Author: Andrew Wheeler

Review: Two Post-genre superheroes from AdHouse

  • Uncategorized
  • July 22, 2009

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…)

Review: Goats: Infinite Typewriters by Jonathan Rosenberg

  • Uncategorized
  • July 20, 2009

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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…)

Review: Stop Forgetting to Remember by Peter Kuper

  • Uncategorized
  • June 30, 2009
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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…)

Manga Friday: Four from Yen+

  • News
  • June 26, 2009

Like its older competitors Shonen Jump and (the sadly just-deceased) Shojo Beat, Yen Press’s Yen+ magazine has launched a number of series into actual paperback books – and, this week, I read four of ‘em. (All of which stories I also covered, several months back, as they appeared in the first few issues of Yen+.)Jack Frost, Vol. 1
By JinHo Ko
Yen+, May 2009, $10.99

Ko is the artist on Yen’s Croquis Pop, but here he’s taking over the whole shebang. And, as often happens when artists start writing their own stories, he works to his strengths – sailor-suited girls with wide eyes and panties in view far more than you’d expect, detailed backgrounds of buildings and rooms, and, of course and mostly, lots and lots of ultra-violence. (I should probably also note that this comes from Korea, so it reads left-to-right.)

Noh-A is a teenage girl who finds herself in a new high school without remembering how she got there. But that’s the least of her worries, since her head is almost immediately severed from her body during a hyper-kinetic fight between a guy who proclaims his name is “Hansen, Head Guidance Counselor!” and the title character, whom Noh-A dubs Nasty Smile. Luckily, Noh-A is now in a world between life and death – called Amityville, probably because Koreans watch old American horror movies like some Americans watch old Asian monster movies – and so her decapitation is reversible.

To make a long story short – though that long story is mostly made up of scenes of Jack cutting up various people with the implausibly long and pointy blades that pop out from his wrists – Noh-A is heartbroken to learn that she can never leave this world, that there are just a handful of people living there (and that they all are completely insane in their own ways), and that her powers extend only to not being able to die and having health-restoring blood. (Setting up many scenes of Noh-A’s blood being tapped for its healing powers later in the series, I’m sure.)

Jack Frost looks sleek and moves quickly, and it has some very stylish violence. It’s also not nearly as far over the top as Fist of the North Star (for example). But I’m hard-pressed to say many more nice things about it than that; it’s very obviously pandering to a specific and very sophomoric audience.

(more…)

Review: Johnny Hiro by Fred Chao

  • Uncategorized
  • June 23, 2009

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.)

(more…)

Group Review: The Kids Are Alright

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  • June 19, 2009
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Kids aren’t just short adults; if you spend any time around them, you’ll learn that quickly. (This is also the reason why many people choose not to spend much time around children.) And, similarly, books for children aren’t the same as books for adults, nor are they adult books simplified or dumbed down.

This week, I’ve got five books – parts of three series – all of which are for kids in some way or another. I’ve got two books that are for “all ages” – and I’ll see what that actually means in this case – two that are solidly aimed at tweens, and one that’s for…well, a very particular audience, as far as I can tell, and I’ll get to that.

Dungeon: Zenith, Vol. 3: Back in Style
Written by Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim; Art by Boulet
NBM, May 2008, $12.95

Dungeon Monstres, Vol. 2: The Dark LordWritten by Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim; Art by Andreas and Stephane Blanquet
NBM, October 2008, $12.95

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I don’t know how the books of the sprawling [[[Dungeon]]] saga are categorized or considered in their native France, but, over here, they get the not-always-helpful “all ages” label. The librarians I’ve talked to hate that label, since it’s inaccurate – no book is for all ages, and saying so usually means the person categorizing it is too lazy, greedy or ill-informed to make a more solid determination. As far as I can tell, the audience for these books is 10-up, or possibly 12-up if I’m being conservative. (Though I am not a librarian, particularly not a children/teen librarian, and those would be the experts in this case.)

The Dungeon series has proliferated into six subseries by this point – “The Early Years” is self-explanatory, “Zenith” has adventures of the duck Herbert at the height of the dungeon’s powers, “Twilight” tells of the downfall of the dungeon, “Monsters” is “great adventures of secondary characters,” “Parade” is set between the first two volumes of Zenith and has funny stories, and “Bonus” is so far unpublished over here – and I have examples of two of them here. (For further examples, see my reviews of Monstres Vol. 1: The Crying Giant and Zenith, Vol. 1: Duck Heart.)

