Author: Andrew Wheeler

Review: ‘Superpowers’ by David J. Schwartz

superpowers-us1-4585912Superpowers: A Novel
By David J. Schwartz
Crown, June 2008, $14.95

There are two kinds of superhero novels, with very different rules. The more common – but less respected – kind of superhero novel takes characters and situations we already know from an existing comics universe and tells a story using that furniture. Those books can be amazing, like Elliott S. Maggin’s two Superman novels, Last Son of Krypton and Miracle Monday, or they can be mediocre, like…fill in your own example here. But they all hit the ground running, since they work from our knowledge of those universes. Who would read a Spider-Man novel if he’d never heard of [[[Spider-Man]]]?

The other kind of superhero novel tends to come from people outside the comics field, and usually reinvents the wheel in its vision of superheroics. (Like everything else, sometimes doing it elegantly and sometimes producing an oval object that doesn’t even work as a wheel.) Some of the better examples of that type of superhero novel are Michael Bishop’s Count Geiger’s Blues and the recent Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman. Those books often have aggressively obvious titles – [[[Superfolks]]], [[[Hero]]], that kind of thing – to immediately signal to the audience that they’re novels about superheroes.

[[[Superpowers]]] is one of the latter kind of novels, down to the title. The British cover (see the continuation) even has line drawings of the characters in costume (by Norm Breyfogle, a name we who read comics will nod knowingly at), much in the style of last year’s [[[Soon I Will Be Invincible]]]. And the set-up is quite typical of an outsider superhero novel: five undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) develop individual superpowers after an evening of drinking homemade beer. (One of the endearing things about Superpowers is that Schwartz doesn’t even try to explain their origin – something unexpected happened, and they now have powers. Period.)

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Manga Friday: Girls and Boys, Boys and Boys

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  • June 27, 2008

 love-for-dessert-9719626This week’s "Manga Friday" features titles from two Aurora imprints that are for adults only. I’ll try to keep the review itself safe for somewhat younger readers, but, if you’re twelve or so, picture me shaking my finger sternly at you and saying you should move on to something more age-appropriate.

Next week should see Manga Friday return to a variety mix, so you kids can come back then.

Most of the manga that get translated for the US market are either shonen (boys’ comics, like Naruto and Bleach) or shojo (girls’ comics, like Fruits Basket) – stories for tweens and young teens, mostly. (That’s the biggest audience for manga in Japan, too, so there’s more of those kinds of stories to translate to begin with.)

But there are also seinen (stories for “men” – mostly in their twenties – like Lone Wolf and Cub) and, the smallest subset, josei (stories for adult women). The books this week are all josei, roughly the Japanese comics equivalent of American romance novels.

(My initial plan was to review two redikomi – books about boy-girl romances, with some tasteful sex – and then two yaoi – boy-boy romance stories for a female audience. But I only managed to get through one yaoi book, so there are only three reviews here this week.)

Love for Dessert
By Hana Aoi
Aurora/Luv Luv, May 2008, $10.95

Love for Dessert has six stories, all with a (sometimes very loose) food theme – the title story sets the tone. Koyama is a young woman who’s just gotten a full-time job at a big ad agency, working for a tough young boss, Kuze.

She’s also been befriended by “Morimoto from Sales,” who indulges her sweet tooth, and eventually (once the big rush job, which has been causing agida and getting Koyama behind, even after lots and lots of overtime, is done) gets her drunk and tries to seduce her.

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Review: ‘Maps and Legends’ by Michael Chabon

mapslegends2-9137528Maps and Legends
By Michael Chabon
McSweeney’s Books, May 2008, $24.00
 
Michael Chabon has had the good luck to be writing in an era when it’s possible to both be a respected, bestselling literary writer and have a public, abiding love for some of the more disreputable genres. His best-known novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, is not only a fictionalized story of the fledgling comic-book industry during World War II, but also has a very definite fantasy element. And his latest novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, is a detective story set in an alternate history – tying it into two types of genre fiction.

If he’d started writing twenty years earlier, or even ten, he probably wouldn’t have been able to do that; only in the last decade or so have writers like Chabon (and Jonathan Lethem, who transitioned from genre science fiction straight into the “literary novel”) been able to admit to their love of genre. Previously, literary writers could go slumming and use genre ideas once in a while – think Doris Lessing with the “Canopus in Argo” series, or The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood – but they could never admit to reading or liking books actually published in that genre. Kurt Vonnegut, after all, was only taken seriously because he ritually denied being a SF writer every day before breakfast.

But Chabon goes even further than his pop-culture-loving compatriots do; he doesn’t just admit to liking science fiction and detective stories – he’s even willing to claim that comics can be pretty damn good, and that some of them have influence him.

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Review: ‘MuZz, Vol. 1’ by FSc

MuZz, Vol. 1
By FSc (Foo Swee Chin)
SLG Publishing, May 2008, $14.95

There’s a train that runs to MuZz – or, at least, it’s supposed to – carrying ideas and thoughts whose creators have lost interest in them. They’re all pretty odd and motley, as you might expect: a black whale, a phantom cat, and things I couldn’t even begin to describe.

