Author: Andrew Wheeler

Black Is the Color by Julia Gfrörer

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I often find I’m thinking about or focused on the wrong things in the books I’m reading – that I need to specifically tell myself to ignore something so I can move on.

For example in Julia Gfrörer’s short, dark, creepy 2013 graphic novel Black Is the Color , the story opens on a wooden ship, far out in the ocean, several hundred years ago. One of the leaders – not the captain, maybe the first mate or owner – tells two sailors that they are, unfortunately, running lower on provisions than expected. So he’s going to kick the two of them off the ship, into a small open boat, to die in the middle of the sea.

And my first thought was: was that a thing? I’ve heard of crews going on half-rations, or even less – stretching their food farther and farther. And I know that a merchant ship, which this one appears to be, had a small, tight crew to begin with – especially compared to a warship, which would be swarming with gunhands and marines and others. So it didn’t quite make sense that they could or would just kill two of a very limited crew at the first sign of trouble.

But that’s how Gfrörer gets to the story she wants to tell: this is about two men, in that open boat, and what happens to them. So the setup almost doesn’t matter: it’s plausible, it’s quick, it gets them out there, under a baking sun, with no food or water.

And then the mermaids come out to investigate.

Black is the story of one of those two men: Warren. He lasts longer. He’s…befriended? made a pet? visited? by a mermaid, Eulalia. We see him alone in the boat, slowly dying. We see him with her, being comforted or having sex or being a new object of interest. We see her down in the depths, among her people, callous and self-centered and flighty. We see that she and all her people view humans as amusing distractions, as entertainment – interesting in the moment, maybe, but nothing more important or significant than that.

Gfrörer’s art is detailed and organic, her lines dark black and usually thin, her borders in this six-panel grid just slightly irregular, her people with sharp defined faces, her seas a mass of lines rippling and undulating, endlessly. This is a book that’s black in multiple ways: story, theme, characters, often visually. Black is the color here.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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The Cat from the Kimono by Nancy Peña

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This graphic novel says it’s based on a folktale, and I have no reason to doubt that. Whether it’s an ancient, well-known folktale or one made up by creator Nancy Peña to fit the story she wants to tell…there I do wonder a bit.

It’s such a wonderfully visual story, one perfectly aligned with Peña’s illustrative, pattern-filled pages. It’s open-ended, with a clear beginning that turns into multiple possibilities – which also feeds the style she uses to tell this story, switching from storybook-style big images with captions for the pure folktale into comics-style grids (mostly three tiers) with speech balloons for the complications, the portions that are clearly and entirely Peña’s.

It doesn’t really matter whether she found a folktale she could adapt so well or made it up, but it does make me think about the creative impulse, and wonder which of the two it was.

The Cat from the Kimono  was published in 2020 in France – Peña is French; she works in that language – and translated into English by Montana Kane for this 2023 edition.

The legend goes that, sometime long ago in Japan – I would guess after unification, during the Edo period, but time is rarely specific in folktales – there was a beautiful young woman, the daughter of the owner of a silk mill. The best weaver in the mill was in love with her; she did not reciprocate. He made her various beautiful kimonos to show his love; she only loved the very first one he made, printed all over with cats. He got angry; things went bad, somewhat supernaturally, on the kimonos. And one cat from that first kimono ran off the silk and out into the real world.

This is the story of that cat’s adventures – perhaps somewhat later in time, perhaps meant to be right after running away. Again: folktales don’t say “and then, three days later, on the fifth of March” or anything like that.

In Peña’s story, the cat stowed away on a ship and made its way to London, where he weaved through the stories of a few Victorian-era people – a girl named Alice, a brilliant consulting detective, and a few less-obvious characters. Peña tells her story in alternating sections – first the folktale, then some comics pages, then usually a blackout page, and back to the folktale. Sometimes we get multiple comics scenes, with one set of characters and then another, and sometimes we just get one group, and then back to the folktale.

Peña tells the main folktale in full at the beginning – up to the cat running away. When she returns to it, it’s for a series of variations and questions: where could the cat have gone? what are the versions of the story? how many endings does this story have? And she closes with the folktale as well, giving – in that very fabulistic manner – mostly questions and options, before ending with a slender thread of “well, there is one version of the story that says thus.”

