Author: Andrew Wheeler

Review: ‘Batman Grendel’ by Matt Wagner

 batman-grendel-4721219Batman Grendel
By Matt Wagner
DC Comics/Dark Horse, February 2008, $19.95

[[[Batman Grendel]]] collects two short series – each one was just two 50-page issues long – originally titled [[[Batman/Grendel]]] and [[[Batman/Grendel II]]]. The slash has disappeared for the collected edition – perhaps because now the names of two male characters separated by a slash brings with it entirely different expectations?

(I’m reminded of Terry Pratchett’s never-quite-named character, from a tribe who are called after the first thing the mother sees after birth, who wished, desperately, that his name was Two Dogs Fighting.)

(And the very small “Vs.” on all of the online bookshots does not actually appear on the book itself, which is simply titled Batman Grendel, as if it were the product of some comic-book equivalent of a corporate merger.)

So what we have first is a 1993 story with Batman battling the original Grendel, Hunter Rose – who is in many ways something like an evil Batman, or a twisted mirror image. Rose is a self-made man, master of arcane fighting arts, and the scourge of the underworld in his hometown…although that’s because he took over in his town. Rose is incredibly violent in a very comic-booky way – he has the typical nonpowered superhero’s utter control of violence and movement, but uses it to slaughter at will.

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Review: ‘How to Love’ from Actus Comics

  • Uncategorized
  • May 28, 2008

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How to Love
By Batia Kolton, David Polonsky, Mira Friedmann, Itzik Rennert, Rutu Modan, and Yirmi Pinkus; translated by Ishai Mishory
Actus/distributed by Top Shelf, August 2008, $29.95

Actus is an Israeli comics collective that publishes one joint project annually; their members are the six contributors to this book. This book was published in Israel by Actus, but is being distributed on this side of the Atlantic by Top Shelf Comics. (And was translated by Ishai Mishory, implying that there was a prior edition in Hebrew.) It’s officially publishing in August, but I can’t find it on any of the US online booksellers, and I got my copy several months ago – so it’s anyone’s guess when it will show up in your local comics shop (if ever). Top Shelf is selling it directly, so there’s at least that way to get it.

[[[How to Love]]] has six stories, one by each of the contributors, each about twenty pages long. (The subtitle calls them “graphic novellas,” which stretches a bit too far for my taste – is there anything wrong with short stories?)

It opens with Batia Kolton’s “Summer Story,” in which pre-teen Dorit watches her nameless older neighbor kissing a boyfriend on the street, then has the neighbor accompany her family on a trip to the beach. It’s a very slice-of-life story; Dorit is clearly learning about relationships through the neighbor, but the story doesn’t get inside her head; we see everything from outside, so we don’t know what Dorit thinks about any of it. The art is a clean-line style, very reminiscent of Actus’s most famous member, Rutu Modan.

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Review: The Complete Peanuts, 1967 to 1968 by Charles M. Shulz

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The Complete Peanuts, 1967-1968
By Charles M. Schulz; foreword by John Waters
Fantagraphics, February 2008, $28.95

By 1967, [[[Peanuts]]] wasn’t just another comic strip in the local newspaper, it was a media phenomenon. The first TV special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, had won an Emmy amid universal acclaim two years earlier, and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown was about to open on Broadway. It was the epitome of mainstream entertainment – on May 24th, California Governor Ronald Reagan and the state legislature even proclaimed it “Charles Schulz Day.” The strip hadn’t quite hit its ‘70s mega-merchandising heyday, but it was getting there.

At the same time, not all that far from Schulz’s Santa Rosa home, Berkley was roiling with anti-war fervor and the Summer of Love had hit San Francisco. Peanuts had been seen as an edgy, almost countercultural strip in the early 1950s, but those days were long past, and Peanuts was the Establishment. In those days, you were with the pigs or with the longhairs, right? And where did Peanuts stand?

From the evidence here, Peanuts stood where it had always stood: on its own, only rarely commenting on specific issues of the day (such as the “bird-hippie” who would become Woodstock in another year or two), but talking around those issues in ways that most of America could laugh at… some more uncomfortably than others. Schulz was never one to declare himself on one side of an issue or the other; he’d just write and draw his cartoons, and let others make their interpretations.

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Manga Friday: Done in One

One of the differences – I won’t say “advantages,” since opinion differs on that subject – of manga from Western-style superhero comics is that manga stories all have endings, eventually. Oh, “eventually” can be a long, long time coming – two decades, in some cases – but manga are created by one person or set of people, and all eventually come to an end, unlike corporate-owned characters, who live as long as their revenue stream does.

Some manga, though, end more quickly than others. Some even end in a couple of hundred pages – a story short enough to fit into one volume. And, by luck, I have two stories just like that in front of me this week.

