Author: Andrew Wheeler

Journey: The Adventures of Wolverine MacAlistaire, Volume 1
By William Messner-Loebs
IDW, July 2008, $19.99

Historical fiction is the odd duck of literature; it inevitably ages twice – once just because it’s set in a past milieu that even the original audience will be unfamiliar with, and a second time because it was really written for that original audience…and their society and expectations and ideas will age and become unfamiliar as well. Today’s historical fiction shows us the past through a lens of today, but yesterday’s historical fiction has a double lens – the historical era it was set in, and the one it was written in.

[[[Journey]]] is set nearly two hundred years ago, on the old Northwestern frontier of Michigan, soon after the election of 1808. And these stories were created twenty-five years ago, in black-and-white comic books, as part of a burst of creativity and possibility in the comics industry, originally driven by a wide array of idiosyncratic creators each telling their own particular stories but eventually buried (within another three years) by piles of cheap knock-offs of “hot” ideas. (Some things never change.)

Messner-Loebs’s hero is a legendary trapper and outdoorsman, Joshua “Wolverine” MacAlistaire – and 1983 is about the last time any comics character could be named “Wolverine” completely independently – who doesn’t dislike people, though he does prefer his own company.

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The Good Neighbors, Book One: Kin
By Holly Black and Ted Naifeh
Scholastic/Graphix, September 2008, $16.99

Holly Black is a major writer for young people – one-half of the team behind the phenomenally popular “[[[Spiderwick Chronicles]]]” (along with Tony DiTerlizzi) and the author of three dark contemporary-fantasy novels for teens, starting with Tithe. Getting her to write a graphic novel series for teens is of the same magnitude as the long-underwear companies signing up bestsellers like Brad Meltzer and Jodi Picoult.

But the difference here is that Black is working for Scholastic, one of the oldest and smartest publishers of books for younger readers around. Scholastic, unlike DC with Picoult, didn’t try to shoehorn Black into some already-existing corporate property, but worked to her strengths. [[[The Good Neighbors]]] is an original graphic novel series set in the modern world, mixing teen drama with an otherworld of nasty folkloric faeries – faeries along the same lines as those in Black’s novels for teens. Scholastic also paired Black with Ted Naifeh, a well-known cartoonist and illustrator in his own right, whose most popular works have a Goth flavor and likely are loved by the same kids who read Black’s books.

This is how it’s done: you get a good writer, let her work on something she knows and does well, pair her with a complimentary artist, and package it for the audience that already knows and loves both of the creators – note that this is a $16.99 hardcover, a price point similar to teen novels and comics collections. (Are you listening, DC?)

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Scrambled Ink
Edited by Anonymous
Dark Horse, July 2008, $19.99

[[[Scrambled Ink]]] is the latest in the recent flurry of comics anthologies by animators, following the high-profile and very successful Flight series (which recently hit its fifth volume) and the slightly newer but still popular [[[Out of Picture]]] (which had a second volume earlier this year). It was published quietly a few months back, and doesn’t seem to have made much of a stir.

And that’s a real shame, since Scrambled Ink is more inventive and ambitious than the most recent [[[Flight]]] and Out of Picture books put together. (And that despite Scrambled Ink being a physically smaller book with only six stories in it.) I’m not sure why that would be – Scrambled Ink comes from animators who worked on [[[Bee Movie]]], not what one thinks of as an excitingly transgressive piece of cinema – but these DreamWorks animators are definitely doing something different from their Blue Sky compatriots from Out of Picture.

Two of the tales in Scrambled Ink – “[[[Kadogo: The Next Big Thing]]]” by David G. Derrick, Jr. and Ken Morrissey & Keith Baxter’s “[[[Greedy Grizzly]]]” – would have been right at home in one of the other anthologies: they’re morality tales, with animal casts, that could easily have been afterschool specials or “heartwarming” animated shorts. Both also have excellent art – Derrick with an earth-toned watercolor palette very appropriate to his African story and Baxter with an appealingly loose version of a cute-animal children’s’ book style. These stories could have fit in perfectly well in [[[Flight 12]]] or Out of Picture 9, but here in Scrambled Ink, they’re notable for seeming a little less refined and a little more obvious than the other four stories.

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A Treasury of XXth Century Murder: The Lindbergh Child
By Rick Geary
NBM/ComicsLit, August 2008, $15.95

Rick Geary has been chronicling in comics form the crimes of past ages since “An Unsolved Murder,” one of his earliest stories. Most of those stories have been funneled into his “[[[Treasury of Victorian Murder]]]” series – first an album-sized book of short stories in 1987, later an additional seven slim books, each chronicling one famous murder of yore.

Those “Treasury of Victorian Murder” books have been coming, one every year or two, since 1995, but Geary’s varied his approach this year – the book is the same size, the format is very similar, but the story this time is part of the newly-named “[[[Treasury of XXth Century Murder]]].” And the crime is one of the many claimants to the throne of “[[[Crime of the Century]]]” – after Fatty Arbuckle and Sacco & Vanzetti but before the Manson Murders – though it didn’t start out to be a murder (and some people, even now, doubt that the Lindbergh baby really died). So now Geary has an entire new century of murder to work through – the pre-WWII years alone could keep him busy for years. (Particularly if he expands his plan slightly to allow larger crime sprees – like Bonnie & Clyde and the various Prohibition-era gangsters.)

Geary tells [[[The Lindbergh Child]]] in his usual detailed, nearly deadpan style – though hints of the Geary wit sneak through, particularly in the faces of his characters – starting off with maps and plans of the important locations and swiftly moving on to set the scene and get into the kidnapping itself.

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American Widow
By Alissa Torres; Illustrated by Sungyoon Choi
Villard, September 2008, $22.00

Luis Eduardo (“Eddie”) Torres started a new job as a foreign exchange trader at Cantor Fitzgerald on September 10th, 2001. He was thrilled to get it – he’d been out of work for a few months, his wife, Alissa, was then seven months pregnant, and he was a Columbian national, so his immigration status could have been compromised by staying out of work too long.

Seven years later, we all remember what happened on September 11th, but perhaps only New Yorkers remember Cantor Fitzgerald as clearly. Their headquarters was at the very top of One World Trade Center: floors 101 to 105. That was directly above the impact site of the first plane; no one in Cantor Fitzgerald’s offices survived. Of the dead at the World Trade Center, nearly a quarter were Cantor Fitzgerald. Eddie Torres was one of them.

Alissa Torres quickly found herself a widow: one of the smallest of mercies was that her husband jumped, and so was identified quickly. And then she found herself a “9/11 widow” – alternately helped and hindered by charities, sought by the media, torn completely from her previous life. The fact that her husband had just started work – at a site whose records were utterly destroyed – only made things more difficult.

[[[American Widow]]] is Alissa Torres’s story, in her own words and presumably her own comics-panel layouts. The art is by Sungyoon Choi, a very young graduate of the School of Visual Arts; this appears to be her first major work. It’s also Torres’s first work in comics; before 9/11 she was an instructional designer for the New York City Department for the Aging and afterward she seems to have only written about herself and her late husband, with several essays on [[[Salon]]] and one in [[[Redbook]]]. (A search at Salon didn’t bring up those essays; nor does the Redbook essay seem to be online.)

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