Peña’s folktale pages are lush and ornate; her comics pages are precise and detailed. She moves from one format into the other effortlessly, back and forth, to tell one story in both modes. Cat from the Kimono is a wonderful expansion of a fable, no matter its origins.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The Incredible Story of Cooking by Benoist Simmat and Stéphane Douay

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The obvious thing to start out with would be a joke about how only the French would make a 250-page graphic novel about cooking.

But I don’t want to be dismissive: this is a both heavily-researched and user-friendly overview of something that’s hugely important for everybody – we all gotta eat, and the vast majority of us enjoy it and want to maximize that enjoyment. It may be too much for some readers, true. But there have been books like this in prose for decades – centuries, actually – and there’s no reason the graphic format should be less useful.

The opposite, in fact – in a prose book, you have to add pictures on individual pages or a photo insert to show what food looks like – in a graphic novel, that’s built in on every page automatically. You have to deliberately avoid showing what things look like in a graphic novel.

So I’m happy to see more books like The Incredible Story of Cooking : serious non-fiction in comics form, for people who want the details and also want to see what it all looks like, or maybe don’t want to read walls of text, or just like the organization of a comics page. (I’m all three of those things, myself, at least intermittently.)

Cooking was written by Benoist Simmat, a journalist and comics writer – he previously did a big book on wine , which has also been translated into English – and drawn by Stéphane Douay, who’s been drawing comics for twenty years but doesn’t seem to have been translated into English before. (Well, he draws the pictures, so his part of it doesn’t need to be “translated,” but you know what I mean.) It was originally published in Paris by Les Arénes in 2021; the US English-language edition (translated by Montana Kane) is from NBM and officially publishes today.

It stakes out a lot of ground: the subtitle starts with prehistory and claims to cover half a million years. The book delivers on that: the first page lists a number of hominids active in Africa between four and one million years ago, and the first chapter tells us as much as modern science knows about what those early humans ate and how they found, prepared, and kept food. I’m not sure that counts as cooking, but I don’t have a solid mental definition of what’s required to “count” as cooking, either. The book only claims 500,000 years of history, anyway, so these additional millions up front are purely lagniappe, to set the stage.

Eight more chapters bring the story, in successive stages, up to the modern world. We start with the great civilizations of antiquity – Sumer and Egypt and China and India – then Greece and Rome, trade routes and the Far East, medieval Europe, the Columbian exchange and food in the New World in general, the rise of first restaurants and gastronomy in the 19th century and then (soon afterward) the industrialization of the food business, before ending with a look at the world today, anchored by the Slow Food movement and related localization trends. Each chapter is dense with detail – there are lots of footnotes, which can send the reader back to an extensive bibliography in the back – livened up by Douay’s crisp and occasionally amusing art.

In the back, besides that long bibliography, Simmat also provides nearly two dozen recipes from representative cultures around the world – the US gets a Chicago Hot Dog, for example – which can probably be cooked from with only a small effort. (Measurements are all in metric, which may confuse some American cooks.) In case the foregoing wasn’t French enough, Simmat also gives a complexity/difficulty level for each recipe in graphic form: one soufflé for simple, up to three for difficult.

I doubt I will cook from this book, but the recipes are a nice addition. And the bulk of the book is the main comics narrative, which is detailed, backed up by all those footnotes, and includes all sorts of quirky details – starting with all of those pre-sapiens hominids up front – that I wasn’t expecting at all. It’s a book that’s both entertaining and informative: what more could you ask for?

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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Planet Paradise by Jesse Lonergan

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This is not a sequel to Hedra . There’s no way it could be set in the same universe. But they’re from the same creator, from the same year, in the same genre, with a similar feel and with SFnal technology that works roughly the same way.

So maybe it’s a companion piece, or another element in an era in Jesse Lonergan’s career. I liked both books a lot, so I’m hoping something like the latter: I’d be happy to see him do SF books like this for a while, if he and the market agree.

(Although…they’re both from four years ago, and I suspect the market has not agreed, since the comics market has been deeply disagreeable for close to a decade now.)

But let me get more specific about Planet Paradise , a roughly hundred-page standalone SF graphic novel. It’s the story of a vacation that goes wrong.

Eunice and Peter live in some medium-future multi-system society, seemingly a pretty rich and healthy and happy one. They’re off for a vacation on Rydra-17, billed as “the Paradise Planet.” The book opens with them individually settling into their hibernation pods, which will then be slotted into bays in the ship.

This isn’t a fast-FTL universe; it takes more than eleven days in transit to go from wherever-we-started to Rydra-17. The two crewmembers of this unnamed ship are the only ones awake for the journey.

