Author: Andrew Wheeler

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

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  • 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.

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Review: The Collected Doug Wright: Canada’s Master Cartoonist, 1949-1962

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  • June 8, 2009

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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Manga Friday: The Travails of Schoolgirls

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  • May 22, 2009
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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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Review: The Eternal Smile by Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim

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  • May 18, 2009
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The Eternal Smile: Three Stories
By Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim
First Second, May 2009, $16.95
 

Three years ago, Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel [[[American Born Chinese]]] – a three-stranded partly autobiographical and partly allegorical story of growing up Asian-American – was published to massive acclaim (National Book Award nominee, Michael L. Printz Award winner) and success. And two years before that, Derek Kirk Kim’s debut comics collection, [[[Same Difference and Other Stories]]], was also highly lauded, winning the Eisner, the Ignatz, and the Harvey. But five years before that, Luen and Kim collaborated on a two-issue series for Image called [[[Duncan’s Kingdom]]].

The Eternal Smile collects Duncan’s Kingdom, along with two other stories – [[[Gran’pa Greenbax]]] and [[[the Eternal Smile]]] and [[[Urgent Request]]] – which seem to be new work, though the book never says that specifically. The three stories are held together only loosely by theme; they’re all about escapism and greed, in their own separate ways.

Duncan’s Kingdom is a medieval fantasy – Duncan is a young knight in the service of a king, who is killed by the agents of the (presumably evil, though the plot is so quick and straightforward that a lot of things are left as “presumably”) Frog King on the third page. The Princess declares that whatever knight can kill the Frog King and bring his head back to her will have her hand and be the next king, so Duncan sets out on the quest with his magic sword.

There’s a twist in the story – there would have to be, with such an over-used premise like that – and I’ll be discrete enough not to tell you what it is. But things turn out not to be just what they seem, though Duncan does show more than enough heroism before it’s all done. Duncan’s Kingdom is a bit facile, though, even with the twist – it’s one we’ve all seen a dozen times in earlier stories. This version of the story is told reasonably well, though Duncan never becomes a specific person rather than “our hero.”

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Manga Friday: Welcome to the Neighborhood

  • Uncategorized
  • May 15, 2009
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Some people stay in the same place their entire lives: joining the family business, marrying their childhood sweethearts, growing old in the bosom of their loved ones underneath the spreading chestnut tree their grandfathers planted. But they’re boring, so there aren’t many manga about them.

People who go different places and do new things, on the other hand, are much more popular…

Cirque Du Freak, Vol. 1
By Darren Shan; Art by Takahiro Arai
Yen Press, June 2009, $10.99

Let’s get a couple of notes out of the way – first, this book calls itself just Cirque du Freak everywhere on the actual volume, but online stores think it’s named Cirque du Freak: The Manga. (Probably because there’s a long series of books for young readers under the “Cirque du Freak” umbrella title, of which this volume adapts the beginning of the first book, A Living Nightmare.) Secondly, “Darren Shan” is a pseudonym, and I know that definitively, because this is the story of a young boy named…

Darren Shan – who loves soccer and spiders, is inseparable from his best friend Steve, and goes to a uniform-requiring elementary school in some unspecified place. But then one day the circus – the strange, mysterious, dangerous, secret circus – comes to town, and Darren and Steve get tickets. The show is creepy and surprising, mesmerizing and faintly evil, in the way of a thousand fictional circuses since Dr. Lao and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Steve is sure that one particular performer, a Mr. Crepsley, is more than he seems, and sneaks off to beg to be allowed to run away with the circus. That doesn’t work out, but Darren soon has an unexpected transformation from the same source. By the end of the book, Darren’s been torn away from everything he ever knew (and so on; you know the drill), given dangerous and ill-defined new powers, and made a mortal enemy out of Steve.

Cirque du Freak shows its origins as a mildly creepy story for grade-schoolers in everything from the I-am-telling-you-my-true-story bunkum of the author credit to dumb names like “Vur Horston, the Vampire” to the moral simplicity of the choices that the characters make. Arai has an energetic but clean-lined shonen style, full of close-ups of distressed faces and overly-dynamic bodies, but that can only go so far – this is essentially a story for ten-year-olds, and so those of us substantially older than that will inevitably find it thin gruel.

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Manga Friday: My Karate Is Unstoppable!

There’s something about the comics form that just lends itself to stories about people in outlandish costumes trying to beat the snot out of each other, often in unfeasible ways using silly powers or items. From giant mecha to Asterix to Spider-Man, it’s just not comics unless you get something ridiculously large dropped on your head, have it shatter into pebbles, and then you shake it off and fight on. And the four books this week all are about fighting in one way or another, and, speaking of funny costumes…. 

Maid War Chronicle, Vol. 1
By RAN
Del Rey Manga, April 2009, $10.99

Prince Alex II of Arbansool is the usual feudal scion – pig-headed, self-centered, and barely smarter than a block of wood – but he’s the last hope of his kingdom after the forces of fiendish Nowarle (neighbor to the south) invade and overrun the capital. He barely escapes with a few retainers. Seven retainers, to be precise. Actually, seven maids.

