Author: Andrew Wheeler

me-and-the-devil-blues-6413812

Manga Friday: ‘Me and the Devil Blues’

  • Uncategorized
  • July 25, 2008

me-and-the-devil-blues-6413812It’s unofficially been Blues & Jazz week here in my reviews – and, if you’re wondering how Erotic Comics fit in there, you don’t know what the word “Jazz” means. So, for Manga Friday, here’s the first book in a series that retells the life of blues legend Robert Johnson from a very different perspective.

Me and the Devil Blues, Vol. 1
By Akira Hiaramoto
Del Rey Manga, July 2008, $19.95

If you know anything about Robert Johnson – the archetypal bluesman, who came out of nowhere to record 24 songs and then die young – it’s that he sold his soul to the devil, one night at a Mississippi crossroads, to get his amazing ability to play and sing. Is it true? Well, it’s a damn good story, and that’s what matters most.

Speaking of damn good stories, Akira Hiramoto weaves one here, drawing from the legends and few known facts of Johnson’s life and bringing in careful research on the rural Mississippi of the ‘30s, plus his own speculation and fiction. In a life as full of holes and mysteries as Johnson’s, the only way to tell a story is to make it up.

Hiramoto starts his story in 1929 with a young man called RJ, who works on a plantation, dreams of becoming a bluesman (though he’s not very good at singing or guitar playing), is harried by his domineering sister Bessie, and loved by his pregnant wife Virginia. He sneaks off to the local juke joint just about every night, to drink, talk with his friends, and hear the blues. He keeps trying to play, but never gets far – he really is lousy. The traveling bluesman Son House tries to explain to RJ what the blues is, but RJ doesn’t quite get it.

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Review: ‘Erotic Comics’ by Tim Pilcher

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  • July 23, 2008

Erotic Comics: A Graphic History from Tijuana Bibles to Underground Comics
By Tim Pilcher with Gene Kannenberg, Jr.
Abrams, March 2008, $29.95

We’ve reached an interesting point in modern culture, when even something as disposable and downmarket as sexy comic books can be the subject of a classy art book from a major publisher. Abrams is about as respectable an art-book publisher as you could find; they’re the official book imprint of both the Whitney and Guggenheim museums. And they’re also the publisher of [[[Erotic Comics]]], a well-crafted and thoroughly conventional art book with lots of pictures of comics panels featuring people at least half-naked – if not actively engaged in various lascivious acts.

Erotic Comics is, except for the smutty pictures, an absolutely standard coffee-table book – printed at a large but comfortable size, not too expensive, with several color reproductions on each spread, occasional background images as well, helpful, detailed captions, and a body text that’s thin beer but perfectly acceptable. It makes no sweeping claims for the field of erotic comics, and is content mostly to show some pictures and retell the same old stories about the men who drew them.

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Review: ‘Bluesman’ by Vollmar & Callejo

Bluesman
By Rob Vollmar and Pablo G. Callejo
NBM, August 2008, $24.95

[[[Bluesman]]] was published once before, as three album-sized collections, but this is the first time the entire story has been collected between two covers. It’s a moody tale, told in black and white – but mostly in grays, from the background to the characters.

Lem Taylor is a blues guitarist, wandering through the rural Mississippi Delta in the late ‘20s, hungry and foot-sore. With him is a blues pianist, Ironwood Malcott, and together they make some excellent music. But that doesn’t put food in their bellies half the time, let alone a roof over the heads and a bed at night more than every so often.

As the book begins, their luck is beginning to look up: they get a decent gig at a popular juke house called Shug’s and are invited up to Memphis to record some sides by J.L. Dougherty, a traveling salesman who also acts as a talent scout.

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kujibiki-unbalance-9708949

Manga Friday: High School!

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  • July 18, 2008

Ah, high school! The greatest time of our lives, right? The time when we all were either on the student council or locked in a life-or-death struggle with the evil student council, when we harnessed powerful robots to save the world, and when the most attractive member of whatever gender we fancied suddenly fell into our laps.

What? High school wasn’t like that for you? You should have been smart enough to go to a manga high school…

kujibiki-unbalance-9708949Kujibiki Unbalance, Vol. 1
Story by Kio Shimoku; Art by Koume Keito
Del Rey Manga, July 2008, $10.95

It would be very unfair of me to pick on Kujibiki Unbalance for being silly, since it’s whole purpose is to be silly: it’s the fictional manga series beloved by the main characters of another manga series, Genshiken. As such, it was designed to be full of clichés and way over the top. But being less than serious doesn’t keep Kujibiki from being a lot of fun.