There’s a cliché that says a story is about what happens when something goes wrong: that’s the case here. There’s some kind of malfunction. The ship ends up crash-landing on some unknown world. One of the crewmembers is killed; the pods are scattered across the landscape and some of them have failed or broken, killing their inhabitants.

Eunice’s pod is intact, but it pops open. We don’t know why. But there she is: unexpectedly on an alien world, in the middle of a disaster scene, the only human on the surface.

Well, not quite the only one. The captain of the ship, Wanda, also survived: she’s got a broken leg and is deep in the wreckage. Wanda yells for help, and Eunice saves her. So then the two of them can work to save the rest and call for rescue.

It’s not that simple: Wanda is demanding and injured and obnoxious and treats Eunice as just the hands to do the things she wants done. Eunice is overwhelmed and untrained and unsure. And there are unexpected large carnivores on this planet.

They do manage to find a distress beacon and set it up. An emergency service agent arrives a few days later – again, travel between planets in this universe is at least several days. That does not go exactly as planned, either.

But Eunice and Wanda do get off this planet. Eunice does finally get to Rydra-17, and her vacation with Peter. But, as we see in the last scene, her experience has changed her – unexpectedly, making her more confident and able in another dangerous situation.

Lonergan’s panels here aren’t quite as visually inventive as the wordless Hedra, but he plays with size and sequence and format a lot – there are some excellent big vertical panels near the beginning to emphasize the solidity of the ship and the old-fashioned lying-back take-off position, among other fun sequences – and his art is dynamic, great at both quiet storytelling and the more energetic action moments.

He also makes his world lived-in and specific; his characters consume soap-opera-ish media and grumble to each other about corporate budget cuts. This seems to be a pretty nice universe, all-in-all, but it’s not perfect, and the imperfections led to this story – we can imagine those same budget cuts caused a little slacking off of maintenance that caused the original malfunction.

This is not a big story: it has a small cast, a short time-frame, and a modest scope. But it’s strongly focused, has a great relatable main character in Eunice, looks lovely, and does everything it needs to do smartly, quickly, and with great style. It is a neat SF graphic novel, totally enjoyable and self-contained, and I would be happy if the world had many more books like that.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces by Valérie Villieu and Raphaël Sarfati

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The book is not nearly as puckish as the cover suggests. Anyone looking for a Little Nemo-inspired imaginative adventure should look elsewhere; this is a memoir by a French visiting nurse about one particular patient of hers, an old woman with an unspecified dementia-related condition.

And this is all true, as far as I can see. This all happened, to the real Valérie Villieu, and she’s telling that story to us, with the aid of artist Raphaël Sarfati. It was a little while ago – Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces  covers a few years in the mid-Aughts, with the 2007 French presidential election somewhere in the middle – and the French edition came out in 2012, to be eventually translated by Nanette McGuiness for this 2020 English-language edition from Humanoids.

Josephine was a woman in her mid-eighties, living alone in a small Paris apartment, as she had for nearly sixty years. She’d recently been found wandering disoriented in the street, and, after a brief hospitalization, was back in her apartment with daily visits from caregivers and an official legal conservatorship to manage her affairs. Villieu was working as a visiting nurse, with a roster of patients like Josephine, who she would see several times a week, to evaluate and support, administering medications and keeping track of their conditions. Villieu seems to have been part of a nursing team; she uses “we” somewhat regularly to talk about the work done, and occasionally shows what I think is a colleague also visiting Josephine.

But it’s mostly Villieu’s personal experience: how she met this woman, how they interacted, what happened over those years, how Josephine affected Valérie.

A lot of the book is the day-to-day: complaining about the often-lackadaisical work of the caregivers, battling to get the conservator to actually do something and not just complain about how many cases he was handling, and slowly gaining Josephine’s trust. Villieu writes at length about the work she does, and how she interacted with Josephine, and what Josephine was like as a person – this is a graphic novel with extensive captions, a very narrated story.

Villieu cared for Josephine for years – and I mean “cared” in both the professional and the personal sense. And she makes their relationship real here, without sugarcoating it. Josephine had a serious, unreversable, progressive mental illness, that confused her and made her forget thousands of things, that changed her moods and made her combative at times. Dementia is one of those horrible diseases we don’t like to think about – for ourselves or for ones we care for – since it turns the sufferer into a different person, bit by bit stripping away important pieces of who they were and replacing those with a pseudo-childish shell, smaller and diminished and occasionally realizing that.

