Author: Andrew Wheeler

Arcade of Cruelty
By Joseph Patrick Larkin
Also-Ran, 2008, $18

Joseph Patrick Larkin is a self-obsessed, creepy, sexist shut-in with voyeuristic tendencies. And those are his good points.

I only know this because I’ve just read his self-published book [[[The Arcade of Cruelty]]] – but, let me back up immediately, because “self-published” will give you a certain image, and this book doesn’t fit that at all. It’s immaculately well-designed, looking for all the world like the catalog of some very, very unlikely traveling museum exhibit. It has a real ISBN, the unlikely and wildly inaccurate category of “Queer Studies/Occult” on the back, and a little log on the front proclaiming it the new selection of “Joseph’s Book Club” (with a circular logo that looks not at all unlike that of a different book club, one run by a TV host hose name begins with O). In the middle of all that, on the otherwise classy cover, is that serviceable drawing by Larkin of a zombie tearing out someone’s (his?) throat.

Larkin’s art is all at about that level: he’s not a great artist by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s reasonably good at crude depictions of appalling things – and, besides, the writing is carrying most of the weight here, anyway.

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Jeffrey Brown appeared in the comics world a few years back, with his painfully confessional (and almost as painfully crudely drawn) graphic novels [[[Clumsy]]] and [[[Unlikely]]]. He’s expanded beyond autobiography since then, mostly into odd but straight-faced takes on geeky topics, such as [[[Incredible Change-Bots]]]. He had three new books in 2008 – well, at least three new books; it’s entirely possible that I missed something – a big autobiographical book and two smaller, weirder books in a new, very loose, series. So I thought I might as well look at them all together, before he publishes another four or five books.

Little Things
By Jeffrey Brown
Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, April 2008, $14.00

This one is subtitled “[[[A Memoir in Slices]]],” and, yes, it’s yet another in the tsunami of memoir-comics from major not-usually-comics publishers. (I guess they’re all hoping for another [[[Persepolis]]] or [[[Maus]]], and not looking to far from the apple tree, either.) Brown has a two-page comics introduction, in which he explains the book to someone on the phone – which comes down to “Anyway, they’re a bunch of autobiographical short stories and they’re funny sometimes.”

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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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Graphic Classics, Vol. 16: Oscar Wilde
Edited by Tom Pomplun
Eureka Productions, February 2009, $11.95

Graphic Classics has been adapting the work of famous dead authors – from H.P. Lovecraft to Rafael Sabatini – for at least five years, mostly focusing on the more popular (rather than literarily classy) writers. And that’s a good thing, since no one wants to see [[[Graphic Classics: Henry James]]]. (“The Face in the Carpet” is not nearly as exciting as the Lovecraft-style title might indicate.)

So this is the sixteenth volume in the series, which are all in the same vein: about 144 pages of comics adaptations of said dead writer’s work, usually with a few long adaptations and some shorter ones sprinkled in for spice. The creators involved are a mix of semi-familiar names and newer folks on their way up – this kind of project, obviously, doesn’t tend to attract top talent. (And is almost certainly better without the kind of compromises “top talent” requires.) Editor Tom Pomplun usually adapts at least one of the stories himself – and why shouldn’t he? It’s his series – and the adaptations sometimes tend to the talky, perhaps in an attempt to be slightly more educational.

(The series as a whole tries to walk the line between “good for you” and “good fun,” and individual stories fall on one side or the other of that divide, but I’ve found that the books as a whole generally are fun, if wordy. I’ve previously reviewed Bram Stoker, Mark Twain, and Fantasy Classics.)

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Chronicles of Some Made
By Felix Tannenbaum
Passenger Pigeon Publishing, October 2008, $10.25

Tannenbaum received a 2008 Xeric Award for the two stories collected here – in fact, the way of the Xeric, these two stories are collected because they won the award. The Xeric is specifically and entirely to help self-publishers get their work out; to help get more new, different, interesting comics projects to see the light of day and get into readers’ hands. Because of that aid, [[[Chronicles of Some Made]]] is now available via Amazon, and it will be in comics shops in the spring.

There are two stories here: “[[[The Dent]]],” about seventy pages long in four chapters, and the shorter (just under twenty pages) earlier story “[[[Why Doesn’t My Robot Love Me?: A Cautionary Fable.]]]” Both are stories of robots, but Tannenbaum’s robots are very un-Asimovian: they are deeply emotional and as impetuous and driven by desire as any human. (They’re very much, to use Charles Stross’s term, emotional machines.)

“The Dent” is the story of three robots at war. The story begins as they travel together towards a point where battle rages. They know where they’re going, but not why – though they do know that they’re not supposed to question their orders. Seeing the devastation for several hills away, they’re all silently sure that following their programming will lead to their destruction. And yet, when two of them try to break all three of them free from that programming, the results are not good.

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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.)

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