Author: Andrew Wheeler

Essex County Vol. 3: The Country Nurse
By Jeff Lemire
Top Shelf, October 2008, $9.95

The finale of the “[[[Essex County]]]” trilogy – which will be available in October, so start saving your pennies now – draws together the first two graphic novels in the series, but at the expense of not being as coherent as a story itself. It has two main plot threads – one set in the modern day, following the nurse of the title, and one in 1917.

The modern plot is similar to the frame story of the second volume, Ghost Stories – Anne Quenneville travels around this fictionalized corner of Ontario, Canada on her rounds one day, looking in on her usual patients and giving us some callbacks to those first two stories. (The kid Lester has given up his cape and mask; ex-hockey player Lou is toast.) It does pull together all of the strands of “Essex County” neatly and well, but that’s pretty much all it’s doing; there isn’t much in the way of events, just Anne meeting people we already know or will soon come to recognize.

The other plot starts off about young Lawrence Lebeuf, a twelve-year-old orphan at an isolated orphanage deep in the woods. (Was it really common to have orphanages out in the middle of nowhere, staffed only by a nun and a caretaker? I guess it exemplifies “out of sight, out of mind.”) The orphanage is run by Sister Margaret, and the caretaker is a scruffy man named Charles Gerrard. Lawrence is something of a protégé of Charles’s; he’s the oldest of the orphans and Charles talks to him quite a bit about what he should do when he soon leaves the orphanage.

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Swallow Me Whole
By Nate Powell
Top Shelf, September 2008, $19.95

Ruth and Perry are stepsiblings, somewhere in the South – people say “shoore” for “sure,” biology teachers can’t even say the word “evolution,” and the kids’ slowly-dying, live-in grandmother is called “Memaw.” It also seems to be sometime in the late ‘80s, from the clothes and the music and the hair.

And they’re both – how should I put this? Oh, let’s use the jargon – both are very far from neurotypical. Perry hallucinates a tiny wizard who makes him draw incessantly for “missions.” And Ruth may even be schizophrenic: she hears voices and feels patterns in everything around her, particularly with insect swarms. She has a huge collection of insects in jars in her room; she’s stolen at least some of them from school, but it’s not clear where they all came from. When she finally has a break at school and is taken to the nurse’s office, the school cop immediately assumes she’s high and starts loudly questioning her about drugs – she doesn’t get diagnosed has obsessive-compulsive for several days.

[[[Swallow Me Whole]]] is a slow, swirling, uneasy book, centered mostly on Ruth and her efforts to live in the world – talking to her Memaw, getting a work-study job at the museum, trying not to be swallowed up by the massive swarms of insects that comfort her and that may, or may not, be real. (Don’t decide either way until you get to the end.) It begins with a few short scenes set about five years earlier, when Ruth and Perry are both pre-teens and Memaw’s hospitalization ends with her moving in with them and their parents. From there, it’s hard to say how much time Swallow Me Whole covers, since there are no external markers. They go to school but we don’t see school begin or end for the summer. We don’t see the seasons change. Scenes could be separated by a day or three months. It’s all now; it’s all happening, like life, one thing after another after another.

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It’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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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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