(I may be biased: a very close family member is going through something similar right now, so this is more real to me than another health problem would be.)

Josephine was still a quirky, interesting person: dementia had stolen a lot from her, but a lot of her was still there, the woman who had lived in that Paris apartment for decades and still had stories of the ’50s and ’60s to tell when she could remember them.

That’s who Villieu wants to celebrate: the woman she met, behind the disease, the woman she supported and helped for a few years, giving her some more happy life at a point when she could easily have been shoved into an institution and left to decline quickly. Little Josephine is a more serious, deeper book than the cover would make a reader expect, but it’s well worth the journey.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Eartha by Cathy Malkasian

Cathy Malkasian’s 2017 graphic novel Eartha is a metaphor for social media. It’s more than that, too, but that’s the log-line: it is centrally an argument against fake “connectivity” and the addiction to bad news.

(Whether the problem it metaphorizes is even our current problem in 2024 I’ll leave as an argument the reader can have; I’m a bit dubious myself.)

Our main character is a very large woman – twice as tall as everyone around her, and notably more solidly built as well – among the gnomish happy rustics of the sleepy town of Echo Fjord. She’s the usual soft-hearted giant: we first see her saving people from a flood of water caused by her own mother’s flightiness. Most of the folks of Echo Fjord either grow crops or help to corral and progress the dreams of the faraway City Across the Sea, but Eartha has what seems to be a unique role: she’s so much taller and stronger that she’s the one to carry all the heavy things, and we keep seeing her pick up and carry the older people, as if they are babies and she is the adult.

The dreams of the city people is an important, complicated system – evocative without being quite as directly metaphorical as the didactic social media metaphor (which I’ll get to in a moment). The people of the City Across the Sea have busy, complicated lives, so their dreams separate from them quickly. Those dreams manifest in Echo Fjord, generally popping out of the soil as purple-hued people – who look mostly like their dreamers – focused on a monomania and with a brilliant beacon of light shining straight up from the top of their heads. The Echo Fjordians attach “shadows” to the dreams to keep them from flying away, and watch them as they act out their psychodramas – usually a few times – before they inevitably go through the Dream Departures area and dissipate while crossing a broad, sunny field.

The Echo Fjordians have been guiding these dreams for a thousand years – before that, they were major trading partners with the City, but they broke off contact because it was unseemly to profit from knowing their trading partners’ innermost secrets. So this is a major activity of these people, but it’s not an industry: it’s amusing and entertaining and central to their lives in the way that a church or tradition could be, but it doesn’t bring them money or anything positive other than psychologically.

And the dreams are waning. It’s been a week since there were any, and then we see a bare few of them.

Eartha, of course, is more worried than most people about the change, and goes around talking to various Echo Fjordians to figure out what to do. The aged keeper of the Archives, Old Lloyd, tricks her into taking a journey to the City to find out what happened – Eartha is uniquely right for this job, not just for the physical reasons we can see, but due to other things Old Lloyd knows that become clear later.

So she takes a small rowboat, and sets off. Somehow – this is a fable, basically, so a lot of things are “somehow” – she arrives at the City, to find it in turmoil. The average people of the city are selling everything they own, bit by bit, to a group of men in plaid jackets called the Bouncers, in return for biscuits with four-word “news” reports printed on them. The biscuit messages are all negative – HYSTERICAL JACKASS STABS RECLUSE; that kind of thing – and the point of the exercise is to be connected to the truth of the world, which is negative, and to gain that knowledge by giving up material things.

Of course, it’s all a scam, but it takes a long time for the naïve, confused Eartha to realize that. The bouncers are led by a man named Primus, a nasty twisted authoritarian obsessed with women’s breasts. Eartha runs into him, wanders through the city, is led by a talking cat who knows more than it’s willing to tell Eartha, and eventually learns the truth.

The biscuit business started out normally, but it picked up steam when they started printing messages on the biscuits. The messages are not actually true – they’re just generated randomly – but they seem true because they’re negative, and that led to the feedback loop that ended with the Bouncers controlling the whole city and close to owning everything.

There is a resistance movement – which sends rubbings of gravestone life-summaries down gutter downspouts, and is more effective in breaking the hold of the biscuits on metropolitans’ minds than you would expect – and Eartha joins it, in her confused, easily-led way. It turns out that many of the major characters – mostly ones I haven’t mentioned – are related to each other, and we learn their stories.

