but this book’s glowing surety that Canada has precisely one “master cartoonist” and Wright is it comes across as the stereotypical Canadian fresh-faced naïveté that exists only to be foiled.

(I mean, what about such widely disparate names as Dave Sim, John Byrne, Hal Foster, Julie Doucet, Chester Brown, and Lynn Johnston? Is every other Canadian cartoonist eternally a journeyman? These are the kinds of questions I ponder, late at night, with my face turned north towards Canada.)

[[[The Collected Doug Wright]]] is a gorgeous book – no online photos do justice to its shiny red cover and the oval die-cut that reveals an embossed image of Wright most famous character, the boy scamp Nipper – and Wright was nearly as gorgeous a cartoonist in his prime. The early strips reprinted here are uneven: the drawing is good but not as strong as it would become, and Wright mostly used his red accent color to frame each panel – often too tightly and not well – rather than as the accent he later evolved it into. But from the mid-’50s his drawings are energetic – they have to be, being focused on a hellion like Nipper – and filled with closely-observed scenes drawn from life. (And then turned into slapstick comedy, of course – Wright was a mid-century gag cartoonist, and he knew what his audience wanted.)

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Life’s tough when you’re a teenage girl – sometimes, it’s even almost as tough as those teenage girls think it is. This week, three “normal girls” with gigantic eyes try to get through their massive problems…most of which, as you might have guessed, have to do with boys.

Orange Planet
, Vol. 1
By Haruka Fukushima
Del Rey Manga, April 2009, $10.99

People in manga quite often have very odd living arrangements. Let’s take Rui, the heroine of Orange Planet, as an example: her parents died six years ago, so she moved in with her aunt then. But now – at the age of maybe fourteen – that aunt has gotten married, so Rui lives all by herself in an apartment and has an early-morning paper route…to pay her rent? for spending money? just because? And, after that paper route, she has the habit of climbing into bed (purely for warmth) with the “adorable boy next door,” Taro, who also seems to be her ex-boyfriend. And then, just a few pages into this book, a strange older man – whose name we and Rui don’t learn for a while – moves in with her because his crazy ex-girlfriend (one of many) burned his house down. And then, of course, he turns out to be the new teaching intern, Eisuke.

Luckily, Kaoru, the boy that Rui’s interested in – she’s writes her first love note ever to him on page eleven – doesn’t live next to her. But, of course, the old-friend-who’s-known-her-since-childhood, Taro, has discovered that he’s in love with her, but he can’t tell her, or the story would end suddenly. So we’ve got the usual shojo love triangle (with a girl at the vertex), with the optional advisor living (semi-secretly) with the girl – call it Shojo Plot # 7B.

Fukushima tells that story in a clean, modern shojo style – yes, everyone has gigantic eyes and no noses to speak of, but the backgrounds and page layouts aren’t cluttered and flowery like the height of ‘80s shojo frippery, and her thin, elongated bodies are exaggerated but clearly reminiscent of the real coltishness of fast-growing early teens. Orange Planet is a standard story done professionally and with a real love for the material, which goes pretty far. But I still don’t have any clue what the title means.

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