Author: Andrew Wheeler

Berlin, Book Two: City of Smoke
By Jason Lutes
Drawn & Quarterly, September 2008, $19.95

More than ten years ago, Jason Lutes began serializing his long graphic novel [[[Berlin]]] in a comic of the same name. Making long-form comics is long, hard work – more like an ultramarathon than any other art form – and this year finally sees the publication of the second part of that story. Even now, the end is still probably four or five years away –although we can certainly know what will happen in Berlin, and guess what will happen to these people, as 1929 slides into ‘30 into ‘31.

Berlin is a dense, complicated story with a large cast of characters, told in a naturalistic, cinematic way, without identifying captions or explanatory notes. That keeps from slowing down the reading experience, and the characters are always recognizable – but it does make it hard to review the book, when I realize that “the Jewish orphan girl” was probably named twice in the entire two hundred pages. (And with two different names at that.)

Berlin takes place in the last days of the post-Great War Weimar Republic, and its implicit theme is the battle between fascism and communism. (Given the time and the place, one need not even pause a moment to guess which side Lutes comes down on. This is unfortunate, though – and more so the more a reader knows about history – since we all know the fascists will win, and that things aren’t going to get better for a long time. And even if the Communists flee to the Soviet Union, they won’t escape the Nazis that way – much less escape oppression, war, and mass death.) The characters are mostly at the lower end of middle-class, if not outright poor, with some secondary characters higher up the income ladder, and they also tend to be outcasts and bohemians of one sort or another: musicians, reporters, artists, lesbians, Jews, tramps, black Americans. Again, one notes that these are all people who will not fare well under Nazi rule.

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The Night of Your Life
By Jessie Reklaw
Dark Horse, September 2008, $15.95

For the last thirteen years, Jessie Reklaw has been turning dreams – mostly those of strangers – into comics, on his website and in a growing number of alternative weeklies nationwide. (Not to derail my own train of thought, but are there any non-alternative weeklies, to which those “alternative weeklies” are the actual alternative?)

Each comic is a four panel grid, two over two: distilling a dream to its essential elements and telling however much of a story there is to tell. The stories are all bizarre and strange – they’re all dreams, after all – but, boiled down to four panels, they also have a lot of similarities. There’s a reason people call it “dream logic;” that’s the way the human mind organizes itself, so the same kind of transitions and imagery come up in many different people’s dreams.

[[[The Night of Your Life]]] collects about two hundred and forty of those “[[[Slow Wave]]]” strips, in black and white. The strips are printed one to the page – large enough to be clear and readable, but only slightly larger than on the web, so they don’t look blown up in the book. The strips are divided into ten parts, each part named for the first line of text in the first cartoon in that part…but the strips don’t otherwise seem to be organized. It’s clearly not by theme or imagery, and the strips aren’t dated, so there’s no way to tell if they’re in chronological order.

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Aya of Yop City
By Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie
Drawn & Quarterly, September 2008, $19.95

[[[Aya]]] was one of the surprise pleasures of last year, a slice-of-life story about three young women and their families and friends in the neighborhood of Yopougon in late ‘70s Ivory Coast. The title character was actually the least involved in the plot, adding to a slight suspicion that the story was partially autobiographical. (Abouet did grow up in Ivory Coast, though she left in the early ‘80s at the age of twelve – so even Aya’s story couldn’t be directly hers. My personal theory is that Aya is based on an older sister or cousin of Abouet’s, one of her strong connections back to her homeland.)

By the end of Aya, Aya herself hadn’t been much changed, but her friend Adjoua had just given birth to a baby she claimed belonged to Moussa, the unmotivated son of local rich man and business owner Bonaventure Sissoko. But it was also clear that Moussa was not the father of Adjoua’s child, and that Bonaventure strongly suspected that.

[[[Aya of Yop City]]] begins almost immediately after the end of Aya; it’s a continuation of the same story rather than being a new, separate graphic novel. (And so the title is appropriate, like a [[[Babar]]] or [[[Madeleine]]] novel, or a line-extending superhero comic: [[[Aya]]], [[[Aya of Yop City]]], [[[The Adventures of Aya]]], [[[The Amazing Aya]]], [[[Yop Comics Featuring Aya]]], [[[The Spectacular Aya]]], and so on.) So it begins with a full-page close-up of Adjoua’s baby Bobby, who is very cute…but also looks absolutely nothing like Moussa.

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The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics
Edited by Paul Gravett
Running Press, August 2008, $17.95

Every genre or medium has a great schism – the thing that practitioners and fans argue about when they can’t think of anything more substantive. For “speculative fiction,” it’s the battle between science fiction and fantasy. For “crime fiction,” the battling parties are cozies and hardboiled novels. [[[Manga]]] is divided shonen against shojo, and romances are contemporary or historical (with select ninja bands fighting for particular historical periods or contemporary subgenres, like the Regency or the prairie romance).

For comics, the essential question is: writing or art?

Oh, sure, we’re all supposedly grown up now; we don’t fight over that anymore. We can have both! we say, whether we’re indy geeks or Marvel zombies. But during those late nights at convention bars, and on obscure message boards, the knives come out, and we rumble.

At times like that, I always come down on the writing side. That’s my tribe; I came to comics from the SF/Fantasy world, and even now I read more pages of words without pictures than with. And the editor of [[[The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics]]], Paul Gravett…well, I suspect him of running with the art crowd.