Eartha is a didactic story with a message to deliver, so of course it has to end well, to bring Eartha back home and underline its message. (Rural is better than urban, lives are each unique and special, murderous authoritarians should be stopped – that kind of thing.) Old Lloyd shows up again, to deliver large pieces of that message.

Eartha looks lovely – its people are quirky and odd-looking, with lived-in faces, so maybe “lovely” isn’t quite the right word – and it’s full of ideas, impressively constructed and intensely imagined. I had a vague sense that it was a long argument against something that has already shifted substantially since the book was published, but that’s not the book’s fault.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness by Bryan Lee O’Malley

This is the one where things become both more and less complicated. On balance, probably less overall, by the end, which is unusual for the mid-point of a series.

For any Gen Z readers coming to Scott Pilgrim for the first time (or, I guess, older people who managed to miss it): this is a six-book graphic novel series by Bryan Lee O’Malley, in a manga-inspired format and video game-inspired world, about a twenty-something slacker from Toronto and his friends, mostly about how he meets a new girlfriend and has to defeat her seven evil exes, but also partly about his band and some related stuff. The six books all came out in the back half of the Aughts, so I guess they’re core Millennial culture, if you want to generation-type them, but Scott himself is such a stereotypical slacker that this Gen X guy found him and his world instantly recognizable.

Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness  is the third book; the first two were Precious Little Life  and Vs. the World . Current editions have color by Nathan Fairbairn; original publication was in black and white.

This one is the all-exes-all-the-time volume: Scott’s new girlfriend Ramona Flowers (the quirky, cool American with a mysterious past) had a previous boyfriend, Todd Ingram, who is the bassist in the hot new band The Clash at Demonhead. And Scott’s ex-girlfriend, Envy Adams, is the leader of that band. So there’s bad blood all around with TCaD – even more so because Envy’s band is more slick, successful, and success-oriented.

TCaD is in Toronto; they’re playing some shows, and Scott’s band Sex Bob-omb is opening for them. Which is just as awkward – for Scott in particular – as it sounds.

So there’s a lot of scenes here of Scott uncomfortable around Envy – she basically kicked him and Steven Stills out of the band the three of them founded, back in high school, and Scott is not known for being comfortable with conflict and ambition and stress in the first place. And there’s a fair bit of flashback, to show those older relationships – Ramona with Todd, Scott with Envy, and even Envy with Todd, since they’re together now. (Well, relatively together – Todd is a cheater there as well as on a level that will affect his fighting abilities later in the book.)

On the positive side, Scott’s most recent ex, the teenager Knives Chau, is less obsessed with him here and more with Envy. She’s maybe growing up a bit, and, as of this point, seems to be over Scott and settling into a new relationship with Young Neil.

And, of course, there are some fights. Scott is at first utterly incapable of fighting Todd – who has superpowers because he’s a vegan, in one of the best-known and most amusing minor plot points of the series – and there are other small and large battles throughout, including the quick bit where Knives gets the highlights punched out of her hair.

The whole Scott Pilgrim saga has a wonderful control of tone and an infectious joy in its own fictional structures – there’s a lovely sequence early in this book that runs through nearly the whole cast, during the first tense meeting with Envy and her band, with captions to say what everyone wants at that moment. There’s a lot of similar moments, where O’Malley is playing with the comics form and with his video-game references, both to make jokes and to quirkily underline serious moments. (When Scott tries to run to access a “save point,” we can feel his flop sweat and panic.)

In some ways, this book is the core of the whole series – sure, it’s not all resolved here, and you can see O’Malley setting some of the hooks for the back half – but this is where the Scott-Envy-Ramona-Todd broken quadrangle happens, and that’s one of the major foci of the whole story.

But, of course, even after getting past Todd here, Scott knows: there are four evil exes yet to fight.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Pearl by Sherri L. Smith and Christine Norrie

This may be me being cynical, I’m sorry to say. And that’s not anything a nice, brand-new YA graphic novel needs. But I am struck by the way that memoir has so taken over YA comics that everything else bends to that format – even a book like this, which is entirely fictional.

Pearl  is the story of Amy, a Japanese-American girl growing up in Hawaii in 1941. The book doesn’t say exactly how old she is, but I’m going to guess around twelve – old enough to take a long trip by herself, young enough to still be a kid, just the right age for a book like this. And Pearl reads as if Amy was a real person, telling us her story – I was initially surprised when we got a “1941” caption, since I thought it would be a modern-day story about discovering her heritage. (Sometimes not reading the publicity material is a bad idea!)