(What is it with the Japanese and maids? At least these girls are dressed in the semi-sensible Japanese maid style, with long sleeves, aprons, and full skirts trimmed in lace, rather than the “sexy French maid” mostly-lingerie look I’m sure they would have had if this book was created by an American.)

So Alex is loud and demanding and only rarely in touch with reality (and then mostly by accident). He also would be fondling the girls all day long if he weren’t a good foot shorter than any of them, and if they’d take it – luckily, they mostly don’t. Since he’s also convinced of his own power and righteousness, his first order of business, upon escaping the capital, is to run to an ancient shrine that holds twelve secret old weapons. The weapons can only be wielded by knights, so Alex declares the maids a new – sexy – order of knights devoted to protecting only him, and the girls then pull a variety of unfeasible and silly-looking weaponry out of a table.

And then Alex and his girl knights – untrained, still in maid costumes, and generally unsure how their new super-duper magical weapons actually work – set off to find a garrison of still-loyal soldiers and then retake the kingdom. That’s going to take a lot longer than Alex expects, of course.

Maid War Chronicle is silly and generic and full of panty shots – you’d think it would be tough with skirts that long, but you didn’t count on the fiendish ingenuity of the being that calls itself RAN – but it never fails to be fast-paced and entertaining. And it’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect a manga called Maid War Chronicle to be, so I certainly can’t fault it there. (more…)

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Review: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1910

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  • May 6, 2009
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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. III: Century #1
: “1910”
By Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
Top Shelf, April 2009, $7.95
 

The usual rule in comics is that nothing with two or more colons in its title – not to mention two or more separate numbering schemes – is nothing but rubbishy hackwork, and should be avoided. In this, as in so much else, Alan Moore is the Great Exception, as his newest miniseries comes with a jaw-breaker of a title that sounds like a piece of summer crossover from a stranger and much more literary world than our own.

This volume begins the third major “[[[League of Extraordinary Gentlemen]]]” story – last year’s [[[Black Dossier]]] doesn’t quite count, for complicated Moorian reasons – and it continues with the survivors of the team from the first two stories (Mina Harker and a rejuvenated Alan Quatermain posing as his own son), augmented by several more fictional characters (Orlando, Raffles, Carnacki) to continue their work preserving England from obscure horrors, reporting in to the secret group headed by Mycroft Holmes.

There will be two more volumes in this story – each set in, and titled after, a different and widely spaced year in the last century – so 1910 is mostly set-up. Moore re-introduces the League and sets them to squabbling, since superteams must always fight among themselves. The battling is less ominous this time around: none of the team are as immediately dangerous as Mr. Hyde, nor as sneakily obnoxious as the invisible Mr.Griffin. (So we get Raffles’s sniffing attempts to maintain his requisite stiff upper lip in circumstances he never expected and Orlando engaging in high-quality mincing whenever the slightest opportunity arises, along with Mina’s usual Serious Girl act and very little from the increasingly colorless Alan.)

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Manga Friday: A Drifting Life

A Drifting Life
By Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Drawn & Quarterly, April 2009, $29.99

It’s hard, sometimes impossible, to avoid a tunnel-visioned view of the world – not to have one’s mental map of things resemble that famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover, with familiar things reassuringly large and the rest of the world a small, distant blur. And so everything we learn gets filtered through that initial world-view, with each fact setting itself into place like a brick and used as shorthand for huge swaths of that surrounding blur, and a few isolated facts pass for “knowledge” of something far away.

For most of us, the history of manga goes like this: Tezuka sprung, fully-formed, sometime after the war. There were other creators, but hardly anybody can remember any of them. Eventually, the shonen-shojo gulf appeared, in the ‘70s, and real manga history started, with series that we can usually remember and some that we’ve actually read. Maybe we believe that because so very little of the first generation of manga has ever been translated into English, and maybe that’s because most of those stories are utterly ephemeral and best forgotten even by the Japanese. Or maybe not – but how would we know what was good, what the artistic movements, the creators, the publishing lines and magazines were fifty years ago in a country on the other side of the world, in a language where we can’t even tell where words end?

That’s where A Drifting Life comes in. It’s another one of those bricks: isolated, yes. Specific rather than comprehensive, absolutely. Biased, certainly. But it’s the story of those years, of the early days of manga from 1945 through 1960, from a creator who was there, and telling a semi-fictionalized story of a culture, an industry and a time we knew nothing about before.

