Author: Andrew Wheeler

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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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.

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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.)

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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.

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Gus and His Gang
By Chris Blain
First Second, October 2008, $16.95

There must be some reason why the good Western comics – hell, pretty much all of the Western comics – of the past three decades have all come from France, but I don’t know it myself. France never had a West of its own; never had a frontier on its border to expand into. (Rather the opposite, actually – their big neighbor is Germany, which spent several hundred years trying to expand into them.) But there’s a streak of Western comics – about the American West, of course – from France going back through the “Blueberry” stories by Charlier and Moebius up to this book.

Well, whatever the reason, the French like stories about our Old West at least as much as we do, and now here’s another one: [[[Gus and His Gang]]], a collection of stories originally published between 2004 and 2007 about three outlaws and the women they pursue (and are pursued by). Gus, Clem and Gratt do rob banks and hijack trains – that’s how they make their living – but those things are mostly incidentals in these stories. These guys are much more concerned with getting a leg over – money never seems to be a problem (there’s always another bank to knock over), but sex always is.

Gus is the title character, the guy on the cover, and the ostensible leader of the three-man gang, but he has the worst luck with women of the three. The first story, “Natalie,” sets the tone – a woman from his past (he knew her five years before, in Cincinnati, when he was working in a wild west show) comes back into his life, and he chases around after her – as she leads him on by his exceptionally long nose – but doesn’t get anything out of it.

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I haven’t reviewed books about sex in close to a month, so it must be time again, right? (As always, I’m reviewing what I have on hand, so, if you publish manga and want me to

cover it, contact me at the e-mail address far below.If you don’t publish manga, but want me to review something in particular, just leave a comment with a suggestion. If you don’t publish manga, and have no suggestions…then I think you’re good the way you are.)

Sundome, Vol. 3
By Kazuto Okada
Yen Press, September 2008, $12.99

I liked the first volume of Sundome, but wasn’t entirely comfortable with how focused on leering at teenage girls it was. (I have no problems with teenage boys leering at teenage girls – in any case, they’ll do it no matter what I think – but I don’t think it’s really appropriate for me to do so. And that can bother me, even in fictional form.) The second volume made me even more uneasy, because the “games” that teenage cutie Kurumi played on utterly-gaga-about-her Hideo were getting dangerous and cruel.

Their relationship is still shifting in this third volume; Hideo’s devotion to Kurumi is showing some positive results (he’s gotten stronger from all of his bike riding-cum-sublimation, and Kurumi’s teasing is turning more girlfriend-ish than purely mean), and the more dangerous or kinky moments are part of obvious sex-play between the two. Oh, she’s still insisting that she’ll never have sex with him…but she isn’t acting as if that’s true.

Even given the cultural differences, Sundome is one of the most raw and realistic depictions of adolescent sexuality I’ve ever seen. Sure, it’s exaggerated for fictional effect, with the usual manga shorthand, but these kids are both horny and confused in a way that fiction rarely shows. And, of course, since there’s some moderately explicit sexuality in this book – more that the previous books, I think – it’s rated “M” for adults only, and teenagers are officially not supposed to read it. That’s irony for you: because it’s so true about teenagers, teenagers aren’t supposed to read it.

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My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down
By David Heatley
Pantheon, September 2008, $24.95

Right at this moment, I know more of the minor details of David Heatley’s life than I do of my own. This is because I don’t typically spend my time obsessing about the minutiae of my past, while I have just spent several hours reading Heatley’s comics – in which he obsessively chronicles every tiny detail of his life (as organized into thematic categories) that he can possibly remember.

[[[My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down]]] collects many (all?) of Heatley’s previously published short strips, and organizes them into something like a memoir in comics form – but a memoir tightly focused and monomanically detailed in its chosen areas. It’s divided into five sections – Sex, Race, Mom, Dad, and Kin – and everything else in the world (including religion, which seems to be very important to Heatley) gets left out or included only at odd, disjointed moments.

Each section, except the last, starts off with a batch of dream comics. These are about as compelling as anyone else’s dreams ever can be, particularly since Heatley has a deliberately crude and flat style. He does generally draw his dream comics with larger panels and more varied transitions than his longer pieces, which gives them some more visual interest. But, still, they’re someone else’s dreams, filled with intensely personal imagery and characters that we don’t recognize (because we haven’t yet met them in the autobiographical stories). So they’re opaque at best, incomprehensible at worst.

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