Amy narrates the book, first telling the story of her great-grandmother, a late 19th century pearl-diver from Okinawa who gives the book its title and provides some parallax to Amy’s story, and then quickly brings her family story up to her time. Now, I read this as an uncorrected proof, and it was obvious in a few places that panels were missing or FPO – some other pages seemed to not have the final color/tone in place. So anything else I write about here might also have changed: what I saw was an early, not-quite-finished version.

So if I say that Amy’s narration is mostly short and factual, evocative rather than digging into her emotions, know that might have changed a bit. Probably not radically – I don’t expect Pearl‘s text doubled or tripled in size – but especially at major moments, it might be a little more personal in the final version than the one I read.

Writer Sherri L. Smith puts us in Amy’s shoes without exactly putting us in her head – we follow her throughout, but see her mostly from outside, as things happen to her. Pearl is largely the story of things that happen to Amy – major, world-historical events – that she has no control over and is just swept along by. I might have been hoping for somewhat more choice on Amy’s part, which isn’t entirely realistic for her age and time and place.

Comics are at least half pictures, though, and artist Christine Norrie’s art is excellent at storytelling, with a particularly good eye for body language and the telling image. (I don’t know how she worked with Smith on this book, so the visual storytelling could easily have been partially or mostly from Smith, if she did thumbnails or a panel-by-panel script.) So we don’t get lots of words about how Amy feels and what she does, but we do see that, and can quickly tell.

I don’t want to get into all the details – it’s a quick read, the kind of comic where the pictures carry a lot of the weight – but Amy goes on what’s supposed to be a few-months trip to visit her family in Japan, in the fall of 1941. And her family lives near Hiroshima. The young audience that Pearl is mostly aimed at won’t necessarily know the significance of “fall of 1941” and “Hiroshima,” but I think anyone reading this post will.

Amy spends the war in Japan. We see it from her point of view – limited, contingent, precise. She’s put to work, goes through travails, learns about what’s happening to her parents back in the USA. Smith and Norrie aren’t quite telling the whole story of the Pacific War here, but they are trying to get through all of the high points that would realistically relate to a Japanese-American girl in Japan.

The art is always evocative, closely focused on Amy and what she sees. There’s a sequence of pages, near the end, with real power and heft, and other stretches of beauty and energy, such as the opening with Amy’s ancestor diving for pearls. It is a lovely book, thoughtful and visually appealing, with a somewhat minimalist text appropriate for the audience. It’s not quite what I thought it would be, but that’s entirely on me not paying enough attention up front.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The Eyes of the Cat by Alexandro Jodorowsky and Moebius

I don’t have the highest opinion of the work of Alexandro Jodorowsky, to put it mildly. (See my post on the Moebius/Jodorowsky product Madwoman of the Sacred Heart  for a fuller rant.) I tend to think Moebius had massive tendencies towards self-indulgence at best, and that Jodorowsky fed into those, adding a soupy Euro mystic vagueness on top, like a light fog that makes everything unclear.

But I like books that I react strongly to – even if that reaction is not actually positive. The point of art is to make people feel, and revulsion and disdain is a feeling, he said somewhat puckishly. So I keep giving Jodorowsky chances, in large part because other readers – people who I otherwise respect – said consistently for decades that there really was a there there.

Thus The Eyes of the Cat , their 1978 collaboration – I think the first time they worked together, a couple of years before The Incal began. It’s published as a comics album these days, but it’s more experimental than that, and a slimmer, smaller thing – it was originally a giveaway in France, which is oddly appropriate. 

It’s about fifty pages long, alternating full-page illustrations and pages with a single tall minimalist panel – that panel seems not to change for most of the length of the book – and a few words. It’s more like a picture book than a comic: not quite words on one side and image on the other, but almost that.

The words are all in one voice, and we realize eventually it is the boy we see in the tall panels speaking. The boy is speaking to a bird of prey, Meduz, as it stalks – well, you can guess from the title and see from the cover. And the title will tell you what Meduz is looking to take from its prey.

This is a book of mood and atmosphere, one that implies things rather than saying them, creating a tone of horror and creepiness rather than telling a fuller story or describing a world. The boy is deeply creepy: that’s the point. But it takes a little while for the reader to realize it: that is also the point.