Maybe I’m wrong – it could just be the material that gives that impression. But [[[Best Crime Comics]]] has a total of five of its stories (out of twenty-four) credited to an unknown writer, a suspicious number. And Gravett’s story introductions always list the artist first.

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Burma Chronicles
By Guy Delisle
Drawn & Quarterly, September 2008, $19.95Delisle has a quirky history for a newish graphic novelist: he’s in his early forties, a Canadian long resident in France who spent ten years working in animation (both in France and overseeing animation production various places in Asia) before quitting that to concentrate on his graphic novels. And his first two major books – [[[Pyongyang]]] and [[[Shenzhen]]] – were both the stories of long trips to those cities (the capital of North Korea and a booming city in southern China, respectively) during the course of his animation career.

I should point out here that the country calls itself Myanmar now – since a coup in 1989 – but that many governments, including both France and the USA, still call it Burma to show that they don’t accept the legitimacy of the current government to make that change. It’s not clear if Delisle intends his title to be a political statement, though he does explain the difference between the two names on the very first page of this book.

[[[Burma Chronicles]]] is the story of another long stay in an Asian country – another relatively oppressive dictatorship, at that – but it wasn’t for his work, this time. Delisle’s wife works as an administrator for Medecins Sans Frontieres, an international non-profit organization that brings doctors and health care to parts of the world desperately in need of it – and this trip was because her work took her there, for a posting of fourteen months.

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My brother was a huge Garfield fan when he was young, and my own two sons (currently ages ten and seven) have followed in his footsteps. They’re certainly not alone: as Dan Walsh writes in his foreword to [[[Garfield Minus Garfield]]], “I wanted to be just like [[[Garfield]]] – lazy, sarcastic, lasagna loving, Monday hating, cynical but under it all, a darn good guy.” There’s something about Garfield that appeal to the slob in all of us – particularly those of us who are pre-teen boys.

But most of us, I think, grow out of Garfield in time. (I could be wrong, of course – the strip runs in something like 2500 papers worldwide, so he clearly has a lot of adults reading about him every day.) We realize that there are only five or six real jokes in the strip (Garfield likes to eat, Garfield likes to sleep, Garfield hates to do just about anything else), and move on to something with a bit more depth.

Maybe I am just speaking for the coastal intellectual elite when I say that, though. And I hadn’t seriously thought about Garfield in years – if ever – so I was happy to devote some time to these two very different Garfield books when they came my way recently.

Garfield: 30 Years of Laughter & Lasagna: The Life and Times of a Fat, Furry Legend
By Jim Davis
Ballantine, October 2008, $35.00

The first book was the obvious one: a volume celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the strip (which debuted June 19, 1978) with a selection of strips from every one of those thirty years and some commentary from Garfield’s creator and cartoonist, Jim Davis. It’s a fairly superficial book, without any deep insights or thoughts – but that does suit Garfield, which has never trafficked in intellectual depth.

As always, I like looking at the early, crude form of a comic that became more sleek and streamlined later on. The scruffy, more obviously fat Garfield of the first year is simply more interesting to the eye than the sleeker, more designed creature he became later – but it was much harder, clearly, to keep that first Garfield on-model. Davis mentions that he started Garfield because there were a number of “dog” strips, but none about cats – what he doesn’t mention are B. Kliban’s cat cartoons, which look to have been a strong influence on Davis’s early drawing style. He also doesn’t mention the general explosion of cat-stuff in the market after Kliban’s massively popular book [[[Cats]]] appeared in 1975; at this point Davis obviously wants Garfield to look like the beginning of the cat boom, and not merely another offshoot of it. (Kliban is safely dead these days, and won’t be raising any fuss.) Davis does allude to the possible competition, though, when he mentions, on p.72, that the original plan was to “develop him for about a year and get a good backlog of strips. …[W]e felt a certain urgency as far as the cat idea was concerned. It would have hurt if someone else came out with a cat feature before Garfield.”

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Jamilti & Other Stories
By Rutu Modan
Drawn & Quarterly, August 2008, $19.95

Rutu Modan came to the attention of most American comics readers last year, when her graphic novel [[[Exit Wounds]]] was published to great acclaim. Exit Wounds went on to hit a number of top ten lists, and won the Eisner for Best New Graphic Novel. But no cartoonist comes out of nowhere – Modan had been writing and drawing shorter comics stories for a decade. Those would be these stories, which have now been corralled between two covers.

[[[Jamilti]]] collects seven stories, all of them but the title piece originally published in anthologies from the comics collective Actus (of which Modan was one of the two founders). (“Jamilti” itself was originally published in [[[Drawn & Quarterly]]], Vol. 5, for those seeking closure.) Modan’s style has changed slightly over the years, but her artistic progression isn’t obvious. Her most recent work – Exit Wounds, “Your Number One Fan” from [[[How To Love]]], the currently running serial [[[The Murder of the Terminal Patient]]] – have a tighter, cleaner line and solid blocks of brighter, purer colors than her earlier stories, but that’s more of a tightening of what she was already doing than anything else. The stories before that bounce back and forth from color to black and white, with the drawing similarly getting looser and tighter as Modan worked out what she wanted to do.

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