Author: Andrew Wheeler

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.”

(more…)

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.

(more…)

The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle
Written by Jim Butcher; Pencils by Adrian Syaf
Del Rey, October 2008, $19.95

Jim Butcher’s [[[Dresden Files]]] series is something of an anomaly in the world of contemporary fantasy – a hugely successful, bestselling series of novels set in the modern world, featuring vampires, werewolves, elves, and other beasties that go bump in the night…but also featuring a main character who isn’t an attractive young woman embroiled in love and/or sex entanglements with two or more of those aforementioned beasties.

Butcher’s hero is Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only consulting wizard – and Harry’s literary background is more from the hardboiled mystery (Always Having Bad Luck With Dames Division, rather than the racier Always Falling Into Bed With Dames Division) than from the romance novel, like so many of his high-heeled and back-tattooed fellow explorers of the supernatural. Harry’s the hard-luck kind of mystery hero: he saves the day, but doesn’t usually get the girl, or much in the way of monetary reward, either. (But that’s OK, since his heart is pure – or as pure as anyone’s heart can be, these days.)

Dresden gets called in – usually by Chicago PD’s Lt. Karrin Murphy, head of Special Investigations (which gets all of the woo-woo cases) – when something seems to be “weird.” No one but Harry actually really believes in the supernatural, of course, but he does get results, most of the time.

Welcome to the Jungle is a prequel to the Dresden Files novels, taking place just before the events of [[[Storm Front]]], the first novel. It’s written by Jim Butcher himself, and penciled by “rising talent” (which here means “someone I haven’t heard of – not that there’s anything wrong with that”) Ardian Syaf, an Indonesian artist.

The Dresden Files is like [[[The X-Files]]] (and many other series of stories about supernatural beasties, like Hellboy) in that there are “mythos” stories – ones that move forward the larger plot – and stories that are one-offs. [[[Jungle]]] is a one-off, concerning some unpleasant doings at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo.

(more…)

The world of webcomics has gotten to be nearly as large and encompassing as traditional newspaper strips – if there aren’t as many people making a living from webcomics yet,

give it a year or two and the one number going up will soon meet the other number coming down. It’s so big, actually, that there can be successful web cartoonists – successful enough to have a book of their work published – that otherwise smart and savvy people (meaning me) have never even heard of.

I don’t mean Scott Meyer: like everyone else, I started reading his online strip Basic Instructions when Scott ([[[Dilbert]]]) Adams linked to it. But I wasn’t familiar with [[[Nothing Nice To Say]]] – a strip about punk-rock culture by Mitch Clem – until I saw the first collection of that strip (confusingly titled “Volume Two”) in a comics shop.

So, since these two collections are both of webcomics, and both came out at the same time from the same publisher (Dark Horse, increasingly the home of webcomics in print), I thought they were just begging to be reviewed together.

And so they shall be.

Help Is On the Way: A Collection of Basic Instructions
By Scott Meter
Dark Horse, September 2008, $9.95

In my circles, and, I think, those of webcomics in general, Meyer is the bigger name. He’s been doing Basic Instructions on and off since 2004, but went onto a regular schedule sometime in 2006. Since the Scott Adams shout-out, he might not be making a living from his comics, but he probably gets enough ad revenue to pay for nachos now and then.

[[[Basic Instructions]]] follows a rigid four-panel format, and is both very wordy and completely rotoscoped (Meyer prefers to call it “traced”) from pictures. It’s also, to one degree or another, based on Meyer’s real life – he’s the main character, and his wife, best friend, boss and other family members and random bystanders make regular appearances (though usually without being given names).

Each strip explains how to do something specific – but Meyer isn’t really trying to explain anything, so “[[[How to Correct Someone]]]” and “[[[How to Avoid Sounding Condescending]]]” are, like most Basic Instructions strips, really about everyday interactions with people. So Basic Instructions is really a very wordy gag-a-day strip, with a recurring cast, running jokes, and all of the usual accouterments. (This is a feature rather than a bug: a strip like Basic Instructions appears to be would be boring and purely oriented to facts, which might be useful, but wouldn’t be funny.)

(more…)

Love & Rockets: New Stories #1
By The Hernandez Brothers
Fantagraphics, July 2008, $14.99

It’s hard to believe [[[Love & Rockets]]] has been around for twenty-seven years now – longer than any of its peers in the “indy” comics world, and longer than a lot of “mainstream” comics characters as well – but dates don’t lie. This trade paperback marks the beginning of a third series of things called “Love & Rockets” – the first was magazine-sized, and started in 1981 (though it shrunk to the size of a regular comic eventually), and then the second was the re-launch of the comic in 2001 for the twentieth anniversary.

This time around, Fantagraphics and the Hernandezes have bowed to the winds of the comics world – the new Love & Rockets will be an annual hundred-page book, rather than a more frequent and smaller pamphlet. And so this book contains exactly fifty pages of comics each from Jamie and Gilbert Hernandez – with prodigal brother Mario turning up to script a six-page story for Gilbert’s art.

Love & Rockets has always swung between the dramatic and the silly – sometimes story-by-story, and sometimes in the space of a single panel. This volume isn’t entirely on the silly side, but it definitely tilts that way, with the first two parts of a long oddball superhero story from Jaime and some shorter, mostly minor pieces from Gilbert, probably unrelated to his major ongoing plots and characters.

(more…)