Author: Andrew Wheeler

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.

(more…)

Where I live – darkest New Jersey – it’s been cold and snowy and cold (did I mention the cold?) for the past week, causing us all to huddle closer for warmth. Add to that the season of closeness and love towards all…and the minds of some of us turn towards more earthy pursuits, such as those examined in the three books this week.

Object of Desire
By Tomoko Noguchi
Luv Luv/Aurora, December 2008, $10.95

Object of Desire comes from the redikomi side – it’s a collection of manga stories by a woman for an audience of women, and all about young women (they seem to be highschoolers, from internal evidence) in their first, or very early affairs of love and sex. There are six stories here, each somewhere from twenty-four to forty-something pages – so they’re of roughly equal weight, unlike the similar manga collections that have one long story and one or two much shorter ones.

(The publisher’s description obscures this, focusing only on the title story – perhaps the old truism in prose publishing that a novel always outsells a book of short fiction is also true of manga?)

“Object of Desire” is narrated by an attractive young woman – so attractive, in fact, that young men routinely date her once or twice and lie outrageously just to have sex with her. (There’s a pretty casual hook-up culture going on here, obviously.) She doesn’t mind, exactly – sex is nice – but she does wish there was some way to find a “nice guy.” But then a boy with a different, blunter approach comes along, and a relationship – unconventional, perhaps, but certainly longer-lasting blossoms.

(more…)

Scott Morse – and I say this with a laugh as well as wonderment – has had an awfully long, varied, and successful comics career for a guy who is essentially unknown to the vast majority of the comics-shop crowd. He’s done a long series of fantasy graphic novels ([[[Soulwind]]]), a number of books for kids or for all ages (like the [[[Magic Pickle]]] series), and a pile of other things, on top of being a story artist and designer at Pixar. Why, in just the last two months he published these two, quite different, graphic novels:

Notes Over Yonder
By Scott Morse
Red Window/AdHouse, November 2008, $12.95

This is a small-format book, about 4” x 6”, with a single painting – each loose and just a bit sketchy, like a storyboard that hasn’t been overworked – on each of its sixty-four pages. It’s also close to wordless, with a few written messages. And it flows subtly back and forth, evoking the rhythms of a jazzy torch song or a quiet blues melody.

There’s a man in a city and another man on a small island – each has a cat (maybe even the same cat), and each has recently lost his woman, in very different ways. Each man also plays the guitar – and, come to think of it, that might be the same guitar as well. (I wouldn’t be at all surprised.) One of the men finds a way to go on, and one of them finds a different way – but their stories aren’t told separately (as the subtitle, ‘A Story in Two Parts,’ might seem to imply), but intertwined. We start with one man and move on to the other before returning.

Again, this is all wordless, so Morse doesn’t tell us where any of this is. His bright white lines and energetic caricatures draw us into the story, and we fill in those details ourselves. If  [[[Notes Over Yonder]]] reads just a bit like the storyboards for a short animated film – probably one set entirely to a single instrumental song, mostly quiet and mournful – that’s only to be expect from a creator who thinks in moving pictures all day long. It’s a fine little story, and the art is particularly impressive.

(more…)

DC has long been the home of a certain kind of story – at least moderately hip, and equally popular, usually with some elements derived from the superhero mainstream but with its own high-concept premise ripped from the Zeitgeist. First there was [[[Sandman]]], then [[[Preacher]]] and [[[Transmetropolitan]]] and so on – but, these days, since [[[Y: The Last Man]]] ended, the two thoroughbreds left in that particular stable are [[[Fables]]] and [[[Ex Machina]]]. As it happens, both of those series had new collections this fall…

Ex Machina, Vol. 7: Ex Cathedra
By Brian K. Vaughan, Tony Harris & Jim Clark
DC Comics/Wildstorm, October 2008, $12.99

[[[Ex Machina]]] has been piling up the cheap trade paperbacks, keeping its storylines to four or five issues and pumping out the reprints as quickly as possible. And so this seventh volume collects issues #30-34, the last of which hit stores as a floppy only in February. (I reviewed the sixth volume back in April, for those who want some background.)

Ex Machina, as you might know by now, is a science-fiction story about Mitchell Hundred, the Mayor of New York City, in a slightly alternate world. Hundred has some kind of alien (or other-dimensional) gizmo embedded in his face, which allows him to understand and command machines – since this is a comic book, he used that at first to dress up in a funny costume (as “The Great Machine”) and fight crime. Since this is a smart comic book, he then ran for mayor, and won after he stopped the second 9/11 plane from hitting the World Trade Center.

[[[Ex Cathedra]]] is a four-part story set in December of 2003; it’s still not quite the midpoint of Hundred’s first term. The series has bounced back and forth in time between Hundred’s mayoral and superhero days; in these issues we do get a few scenes in 2000-2001 for spice, but it’s mostly about a visit to the Vatican.