Drawn & Quarterly has published three books of Tatsumi’s work before this, three collections of his short stories from the 1969-1972 period: The Push Man and Other Stories, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and Good-Bye. A Drifting Life comes from somewhat later in his career, though how much later isn’t clear. It’s been said that Tatsumi worked on this for more than a decade, and the epilogue – set in 1995 – has the feeling of bringing the story up to the “present day.” So, from that evidence, I surmise that Tatsumi worked on A Drifting Life from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, with serious uncertainty about both ends of that assumption. But it does look like he came to write this memoir long after the events he’s writing about, and probably at least a decade after he created the other stories we’ve seen from him. (more…)

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Review: Showcase Presents Ambush Bug by Giffen, Fleming, Oksner, and others

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  • April 29, 2009

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Showcase Presents: Ambush Bug Vol. 1
Plot & Pencils by Keith Giffen, Script by Robert Loren Fleming, Inks by Bob Oksner (for most of the stories)
DC Comics, March 2009, $16.99

We all have to look back at the comics of our youth once in a while. It’s not always a pleasant experience, particularly when we’re reminded of what no-taste cretins we once were. But, once in a while, it’s possible to look back and discover that our taste wasn’t that bad, that something we remember as funny was actually clever and inventive as well. Even then, though, we might have to wade in pretty far before we get to the good stuff.

Ambush Bug started off as a random villain in a minor issue of a minor DC comic in late 1982 – DC Comics Presents #52, at that time the [[[Superman]]] team-up book – written by Paul Kupperberg, though the Bug was created by penciller Keith Giffen. He was there purely as an additional complication, as the A story in that issue saw a rampaging Negative Woman (from the then-new incarnation of the Doom Patrol) trashing Metropolis while Supes and her teammates tried to stop her. (And that issue is very of its time, with acres and acres of tedious explanatory dialogue like “The name’s Joshua Clay – Tempest to you, Superman. The lady calls herself Arani, or Celsius, take your pick! Put us together an’ you get the Doom Patrol” and similar decaying-Silver-Age tediousness.)

The Bug came back to DC Comics Presents slightly wackier, but still vaguely villainous, seven issues later, with Giffen taking over plotting as well and getting Paul Levitz to write an ostensible Superman-Legion of Super-Heroes team-up. It turned into a chase-the-wacky-villain around plot, something like a minor ‘50s Joker story. Kupperberg grabbed the Bug another six months later and made him wackier still for an issue of [[[Supergirl]]].

And then Giffen took the Bug back for good, putting him in three short stories for [[[Action Comics]]], where the core Bug team – Giffen on plots and pencils, Robert Loren Fleming providing script, and Bob Oksner on inks – came together. Giffen’s panels shoved into each other, eliminating gutters most of the time, and his Munoz-influenced period, all big noses, tight close-ups and odd angles, began – all of which gave the Bug’s stories a dark, cluttered, deeply nonheroic look. Oksner chipped in by dropped pots on ink on every page to fill Giffen’s blacks. And Fleming brought a light touch to the prose that made the stories funny and not just amusing.

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Manga Friday: Growin’ Up

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  • April 24, 2009

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The theme is more random than ever this week, because – let’s be honest – it would be difficult to find four manga series that aren’t about teenagers. But these three books offer exceptionally varied takes on the eternal problems of adolescence, and that’s good enough for me!

Wolverine: Prodigal Son, Vol. 1
Story by Antony Johnson; Art by Wilson Tortosa
Del Rey Manga, April 2009, $12.99

Yes, that the X-Men Wolverine; the one whose big movie opens a week from today. But here he’s ripped out of the Marvel Universe and dropped into a manga-fied version of his life, where he’s a sullen teenager attending an all-martial-arts all-the-time high school somewhere in darkest Canada. And he’s not yet the best at what he does, though what he does, as ever, is not pretty. (Or nice, if you subscribe to Eastern Orthodox Wolverineism.) He’s also a lot whinier than you’d expect from Wolverine, with a host of insecurity issues.

That’s what makes it manga-style I suppose: the school setting, the bizarre hair, the complicated school projects-cum-training-sessions, the teenage protagonist who thinks no one likes him. The extended fight scenes and ninjas, though, were in Wolverine stories almost from the beginning, so any manga influence is buried under Claremont and Miller and Wein.

So Wolverine is tormented and misunderstood, having mysteriously appeared at this school with no knowledge of his past, and he coasts through his all-hitting school work by being really really good at martial arts. He’s got an almost-love affair going with Tamara, the daughter of the school’s head, and he’s in regular conflict with some other, more stereotyped members of the class.

But then the boss of the school takes him to New York as a treat, and things get really bad. The aforementioned ninjas show up, and…well, the back half of this volume is pretty much wall-to-wall fight scenes, with short breaks for emoting and monologing. There will be more, of course – there’s never a “volume one” without a two – and the last few pages have some higher-up villains cackling and wringing their hands as a preview of what’s in for Logan in that volume.

Prodigal Son is a serviceable mash-up of X-Men and shonen, but it’s also entirely disposable and has no real reason to exist besides pure brand extension. I guess it’s really for kids who might like to read stories about Marvel Mutants, but will only read comics if they’re drawn manga-style. (more…)

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