Author: Andrew Wheeler

Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Prodigal Son, Volume One
Adaptation by Chuck Dixon; Illustrated by Brett Booth
Dell Rey, February 2009, $22.95

There comes a time in every best-selling writer’s life when he realizes that he’d like to make money even faster than he can write books. OK, maybe that realization comes to all of us – but the best-selling writer can actually do something about it. At that point, assuming that scruples aren’t a problem – and how on earth did he become a best-selling writer and keep his scruples, anyway? – the options are two: let someone else write a book under your name, or license something you’ve already written to another medium, and let Joe Hired-Hand do the heavy lifting in that format.

Or, if you’re Dean Koontz, you could do both.

Some years ago, he got Kevin J. Anderson to co-write a novel called [[[Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Prodigal Son]]], and then a couple of sequels. (There was also a TV deal at the time, though, sadly, it eventually fell through.) And now long-time comics writer Chuck Dixon has adapted that novel, which was at least half-written by Anderson in the first place, into a comics series…which, of course, still has “Dean Koontz” as the largest thing on the cover.

(I’m beginning to think that popular writers’ names have a nearly homeopathic power – no matter how much they’re diluted, the audience will keep clamoring for more.)

(more…)

The Joker has always been Batman’s most iconic and popular villain. We can argue why this is so, but it’s been true since at least the ‘70s, and shows no sign of changing any time in the near future. And so, with a major movie coming out last year with a high-profile Joker (though no one knew just how high-profile it would eventually be, after Heath Ledger’s surprise death and a billion dollars at the box office), DC signed up some more Joker-centric projects. Who could blame them?

Joker
Written by Brian Azzarello; Pencils and Covers by Lee Bermejo
DC Comics, November 2008, $19.99

This one was billed as the closest thing to a direct tie-in with that [[[Dark Knight]]] movie, and this [[[Joker]]] could function as a sequel – the Joker gets out of Arkham as the story begins. It’s pretty blatant, actually, with the Joker looking as close to Heath Ledger as a jumpy lawyer would allow, scarred cheeks (not an element of any previous Joker incarnations I can recall), and a brief Riddler cameo seemingly planned as a Johnny Depp casting call. (On the other hand, Two-Face is still alive in this story and Batman hardly appears at all – just at the end, when Azzarello was nearing the end of his page limit and nothing else would bring the story to any kind of conclusion.)

Joker is not precisely Joker’s story, though: it’s yet another worms-eye view of a superhero universe, the story of small-time hood Jonny Frost (and why, after seventy years of pulp comics, are we still stuck with dumb names like that?), who wants to be bigger than he has any right to be. So he volunteers to pick up the Joker when he gets out of Arkham, and he becomes the Joker’s right-hand man, sort-of. Then there’s a lot of violence – mostly against Two-Face’s gang – to show us how twisted and sociopathic and sneaky the Joker is.

(more…)

Comics come in all sizes. Some are big books, massive “ultimate” or “essential” or “indispensable” or “your friends will say you have a small penis if you don’t buy this” editions, with fancy foil and trim to make the stories of people punching each other seem that much more serious.

But there are also little books: ones that tell their own stories in a small compass, that don’t rely on bombast or hype. Ones that might actually be good.

Like these three books, the most recent entries in the fine Montreal publisher Drawn & Quarterly’s “[[[Petits Livres]]]” series – fine comics by fine creators in a small, affordable format.

Nicolas
By Pascal Girard
Drawn & Quarterly, February 2009, $9.95

In a series of short vignettes, Girard circles around the death of his brother, [[[Nicolas]]], of lactic acidosis at the age of five – when Girard himself was only a few years older. Girard grows through childhood into a young man as this short book goes on, but he never forgets his brother – he never “moves on,” and it never stops being painful.

(more…)

In the Flesh
By Koren Shadmi
Villard, February 2009, $14.95

You probably haven’t heard of Shadmi before this book – he’s an Israeli, now resident in New York, and this is his first collection. Some of these stories did appear before…in French, in various anthologies, which I doubt any of us are familiar with.

But he’s clearly a mature artist; these nine stories are of a piece, both in their drawing and their writing, and they paint a consistent picture of the world. It’s not a pleasant picture, though: Shadmi’s world is ruled by tormented desire and inchoate longings, populated by characters who live in quiet despair only when they’ve settled down a bit from the loud kind. In fact, [[[In the Flesh]]] reads very much like a comics adaptation of the short stories of some young writer with a strong voice – it’s not so much “art comics” as it is a direct translation into comics of a particular kind of art short fiction.

(more…)

Labor Days, Volume 1
By Philip Gelatt and Rick Lacy
Oni Press, September 2008, $11.95

Some kinds of double standards will never die. Take a brutish young American male – dull, unattractive, drunken, and stuck in a dead-end odd-jobs business – and he’s both boring and contemptible. But turn him into a London boy, with the same face and job, demeanor and intellect, and suddenly he’s a hero. This hero.

He’s Benton “Bags” Bagswell, the man who put the “never” in ne’er-do-well. And these two New York-based creators knew that if they made him a Londoner, made him a British boy, then he’d be loveable rather than the lumpish prole the identical New Yorker would be.

Bags opens the story on a morning after the night before – his girlfriend has just dumped him for terminal being-Bags reasons, and a package has been left on his front step, for him to take care of professionally. (On the first page, we see Bags’s flyer, which says “I’m your next handyman for hire! Benton Bagswell’s the name. Are your chores bores? No job is too mundane for me!” Now, I haven’t hired a handyman in some time, but I thought they generally list things they’re reasonably good at, such as carpentry or plumbing or C# coding or knitting, rather than proclaiming that they’d do anything at all, as long as there’s a quid in it for them. One wonders if this approach works for Bags, and, if so, why? It reads very close to the kind of code used for drug transactions and other nefarious activities.)

(more…)

08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail
By Michael Crowley and Dan Goldman
Three Rivers Press, January 2009, $17.95

Typically, there are two kinds of non-fiction books about big events – first are the quick-and-dirty ones that come out almost immediately, pulled together from news reports or written on the fly or just knocked out by a writer with lightning fingers. The other is the “think piece” – longer, more measured, with time for distance and clarity. They each have their strengths: the quick books can crystallize a mood, and remind us of what we felt at the time, while the slower books tend to be the ones that last. It happens with all kinds of nonfictional topics, from biographies (the quickies come out after the personage has done something major, such as died) to political scandals to social movements.

But the area that attracts more quick books than any other is high-level politics – since the energy available to be expended on political arguments, thoughts, and post-mortems is effectively infinite; the winners are always happy to relive their victories and the losers are desperate to know how to win the next time. So every four years there’s a wave of books about the US presidential race: it starts slow, about a year out, with potted campaign biographies and thinly disguised position papers and various attempts to influence the debate. Once the race gets going in earnest, the Swift Boats start running – quick-and-dirty books (usually as dirty as possible) aimed at real or perceived weaknesses, plus new or updated versions of the first kind of books. And then there’s another rush after the election is done, praising or damning the winner, and explaining how everything will be utterly different, unless it’s going to be completely the same. At the same time, reporters bash their campaign columns into shape and shove them out the door as books, or quickly explain for posterity how they knew all of the important things all along. Finally, the slower, more thoughtful books – things like [[[What It Takes]]] and [[[The Selling of the President]]] – come along a year or so later…just as the machine starts to gear up for the next time around.

(more…)

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.

(more…)