Chihiro is the nebbishy hero – he’s had bad luck his entire life, and is otherwise the epitome of the plucky but downtrodden shonen shlub. That all changed when he was chosen in a lottery to attend the ultra-prestigious and powerful Rikkyoin High School…and then learned that everything at Rikkyoin is determined by lottery.

He’s quickly chosen as student council president, with his long-time platonic best friend (and source of a whole lot of panty shots) Tokino as his VP. The secretary is a cold, bossy, super-genius named Renko, who’s been at Rikkyoin since kindergarten and is always accompanied her her home-made super-robot slave Kaoruko. And the treasurer – well, that’s what the first story is about: finding the treasurer so that the whole new council can go present themselves to the outgoing council.

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Review: New ‘Fables’ & ‘Jack of Fables’ Volumes

[[[Fables]]] is one of the big successes of the current version of the Vertigo line, where every book has a Hollywood-style high concept: all males on Earth are killed – except one!; New York’s mayor can talk to machines!; Refugee fairytales live in the modern world! And, in another Hollywood-esque twist, Fables even has a spin-off of its own, like Diff’rent Strokes begat The Facts of Life.

Last month, both the parent and spin-off series had new collections, with titles that implied a connection. So let’s look at the two of those books together:

Fables, Vol. 10: The Good Prince
By Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, and others
DC Comics, June 2008, $17.99

Fables, as you might know, is a series in which all of the folkloric and fairy-tale characters that you’ve ever heard of are real, and originally lived in an array of alternate worlds. But “the Adversary” – whose identity was revealed a few volumes ago – led huge goblin armies to conquer nearly all of those worlds, sending a few (but mostly very well-known) Fables to our world, to live in secrecy in an enclave in New York City.

More recently, the cold war with the Adversary is beginning to heat up, with Fabletown’s leadership striking alliances with the “Cloud Kingdoms” (you know, where the beanstalk led?) and with the as-yet-unconquered world of the [[[Arabian Knights]]]. (There’s also an unsubtle parallel between Fabletown and Israel that Willingham is a bit too fond of.) As we hit this tenth volume, we know that the Adversary is building for a major attack three years from now, and the characters of Fables learn that quickly as well.

The last storyline, [[[Sons of Empire]]], served to ratchet up tension, but [[[The Good Prince]]] goes the other way; Flycatcher – Prince Ambrose, the Frog Prince – has finally regained his memory, and is grieving over the loss of his family centuries before. But Red Riding Hood goads him out of his misery, and he rushes off to get fighting lessons from Boy Blue.

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Review: Three Kids’ Books

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  • July 16, 2008

To make up for Manga Friday being so “adult” and off-limits to kids lately, how about some reviews of books that are made for kids? Here are three very different ones – two of ‘em are even “educational!”

robot-dreams2-8802469Robot Dreams
By Sara Varon
First Second, September 2007, $16.95

But let’s start off with a book with no particular pretensions of teaching anyone anything – it’s just the story of the friendship between a dog and his robot. [[[Robot Dreams]]] is a wordless graphic novel by Sara Varon, whose Chicken and Cat was similarly wordless, similarly about a friendship between two anthropomorphic creatures, but which was laid out and published as a picture book. Robot Dreams, though, is a trade paperback, and doesn’t immediately announce itself as a book for kids. (Not as blatantly as a picture book does, at least – that cover would garner some glances on the subway.)

Robot Dreams is set in the kind of world where there are some real people, and some anthropomorphic people – dogs, cats, raccoons, elephants – and nobody ever notices. Dog lives in a city, and sends away for a robot kit. It arrives, and he builds himself a new friend.

They are briefly the best of friends, until a trip to the beach for Labor Day. Robot goes in the water, and then rusts solid on his towel on the beach. Dog can’t move him, and has to leave. And, when Dog comes back a few days later – with a repair manual and some tools – the beach is closed for the winter, with barbed wire on top of a tall fence.

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Review: ‘The ACME Novelty Date Book, Vol. 2’ by Chris Ware

The ACME Novelty Date Book, Vol. 2: 1995-2002
By Chris Ware
Drawn & Quarterly, December 2007, $39.95

In typical Chris Ware fashion, this is an attractively (and extensively) packaged book – so much so, in fact, that what this book precisely is isn’t immediately clear. Is it some kind of notebook, journal, or calendar, perhaps? No, it’s Ware’s sketchbook, or perhaps selected pages from that sketchbook, from the years in the title.

