Author: Andrew Wheeler

I Saw You…: Comics Inspired by Real-Life Missed Connections
Edited by Julia Wertz
Random House/Three Rivers Press; February 2009; $12.95

Everyone’s looking for something: money, fame, recognition, wonder, love. For most of those things, you’re on your own. But, for the last one, there’s always the personal ads. Blatantly advertising for love can feel very needy and desperate, though – but what if the love is already there (or, at least, you hope it is) and just needs to be coaxed out? That’s the place for the missed connection – I saw you, you winked at me, the subway doors closed, and so on and on. A missed connection, if you’re inclined to think that way, if someone you should have really met and clicked with, but didn’t, quite, because of external circumstances.

Julia Wertz, the cartoonist of the webcomic [[[The Fart Party]]], is one of many people obsessed with missed connections, either checking incessantly to see if someone “missed” them, or just amazed at what some people think a “connection” is. She found herself checking Craigslist several times a day, and then decided to make a minicomic out of missed connection ads. She got many more submissions than she’d expected, and that minicomic anthology eventually blossomed into this book – a collection of comics by nearly a hundred contributors, all illustrating actual missed connections ad, imagining their own missed connections, or just inspired by the idea.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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