Author: Andrew Wheeler

My reading has been rejuvenated over the past couple of weeks by infusions from the Eisner Overmind – I’m a judge this year, and so I’m reading ahead in preparation for the big judging weekend coming up at the end of March – in particular by these three recent, and unique, manga volumes. All are complete stories in themselves, which seems rare for manga, and they range pretty far – from each other, and from the well-trodden paths of shonen and shojo.

Disappearance Diary
By Hideo Azuma
Fanfare/Ponent Mon, October 2008, $22.99

Azuma has worked in manga since 1969, and is known as the father of “Lolicon.” He created many long, popular series for the Japanese market – Futari To Gonin and Fujouri Nikki, for example – over several decades. But this is something different.

In 1989, Azuma ran away from his home and work, and lived as a homeless man for months. He did it again in 1992. And then in 1998, he was forced into rehab to recover from his alcoholism. Disappearance Diary is the story of those three times in his own life – a memoir comic of some very dark moments.

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The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude
By Carol Lay
Villard, January 2009, $18.00

In the wake of [[[Perseopolis]]] and similar works, graphic novels have become ever more popular for acquisition editors at the major trade publishing houses. But, just as the direct market twists products in the direction of its own obsessions – spandex, punches, and chivalry twisted through at least two axes, these days – those mainstream publishers have their own market trends and forces, and they’re looking for particular things themselves. To be blunt, all of the big-publisher GNs seem to be memoirs of one sort or another. Some of them are “here’s my life in numbing detail” books, like David Heatley’s [[[My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down]]], and some are small stories of particular moments and times, like Lucy Knisley’s [[[French Milk]]] – but they all are personal stories of one kind or another.

Carol Lay, surprisingly, hasn’t written a book-length illustrated work before; she’s had several collections published – mostly of her weekly [[[WayLay]]] strip – but [[[The Big Skinny]]] is the first time she created a graphic work purely for book publication. And, since it’s from Villard, one piece of the huge Random House book conglomerate, you’d be pretty safe betting that it’s a memoir of some kind. And it is. But The Big Skinny isn’t just a memoir – it’s some more unusual for comics, though it fits into a pretty common prose format.

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Ghost World: the Special Edition
Graphic novel by Daniel Clowes; Screenplay by Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff
Fantagraphics, October 2008, $39.99

Ten years after the first collection of [[[Ghost World]]] and seven after the movie version of the same story (and, not coincidentally, the screenplay book), Dan Clowes’s most famous and best-known story has gotten the big fat hardcover treatment – and I’m sure that the fact that his story of suburban ennui and aimlessness follows dozens of stories of spandex-clad punching bags into basically the same format and sales channel is an irony not lost on Clowes. (Though I should point out that this big fancy hardcover is not nearly as expensive and laded with gewgaws as most of those “absolute” and “essential” and “ultimate” books – all those books that name themselves, and lavish on themselves production designs, reminiscent of high end sex toys; shiny and sleek and oversized and, all too clichéd often, in jet-black. Clowes’s book has reasonable proportions, and a price quite reasonable for an art book of its size.)

This “Special Edition” collects the graphic novel [[[Ghost World]]], by Clowes, and the screenplay, by Clowes and Terry Zwigoff. It also adds in a forty-eight-page section of miscellany – box art from odd ancillary products, covers from old [[[Eightball]]] issues when Ghost World was being serialized, foreign covers, miscellaneous art related to the movie, and a few sketches and pages of original art. Up front is a new introduction by Clowes, and a two-page story that may, or may not, show a glimpse of Enid and Rebecca’s lives now. Those are pleasant, but the real core of Ghost World is the story, and this book gives both versions of it equal weight.