But, on this particular train, there’s also a figure that looks like a teenage girl missing an eye. She’s Modorelin Farllee, she’s an actual human, and she’s not even dead. (Well, I don’t think she’s dead, but I don’t want to be too definite about any plot points concerning [[[MuZz]]].)

Farllee remembers nothing of her past, and wakes up on the train in such a frantic, grouchy mood that she shakes her elf guide to death and has to rely on the standard pamphlet and the advice of her fellow passengers to figure out what’s going on.

And so she quickly learns what I’ve just told you – she doesn’t believe that she’s actually a figment of someone else’s imagination, but she can’t prove that, and drops the subject. None of them are precisely sure what will happen to them in MuZz, but, for nearly all of them, it has to be better than their previous lives.

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Manga Friday: Three Books from CMX

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  • June 20, 2008

variante-6445598Just last week, a secret package of photocopied pages, marked "CONFIDENTIAL — DO NOT REPRODUCE" landed on my desk. Included were three books from DC’s newish manga imprint, CMX, from across the range of their titles. And so, through great personal travail — and with the assistance of someone at DC who must remain nameless, since there was no cover letter — here are the first ComicMix reviews of CMX books…

(Exciting, isn’t it?)

These are all forthcoming books, hitting stores starting in late September. So you can think of this review as a teaser, if you want.

Variante, Vol. 1

by Igura Sugimoto

DC Comics/CMX, October 2008, $12.99

This is the fourth and final volume of this Mature-readers series, so I’m going to be doing a bit of guessing about the beginnings that led to this ending. There’s a young woman named Aiko who’s being held prisoner by the requisite nasty corporation, Atheos. The head of Atheos is completely insane, and wants to turn Aiko into a goddess who will destroy the entire human race and create a new world just for him.

This is a not-impossible dream, since Aiko is a "second-generation chimera," a human with some sort of ill-defined powers — she seems to spead out her own flesh into shields and weapons, or maybe that’s supposed to be energy — who is also the daughter of people who also secretly had those powers. Also, Atheos has been involved, somehow, in turning people into chimera, which is nasty and unpleasant, even leaving aside the fact that chimera tend to go crazy and kill lots of people.

There are other bad guys — as usual, there are factions and intrigue within Atheos, and someone on the good guy’s side turns out to have worked for them long ago, before he turned good.

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Review: In Odd We Trust by Dean Koontz & Queenie Chan

In Odd We Trust
Created by Dean Koontz; Written by Queenie Chan & Dean Koontz; Illustrations by Queenie Chan
Del Rey, July 2008, $10.95

Odd Thomas, in a series of (so far) four novels from Dean Koontz, is a twenty-year-old fry cook in the small desert town of Pico Mundo, California. He has a tough girlfriend – Stormy Llewellyn, orphan and gun-slinging amateur detective – a great way with pancakes, many friends in town, and a secret: he can see the dead. The dead never talk, but they do find ways to communicate with Odd, and to get him to help them.

[[[In Odd We Trust]]] takes place when Odd is nineteen; it’s a prequel to the novels. Very early on, in a scene reminiscent of the great amateur “consulting detectives” stretching back to Sherlock, the local police chief, Wyatt Porter, comes to ask Odd for help. Joey Gordon, a seven-year-old, was killed brutally in a home invasion during the fifteen minutes between being dropped off after school by a neighbor and the arrival of his housekeeper/nanny. The killer left a cryptic note, made up of letters cut out of magazines, but no normal clues.

The police are baffled, as they so often are in stories like this. Sometimes I think the police exist in fiction merely to be baffled while the much smarter and more skilled amateurs do their legwork for them, and then sweep in at the end to do the actual arresting.

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Manga Friday: Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting

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  • June 13, 2008

freak-4828629

This week it’s time to go back to what manga do best – or one of the things manga do best, anyway – stories about people fighting and killing each other, usually with long point bits of metal. To make it even more interesting, all three of the books I’m looking at this week are later books in series – and I’ve only seen the earlier books in one case. So this might just turn into another installment of Stump the Reviewer…

Freak: Legend of the Nonblonds, Vol. 3
Story by Yi DongEun; Art by Yu Chung
Yen Press, June 2008, $10.99

Three people –the increasingly oddly named Verna, Lorel, and Tublerun – live together (I think) and are the “Nonblonds,” a troupe of fighter/bounty hunter/martial artists, which apparently is a legitimate career in this world. (And that’s not unusual for manga, actually.)

None of them are blonde – which I wouldn’t have been sure about if Tublerun wasn’t the guy on the cover, but leave that aside – but I have no idea why that matters. Oh, and Verna – a dark-skinned woman, when the other two are light-skinned men – has been spending too much time in “Cerebro” lately, to make more money for someone who’s been in a coma for fifteen years.