And both of these are solid pieces of middle, with the humorously bittersweet, almost world-weary tone that’s characteristic of the Dungeon books and of nothing else I know for this audience. (The Dungeon books take place in a world that could have been written by Jack Vance – lots of adventure and jokes, against a dark and unforgiving background that implies an inevitable tragedy.) Back in Style starts with Herbert’s love, Isis, about to marry the dungeon’s Keeper – or supposedly about to do so, since it later becomes apparent that it’s all a plot to trick her father. But plots rarely go well for the heroes of Dungeon, and Herbert and his friends soon are heading for the dubious safety of Craftiwich, the duchy where he would be the heir, if he weren’t under an instant sentence of death if he reappears. And things get even more dangerous and difficult by the end – which is, again, more of a stopping point for a volume than an actual ending; none of the crises have been really resolved.

The [[[Monstres]]] volume, [[[The Dark Lord]]], is deliberately a sidebar to the main Twilight story – which I have to admit that I haven’t read yet – so it’s set many years later. The apparent villain and title character is the Grand Khan, an aged duck who looks very familiar and has a son who is the Duke of Craftiwich, but the hero of the first story is Marvin the Red, a bunny in a full-body powered suit of armor. He’s escorting a village of women to safety when the world stops spinning and breaks into thousands of islets floating in lava – and then he gets sidetracked by a beautiful cat-woman, who is the Grand Khan’s daughter. The second story here is from the Grand Khan’s point of view, and we learn that he’s a prisoner of the Dark Entity within him – until he briefly dies to set it free. And then things get much worse for him, as the various evil minions and forces that he’s been controlling begin to battle with each other and him for control of the pieces of the shattered planet. Again, there’s not a whole lot of ending – and doubly so, since each of these stories is a sidebar to Zenith where, presumably, the main action will take place.

Both of these books have a strong dose of adventure, in their very European fatalistic style. (Knowing what will happen to Herbert later in his life certainly makes his youthful adventures less enthralling.) The art is by various hands, though all in the same vein – Blanquet is the cartooniest and Boulet the most energetic, but they’re all similar to the look established by writer-artists Sfar and Trondheim in the earlier volumes. I wouldn’t suggest starting here, though – the best bet, I think, is to begin at the beginning of [[[Zenith]]] and work out from there.

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Review: Love Is a Peculiar Type of Thing by Box Brown

  • Uncategorized
  • June 16, 2009
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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.

(more…)

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Review: A Mess of Everything by Miss Lasko-Gross

  • Uncategorized
  • June 15, 2009
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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.

(more…)

Manga Friday: Reading It Forwards

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  • June 12, 2009

Just when you think you’ve gotten the hang of Asian comics – you can read right-to-left without blinking, speak of shojo and shonen with ease and have even been known to bring up seinen in casual conversation – you get caught up short with the realization that Japan is not the entirety of Asia. There are other countries with their own comics traditions, and you (well, me) suddenly realize that you (no, it’s still me) don’t know all that much about them. But there will always be more books you haven’t read than those you have, so the only thing to do is dive right in….

Mijeong
By Byun Byung-Jun
NBM ComicsLit, July 2009, $19.99

If Bret Easton Ellis was a Korean cartoonist – and about twenty years younger – he might have produced a short-story collection like Mijeong; Byung-Jun’s characters are mostly urban young people, disaffected more often than not. There are seven stories here, in a wide variety of art styles – some painted, some drawn, and all absolutely stunning in their virtuosity – but they’re all quite bleak.

Byung-Jun’s stories traffic in rape and abduction, murder and suicide, but his viewpoint is distanced and quiet, as if to say that this is just life, and none of it can be helped. Some of the stories end on a relatively upbeat note and some the other way, but it doesn’t really matter – they all have that quiet, detached tone.

Byung-Jun’s art is amazing in its textures and environment, though his people, deliberately, have mask-like faces that show little emotion most of the time. It’s harder to judge his writing – there are passages like “For weary lovers, love seems distant. But they’ll endure it all. Overwhelmed, they endure. But, in the end, they’ll manage.” that clunk around like a tire with a bald spot, but it’s impossible to say if that was clunky in the original Korean, or if the translation (by Joe Johnson) is responsible. In either case, the writing aims towards sublimity but doesn’t always make it.

Mijeong is an Asian comic for people who usually like European comics – it’s nuanced and subtle, quiet and vaguely depressive, with gorgeous art and a deeply jaundiced view of the world. Perhaps the fact that it reads left-to-right – since it’s Korean, and that’s the way their books run – will help it find that audience. (more…)

Review: Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files: Storm Front, Vol. 1: The Gathering Storm

  • Uncategorized
  • June 10, 2009

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.

(more…)

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