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Cartoon Marriage: Adventures in Love and Matrimony by The New Yorker’s Cartooning Couple
By Liza Donnelly and Michael Maslin
Random House, January 2009, $24.00

Donnelly and Maslin are both professional cartoonists – both regularly appearing in The New Yorker – and have been married for twenty years. [[[Cartoon Marriage]]] is their paired look at modern relationships, consisting of two hundred reprinted New Yorker cartoons – divided roughly right down the middle – and some new comics-format pages to explain and introduce each section.

(The two of them have collaborated on two previous books – [[[Call Me When You Reach Nirvana]]] and [[[Husbands and Wives]]] – the latter of which sounds very similar in scope and theme to this new one. But both of those are well over a decade old, so presumably they have a lot more marriage to reflect on now – as well as more cartoons to choose from.)

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These two books have very little in common on the surface, but, beneath that…they deeply have little in common. But they’re both fairly new, not all that well-known, and self-published by their respective female creators (with an asterisk in the first case, which I’ll get to) – so that’s good enough for me.

The Martian Confederacy: Rednecks on the Red Planet, Vol. 1
Story by Jason McNamara; Art by Paige Braddock
Girl Swirl, July 2008, $15.00

[[[The Martian Confederacy]]] cannot be adequately described by the phrase “The Dukes of Hazard on Mars,” but it’s a good first stab. Our two heroes here aren’t brothers – one of them, Spinner, is actually an anthropomorphic bear, though the other, [[[Boone]]], is the expected tough-but-tender he-man type. And the closest thing to a Daisy Duke is Boone’s roommate, the android woman Lou – come to think of it, maybe she fits better in the “other Duke brother” slot.

Well, anyway, this is a story of beaten-down good ‘ol boys and girls battling the corrupt leadership – as personified by “the Alcalde” (whose name I can’t find, if it’s ever given), who calls himself “the legislative, judicial, and executive arm of Martian law” and also mentions that he’s the only lawman on the planet, though he scrounges up some additional muscle late in the book when he needs them. (Even assuming that his official position does give him power, he’s amazingly arbitrary and capricious in his “law enforcement” – the kind of cop who doesn’t survive long in a society where anyone other than him has a gun. I’m deeply surprised that he hasn’t woken up dead a dozen times before this story begins.)

Mars is owned outright by a small number of really nasty corporations, who keep the entire population – how large a population is not quite clear – in essentially indentured servitude, as the rich tourists come from Earth during the high season once a year. (Implying that the writer McNamara either doesn’t know much or doesn’t care much about orbits.) It’s 3535, after the usual humorous loss-of-all-data and resulting reborn society with quirky touches like “shatners” for money. And there are lots of anthropomorphics, who may or may not be an underclass even within the downtrodden Martian population. (They have their own bars and the Alcalde hates them – but plenty of groups have their own bars, and the Alcalde hates everyone.) And even odder things, like the woman Sally, who has heads and arms growing out of each end of her torso and split personalities to match. (Try not to think too much about her plumbing issues – that way lies madness.)

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Alan’s War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope
By Emmanuel Guibert
First Second, November 2008, $24.00

French cartoonist Guibert met Alan Cope in 1994 on a small island off the coast of France, where Cope was living in retirement and Guibert was visiting on vacation. The older man gave the young man directions, and a friendship bloomed. Soon, Cope was telling Guibert the stories of his service in the US Army during WW II. The two expected to turn those stories into comics – and it’s not clear how much of this book had Cope’s direct input and corrections – but Cope died in 1999, partway through the project, and the final book bears only Guibert’s name.

But Alan’s War is very much Alan Cope’s story, in his own voice – it’s extensively narrated in Cope’s voice, with pages and pages of text that appear to be directly from Guibert’s notes and conversations.

Cope was born in 1925 in Southern California, and grew up in Pasadena when that was still a quiet area of orange groves. (Guibert says in his introduction that he has another set of notes and stories from Alan, about his childhood, and that he expects to turn those into a companion graphic novel some time in the future.) In February of 1943, Cope turned 18, and was immediately drafted – there was, of course, a war on at the time.