Anyway, in this book, Tublerun – who I think was previously the goofball of the group, or perhaps even the explicit comedy relief, takes a solo job up near the North Pole. There, a girl named Marti, who calls herself the personal secretary of President Magnus and says the quest is an unofficial GIA event, tells an assembled group of tough characters that they are going to go into “an ancient site where the method of liquid metal-making was created” to find and retrieve a capsule for a vast reward.

With her is a guy who is, in order, Mr. Ecliptor, GIA’s security chief, and the son of “our President.” (He’s also, once he puts on a mask, the powerful and deadly Chroma – this may be a secret identity.)

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Manga Friday: Korean Road Trip!

The two books this week are actually manwha rather than manga, since they come from Korea and not Japan. Other than the reading direction, both of these books are more similar to their Japanese counterparts than to American comics, which I will demonstrate, viz:

Croquis Pop, Vol. 1
Story by KwangHyun Seo; Art by JinHo Ko
Yen Press, June 2008, $10.99

Da-Il is a young man who either wants to be a manwha artist more than anything in the world — because he told his now-dead mother that the only thing he wanted to do with his life was to make pictures that made her happy — or he fell into the job as a high school student because making comics "looked like fun." Or maybe both, since the story tells us both things and gives us no reason to disbelieve either of them.

Da-Il has just come to work for the manwha-ga Ho Go, who has just moved into a big house with his two other assistants, the punctilious senior assistant Ho-Suk Yang and the gorgeous and mysterious Hang-Chu. (Either in Korea in general, or just in this kind of manwha story, the staff of a particular story live with their boss.) But the hiring procedures are a bit lax, since Da-Il can barely draw. (more…)

Review: Two Grendel Hardcovers – Devil Child & Devil Quest

  • Uncategorized
  • June 5, 2008

devil-child1-3321577It’s generally not a good sign when a series turns from telling stories at the far end of its timeline to filling in the gaps in earlier stories and explaining all the backstory — do I need to mention George Lucas here? — so these two new collections filled me with some trepidation. They’re both reprints of older material — older even than I thought, from 1999 and 1994-95 — but were explicitly returns to even earlier stories.

Matt Wagner’s series of [[[Grendel]]] stories started in 1982, and the main sequence ran from 1986 through 1992 (with a gap near the end caused by the collapse of Wagner’s then-publisher Comico). They started as the story of a near-future crimelord named Hunter Rose who used a mask and electrified pitchfork to terrorize…well, everyone, really. After Wagner wrote the story of Hunter’s inevitable demise, he rethought “Grendel” as a force of evil and aggression that possessed various people through a long future history. With various collaborators (and a number of stories entirely by other hands) and a great diversity of storytelling styles, the Grendel stories all had something in common: a deep, central notion that people are full of evil and corruption, and that life is inevitably nasty, brutish, and short.

Grendel: Devil Child
By Diana Schutz, Tim Sale, and Teddy Kristiansen
Dark Horse, May 2008, $17.95

Stacy Palumbo was the (adopted) daughter of the first Grendel, Hunter Rose, and the mother of the second, Christine Spar. She was a serious but lovable girl in Hunter’s story, and dead by the time of Christine’s. Her unpleasant life in between was backstory in the Christine Spar stories, but here it’s dramatized to wring maximum pathos.

(Think “maximum pathos” is too much? Try this line from the back cover of [[[Devil Child]]] — “The ugly world has no shelter for frightened Stacy, the pivotal link in a chain of evil that extends to the limits of time.” The limits of time, huh? Okay, if you say so.)

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Review: Out of Picture, Vol. 2

picture21-3506137Out of Picture, Vol. 2
no editor credited
Villard Books, June 2008, $tk

No one will admit to editing [[[Out of Picture 2]]], though they seem to be proud of it – buried deep on the copyright page is the “produced by” credit I’ve pulled out for the bibliographic information above, but that doesn’t necessarily mean those were the editors. Ah, well – someone was in charge of this book, even if we’re not sure who that was.

Out of Picture 2 is the second book from a group of animators and illustrators connected to Blue Sky Studios – the first Out of Picture was published by a French house, caused a stir at some conventions, and was reprinted by Villard in December. (And I reviewed it then.) Basically the same crew is back for this volume, though they don’t all work at Blue Sky anymore.

And I see, looking back at my review of Out of Picture 1, that it was a gorgeous book, but a bit lacking in the story department – somewhat obvious and clichéd. I’m sorry to say that Out of Picture 2 is the same kind of thing – amazing art, reproduced fantastically well on large pages of nice paper…but telling stories that aren’t all that special.

This time, we open with Jason Sadler’s wordless “[[[Sub Plotter]]],” a cute little story about the effects of sneezing on a gigantic war-map of an ocean. It seems to be set during WWII, and it’s quite visually inventive, using the space of the large pages very well and popping up with more insets than I would have thought possible. But the story told is a silly little vignette, and, even more so, it’s a vignette that would probably be better animated than in its current form.

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