Drawn & Quarterly published the first volume of the “[[[ACME Novelty Date Book]]]” in 2003, which included sketchbook pages from 1986 through 1995. That book covered most of Ware’s twenties, starting when he was in college in Austin, Texas and following him forward as he developed the early ACME characters and themes. That first book also had a wide variety of materials; Ware was young and trying out different art styles, but he’d mostly settled down into his current mode by 1995.

So Vol. 2, as Ware mentions himself partway through it, is mostly made up of three kinds of entries: drawings from life, journal entries, and some short comics strips (mostly autobiographical). There are also some sketches and ideas for [[[ACME Novelty Library]]], and the occasional joke or reference to older comics, but, mostly, it’s those big three.

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Manga Friday: Stories for Girls, But Not About Getting Boys

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  • July 11, 2008

sunshine-3366452Half by accident, I realized my manga reading this week included four shojo books – for girls – but that none of them were about dating, boys, or relationships. That’s probably not as unlikely as I think it is, but it’s my theme for the week, and I’m running with it. (Think of it as a nod to Alison Bechdel’s Movie Rule.)

Sunshine Sketch, Vol. 1
By Ume Aoki
Yen Press, June 2008, $10.99

Sunshine Sketch is mostly in 4-panel style, though it doesn’t seem to be primarily a gag strip. (Or, at least, if there were supposed to be jokes in each strip, most of them sailed over my head.) The beginning of each section is generally in a more standard page layout, though – and there’s an eight-page color section in the front, for any readers who need to ease into black and white slowly, like a cold pool.

Yuno is a first-year high school student, moving into an apartment complex near her prestigious arts-focused school and quickly becoming friends with her three housemates: Miya, Sae, and Hiro. (And once again I have to wonder – is it really common in Japan for thirteen and fourteen-year-olds to live on their own in apartments when they go to high school? Or is this an accepted fictional trope, something that happens a little bit in life – like a few Americans go to elite boarding schools like Choate – but happens a lot more in fiction?)

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Review: ‘Ordinary Victories: What is Precious’ by Manu Larcenet

ordinary-victories2-3501417Ordinary Victories: What is Precious
By Manu Larcenet
NBM/ComicsLit, August 2008, $15.95

[[[Ordinary Victories]]], in France, is a series of four graphic novels about a photographer named Marco Louis. They’ve been very successful, selling hundreds of thousands of copies of each book. But those books are each only about sixty pages long, so they’ve been combined for the American market. This volume contains the second half of the series: volume 3, “[[[What Is Precious]]],” and volume 4, “[[[Hammering Nails]]].”

I can’t be the only one to wonder how much “Marco Louis” – a guy in a creative profession in France – resembles his creator with the same initials, but the book itself doesn’t provide much in the way of clues. Let’s just throw this one onto the groaning pile marked “semi-autobiographical” and move on from there, shall we?

“[[[What is Precious]]]” opens with Marco and his partner Emily – it’s not clear if she’s a girlfriend or a wife, but she’s around for the length of the book – visiting Marco’s mother in Brittany in the aftermath of his father’s suicide. Marco needs to clean out his father’s things, which inevitably makes him think about his difficult relationship with his father.

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Review: ‘Skyscrapers of the Midwest’ by Joshua W. Cotter

skyscrapers2-3107482Skyscrapers of the Midwest
By Joshua W. Cotter
AdHouse Books, June 2008, $19.95

If Chris Ware were a few years younger, grew up in a more religious household, and had less of an obsession with comics formalism, he just might have become Joshua Cotter. Or maybe that’s just me being flippant – it isn’t really fair to Cotter; his work covers some of the same emotional terrain as Ware’s, but is otherwise very different.

[[[Skyscrapers]]] is difficult to describe; it’s made up of many short stories – sometimes as many as three to a page – that mostly focus on a family in the small town of South Nodaway, somewhere in the vast American Midwest in 1987. There’s also the robot Nova Stealth, who is both the human-sized hero of a Marvel-ish comic the elder boy of the family loves, that boy’s robot toy, and a gigantic god-figure stalking across the landscape, sometimes in imagination but other times clearly real. And then there are the stories that get into really weird stuff.

The stories mostly focus on the family’s ten-year-old son, who is never named. Neither are his father or mother, though his younger brother Jeffrey has the same name as Cotter’s own younger brother (to whom the book is dedicated). And Cotter was born in 1977, which would make him ten year old in 1987 – the same age as his fifth-grade hero. So we do know a name for this boy, even if that name never appears in the book.

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