[[[Alan’s War]]] is divided into three sections, each originally published as a separate book in France. The first covers Cope’s time in uniform on American soil – he went over by train immediately to Fort Knox, but then stayed there for more than a year and a half, first learning to be part of a tank crew, then going to radio school, and eventually becoming a radio instructor. He was clearly good at all of these things – though we are getting the story from him directly, if that matters – but the upshot was that he stayed stateside for some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. There are plenty of entertaining stories in the first section, but they’re not essentially wartime stories; they could have happened to any conscript soldier at any time, since they’re all stories of training and friends on the base and going into town.

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The Alcoholic
By Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel
DC Comics, October 2008, $19.99

The main character of T[[[he Alcoholic]]] is one Jonathan A., a writer who looks very much like writer Jonathan Ames and whose life has been exceptionally similar to Ames’s. Those who have read Ames before know that this is nothing new: he is his own best subject, either transformed fictionally in novels like [[[I Pass Like Night]]] and [[[Wake Up, Sir!]]] or poured out in his rawly hilarious nonfiction in [[[What’s Not To Love?]]] Jonathan A. is and is not Jonathan Ames; The Alcoholic isn’t a memoir but a novel (a graphic novel – very graphic in places), and so we must treat A. as a fictional character.

(I think I’ll refer to him as A. from here on; it adds an oddly Kafkaesque air – or, and perhaps more appropriately, a sense of anonymity and confession.)

The Alcoholic is A.’s life story – or at least as much of his life as concerns alcohol and sex – from 1979 through late 2001, high school through early middle age. It opens in August 2001, as A. is waking up in a station wagon in Asbury Park, with an old, very short woman trying to seduce him after a long night of drinking.

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Bottomless Belly Button
By Dash Shaw
Fantagraphics, June 2008, $29.99

Wrapped up inside [[[Bottomless Belly Button]]] is the realistically-depicted story of a family – aged parents, three grown children, and few others – coming all together for one last time as the parents divorce after forty years of marriage. But Dash Shaw is in no hurry to tell that story; he wraps the three sections of this graphic novel in metaphor and metafiction, graphically depicting the Looney family and their world in various forms – as water, as sand, as maps, as diagrams and lists. Shaw takes the time and space to tell his story slowly, to circle around it from all sides, and to focus on each member of the Looney family in turn.

David Looney is the patriarch: his word has always been law. We see the least of him in Bottomless Belly Button, but he’s clearly diminished from the authoritarian, demanding man we see in flashbacks – he’s no longer in charge. The divorce probably isn’t his idea.

Dennis Looney, the older son – the good son. Married, with a baby. Somewhere in his mid ‘30s. Dennis can’t accept the divorce – in the Looney’s view of the world, families always stick together, because families are the core building blocks of the world. Something must be wrong – something he can fix. So he gets angry inappropriately, takes long runs on the beach to think through things, roams restlessly through the house, looking for clues and reasons for something he can’t accept.

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French Milk
By Lucy Knisley
Touchstone, October 2008, $15.00

The first thing to know – and to keep in your head – is that Lucy Knisley is twenty-two years old. That’s fantastically young to be planning and executing a nearly two-hundred-page-long drawn book, and the mere fact that she did it is impressive. And so if I say that [[[French Milk]]] is a bit thin, a bit obvious, and clearly created by a very young woman – that’s only to be expected, and not a major criticism.

French Milk is a sketchbook diary, something like Craig Thompson’s [[[Carnet de Voyage]]] or Enrico Casarosa’s [[[The Venice Chronicles]]]. Knisley flew to Paris with her mother just after Christmas of 2006 – she was turning twenty-two, and her mother was turning fifty, which added up to a good enough excuse – and the two of them lived there in an apartment for just about a month. French Milk is the story of that month, and of a few days before and afterward – several pages are devoted to each day, with photos and drawings and narrative.

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