Author: Andrew Wheeler

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Best American Comics: 2008
Series editors: Jessica Abel and Matt Madden; edited by Lynda Barry
Houghton Mifflin, October 2008, $22.00

The “Best American” series has been around for decades, starting with the acclaimed annual collection of short stories and expanding in recent years to such newer emanations as [[[Best American Nonrequired Reading]]], [[[Best American Spiritual Writing]]], …[[[Travel Writing]]] and, of course, [[[Comics]]]. This is the third year for this particular Best American series, and it sees the cast of editors completely change over.

The way the “Best American” books seem to work – as much as they are explained to us mere mortals – each series has a “series editor,” who takes on the tough work of reading or looking at everything eligible in the given year, and culling down that list to something manageable for the marquee-name “editor” to select the final contents from. (For example, for the most recent annual editions, the series editor of [[[Short Stories]]] is Heidi Pitlor and the editor is Salman Rushdie. Similarly, Adam Gopnik edits Essays this year, Anthony Bourdain Travel and George Pelecanos Mystery Stories.) For the first two years of Comics’s existence, the series editor was Anne Elizabeth Moore, who was somewhat controversial for reasons that always remained murky to me. She’s been replaced this year by the team of Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, for no stated reason – though it does seem unusual for that to happen so soon.

The big-name editor this time out is Lynda Barry, following Chris Ware last year and Harvey Pekar in 2006. And, again, the editor profoundly affects the content of the book. Pekar leaned towards long, autobiographical stories, often with a political slant. Ware continued the trend towards autobiography and memoir – it would be hard to avoid that tide in comics, this decade – but he also brought in the expected formalist streak. And now Barry changes the mix again, with more comic strips (Matt Groening’s [[[Life in Hell]]], Derf’s [[[The City]]], Kaz’s [[[Underworld]]], and Alison Bechdel’s [[[Dykes to Watch Out For]]]) and many excerpts from longer works (Nick Bertozzi’s [[[The Salon]]], Cathy Malkasian’s [[[Percy Gloom]]], Gene Luen Yang’s [[[American Born Chinese]]], and Seth’s [[[George Sprott]]]).

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