The Moebius art is from his prime period, detailed and precise, from the vertiginous ruined cityscape to the intricate crosshatching on Meduz’s feathers. And Jodorowsky’s words are few enough and allusive enough that they work perfectly well – for me at least.

And, before I forget and end this post, the edition I read was the 2013 Humanoids English-language edition, which was translated by Quinn & Katia Donoghue.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Tentacles at My Throat by Zerocalcare

You know how, when you’re a kid, there are rigid rules to life that just seem to be there: generated by the kids themselves, random, unquestionable and bedrock?

Zerocalcare’s graphic novels are set in a world – well, they’re memoirs, officially, so it’s the world inside his head, the real world as he sees it or the way he thinks it’s more entertaining to pretend he sees it – based on that logic. It’s a world full of internal voices – society, peer pressure, desires, the weight of kid opinion – demanding that the main character must do X or Y in this situation, and must never do P or Q, no matter what.

Most of us grow out of that kind of thinking, or at least build different obsessive-compulsive structures in our adulthood. But Michele Rech – the Italian cartoonist who works as Zerocalcare – is not most people.

Tentacles at My Throat  was his second graphic novel, after The Armadillo Prophecy ; it was published in Italy in 2014 and this edition, translated into English by Carla Roncalli di Montorio, came out in 2022. I’ve also seen Forget My Name , which I think was his third book. They’re all that sort of thing: mining the mindset of an obsessive, inward-focused childhood and young adulthood, a life intensely examined.

Of course, Zerocalcare constructs each one of these books carefully and deliberately; this isn’t just a rush of “how I really feel.” One major clue to that construction is that the specific internal voices are very different in each book – the internal voice, the superego if you will, of Armadillo was, yes, an armadillo. But here basically the same role is played by “David the Gnome,” the main character of the TV show based on the ’80s illustrated books. And the internal voices are much less central this time – they pop up to stop Zero from doing things, but aren’t the everyday companion the armadillo was.

So this one is a more typical memoir, made more dramatic and serious – in the way that kids do, when telling stories about their own lives – but mostly realistic and grounded. (There is what I think is a burst of fiction at the end, to tie off one loose end that I suppose Zero never learned the real history of, but nothing like the dive into pure fantasy at the end of Forget.)

Tentacles is a three-part story, centered on his school. The main characters are a group of kids, most centrally Zero himself, his friend Slim – who I suspect may be a composite; he’s appeared in every book so far and has been central in all of them – and their friend Sarah. The three sections are of equal length, taking place when Zero is seven, sixteen, and twenty-seven. The first two center on sneaking out of the school to do something – both in that vaguely transgressive and somewhat ritualized way kids have: “prove you’re brave by sneaking under the fence you’re never supposed to cross, and doing this specific thing to prove you did it.” And the third section is the usual reason former students come back to their old school: someone has died.

Of course Zero obsessed about what happened for years afterwards; that’s what he does. The fact that he “betrayed” one of his friends at the age of seven – as always with Zero, his internal dialogue obsessively focuses on that, on how horrible and unreclaimable he is, how everyone would hate him forever if only they knew the truth, and on and on and on.

And, of course, it’s never as bad as he assumes. That’s the point of this spiraling: it can’t possibly be as bad as the person spiraling worries. I do wonder if the “Zerocalcare” of his stories is going to move forward into that realization at any point, or if they’ll stay stuck in that childhood/young adulthood nexus of fear, doubt, and shame. My understanding is that he’s shifted formats over the past few years – moved from telling these stories in graphic novel form into telling them in animated TV-show form, so he can run through them all again and do the same thing over – but, eventually, the character of Zero will have to move out of the conflicted, neurotic twenty-something life, right?

As always with Zerocalcare, I find it’s a bit too overwrought for me. I want to reach into the page, shake Zero, and tell him to just mellow out – nothing is as earth-shaking or as central as he’s sure every last bit of it is.

(Or maybe he’s right, because this is the world he constructed. As far as I can tell, his group of friends have already utterly ruined the lives of two of their schoolmates, and that’s played for laughs. Ha ha! Lifelong trauma because they happened to be there, and aren’t the heroes! It’s funny!)

I guess I’m saying that I appreciate the skill and craft and energy of Zerocalcare’s work, but I hope he’s massively exaggerating a lot of this stuff, because otherwise he and his buddies come across, frankly, as a bunch of horrible little monsters. More than most kids, even.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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