(more…)

An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories, Vol. 2
Edited by Ivan Brunetti
Yale University Press, October 2008, $28.00

Two years ago, we saw one of the biggest signs yet that comics had “made it” and were being taken seriously by the academic/literary community: the publication of a big, magisterial teaching anthology of comics, edited by Ivan Brunetti and published by the utterly respectable Yale University Press. That book was [[[An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories]]], and even its unwieldy title seemed to underline just how serious and important it was – the Anthology was the kind of comics collection that could be assigned as reading in English 214: Readings in Contemporary Literature, or some other similarly dull university course.

Inside the Anthology, Brunetti staked out a position for comics much closer to the Art History department than to English, leading off with intensely formalist works and only settling down to things like “Graphic Fiction” and “True Stories” deep into the book. (A lot of the first Anthology – and a lot of this second book as well – must be called “Cartoons” as a default; they’re clearly sequential art, but they’re closer to poems or painting series than they are to any kind of written prose. Not that this is a bad thing; I’m sure Brunetti would argue that those works show the unique abilities of the comics form.) Most impressively, Brunetti produced a book that wasn’t obvious – it wasn’t the book anyone would have expected, or a book anyone else would have compiled. (Not that the obvious anthology of great comics wouldn’t have had a use, and possible been more useful for teaching than Brunetti’s book ended up being.)

But that was two years ago, and now Brunetti, and Yale, are back with a second volume, [[[An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories, Vol. 2]]], to give it its entire ungainly due. (The “An” at the beginning particularly bounces oddly off the “Vol. 2” at the end.) It doesn’t so much take up where the first [[[Anthology]]] left off as replicate the pattern (and, almost exactly, the contributors list) of the first book; it could as easily be a second attempt at the same idea as an extension. It doesn’t stake out any different territory than the first Anthology did; it focuses on mostly the same creators, and the same type of comics, and is organized in a similar, vaguely thematic, free-form fashion.

(more…)

ACME Novelty Library, No. 19
By Chris Ware
Drawn & Quarterly, October 2008, $15.95

First of all, it’s just struck me how odd it is that the cartoonist universally referred to as “Chris Ware” is only credited as “F.C. Ware” – and that in tiny indicia and similar eye-straining matter – in his own stories and publications. One might almost posit a crippling social phobia or overwhelming shyness on the cartoonist’s part, a personality much like his usual viewpoint characters. (But then one remembers never to assume an artist is anything like his creations; it’s rarely useful.)

The last annual issue of [[[ACME Novelty Library]]] – number eighteen, for those who have difficulty counting backwards – collected the “Building Stories” sequence, mostly from The New York Times Magazine’s “Funny Papers” sections, but this volume returns to “Rusty Brown,” the long story that ran through most of issues sixteen and seventeen and does not seem to be done yet. These pages, a typically arch and distanced note by Ware informs us, “originally appeared in somewhat different form in the pages of [[[The Chicago Reader]]] between 2002-2004, and thus should not be interpreted as an artistic response to recent criticisms and/or reviews of this periodical.”

This time the focus isn’t on the title character, but on his father Woody – first, through a dramatization of a science-fiction story by Woody (luridly, but honestly, titled “[[[The Seeing Eye Dogs of Mars]]]”) and then through a sequence of events in Woody’s life as a young man in the ‘50s, fresh out of school and working as an obituary writer on a newspaper. Those events do lead to the writing of “[[[Seeing Eye]]],” and, near the end, back to the frame story of Rusty’s youth in the 1970s.

Do I need to tell you that young Woody Brown is painfully shy, ridiculously introverted, barely in control of his emotions, socially inept, clueless when it comes to the most basic patterns of living in a society, and completely unable to make any of his thoughts or feelings clear in any form of communication under any circumstances? Or did you already assume that when I mentioned that he was the main character in a Chris Ware comic?

(more…)

Speak of the Devil
By Gilbert Hernandez
Dark Horse, November 2008, $19.95

Most of Gilbert Hernandez’s comics have been set in the same world, featuring a huge cast of characters with many obvious and obscure links, reaching from the small Latin American town of Palomar to Southern California and covering the second half of the twentieth century right up to now. Even the few of his comics that aren’t obviously in that world often turn out to have links to the “[[[Palomar]]]” cast.

Last year, Hernandez put out the graphic novel [[[Chance in Hell]]]. That story didn’t itself take place in his usual world – but it was a comics version of a movie from that world, a movie that featured his character Fritz in a minor role. Hernandez is continuing that conceit; [[[Speak of the Devil]]] is another metafictional comic, the story of a movie that only exists within another world of fiction, and one that featured Fritz in a larger part. (Fritz had a short but eventful Hollywood career, so we might well get another half-dozen “movies” with her as an “actress.”)

Like Chance in Hell, Speak of the Devil is a noirish drama with a timeless feel – there are a few details like cellphones that place it in the modern day, but the atmosphere and touches like a beatnik tertiary character make it feel like a movie from the late ‘60s or early ‘70s – that is, if we take Hernandez’s bait and think of Speak of the Devil as a movie to begin with. Devil does have the feel of a movie sometimes; Hernandez often allows his panels to stretch all the way across the page for a widescreen effect before diving into an array of smaller panels to indicate quicker events.

(more…)