Haridama: Magic Cram School
By Atasushi Suzumi
Del Rey Manga, May 2008, $10.95

Kokuyo and Harika are childhood friends who both ended up at the Sekiei Magic Cram School – named after its founder and apparently only teacher – studying to be magicians (who, once they’ve climbed the magic ladder as far as they can, we’re told are qualified to open cram schools of their own, which makes the whole thing seem like a pointless pyramid scheme). They’re “Obsidians,” people with only Yin or Yang power – instead of both, like proper magicians – and so they need swords with stones in the hilt to channel their lesser powers.

The other two main characters of this story are Sekiei, their young teacher – there don’t seem to be any other students in the school, in fact – and Nekome, a third-level sorcerer who recently graduated from the rival Torame school. Sekiei pushes Kokuyo and Harika to work harder and achieve more, while Nekome mildly torments them and puts down their abilities. (more…)

Review: ‘The Rabbi’s Cat 2’ by Joann Sfar

  • Uncategorized
  • May 22, 2008

rabbi21-9512084Joann Sfar, one of the major lights of the current European graphic novel scene, has written or collaborated on more than one hundred books, but probably his most famous and acclaimed work is the original [[[The Rabbi’s Cat]]], which won the prestigious Jury Prize at the Festival International de la BD d’Angouleme (Angouleme International Comics Festival).

Sadly, I still haven’t read it. Luckily, that means that I can review this sequel with an eye towards the new reader – since I was one myself.

The Rabbi’s Cat 2
By Joann Sfar
Pantheon, April 2008, $22.95

The title character is a nameless talking cat in Algiers in the 1930s, the pet of Rabbi Sfar – or perhaps of his beautiful, frustrated daughter Zlabya and her husband, a younger, urbane rabbi from Paris. I say “talking cat,” but most of the characters can’t tell that he talks – and it’s not clear what the difference is between those who can and those who can’t. (But the reader can always understand, which is the most important thing.) [[[The Rabbi’s Cat 2]]] collects what were the fourth and fifth French albums in the series, as the original Rabbi’s Cat collected the first three.

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‘Dungeon Monstres, Vol. 1: The Crying Giant’ Review

The “Dungeon” series has gotten so full of stories, so complicated, that there’s a diagram on the back of this book to explain how all of the sub-series relate to each other.

Up top are the three main sequences – The Early Years (the creation), Zenith (the height), and Twilight (the downfall), as it says here – and below that are explanations of the other three clusters: Parade, Bonus, and Monstres. All are set in a giant castle in a standard fantasy world – the castle was set up by “the Keeper” as a habitat for various monsters, who could kill and devour the inevitable wandering adventurers. (So it’s a hack-n-slash D&D campaign turned on its head; the monsters win every time.)

Dungeon Monstres, Vol. 1: The Crying Giant
By Johann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Mazan, and Jean-Cristophe Menu
NBM, June 2008, $12.95

 

This particular subseries focuses on, as the back cover says, “great adventures of secondary characters.” So Monstres is the Cable & Deadpool of the “Dungeon” world, I guess…

The other different thing about Monstres is that the stories are illustrated by guest artists, not by series creators Johann [that’s how he’s credited on this book; though I’ve never seen the “h” in his name before] Sfar and Lewis Trondheim. In this case, the first story, “John-John the Terror,” has art by Mazan while the title story is illustrated by Jean-Cristophe Menu, head of the alternative comics publisher L’Association.

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Review: ‘The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch’

finch2-6975608Neil Gaiman has been too busy lately to write much for comics unless it’s an event — like 1602 or his curiously pointless Eternals miniseries — but there’s still an audience for his stories in the direct market. So what’s a poor comics publisher to do? Well, if it’s Dark Horse, what you do is get various folks to adapt Gaiman stories into comics and publish them as slim trade-paperback-sized hardcovers. So far, Michael Zulli did Creatures of the Night, John Bolton adapted Harlequin Valentine, and P. Craig Russell tackled Murder Mysteries. And now Zullis is back again for:

The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch
By Neil Gaiman, Michael Zulli, and Todd Klein
Dark Horse Books, May 2008, $13.95

Now, for most writers, “[[[The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch]]]” would be by far their longest title ever, but Gaiman is not most writers. He’s also responsible for “[[[Being An Experiment Upon Strictly Scientific Lines Assisted By Unwins LTD, Wine Merchants (Uckfield)]]]” ” [[[Forbidden Brides Of The Faceless Slaves In The Nameless House Of The Night Of Dread Desire]]],” ” [[[I Cthulhu: Or What’s A Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing In A Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47º 9′ S, Longitude 126º 43′ W)?]]],” and ” [[[Pages From A Journal Found In A Shoebox Left In A Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, And Louisville, Kentucky]]].” So “[[[Miss Finch]]]” may just be one of Gaiman’s more punchy and terse titles.

According to the Neil Gaiman Visual Bibliography — and why should we mistrust it? — “Miss Finch” is one of Gaiman’s more obscure stories, showing up in the program book for the convention Tropicon XVII and a magazine called Tales of the Unanticipated before turning up in one of his collections — though in a different one depending on which side of the Atlantic you live on.

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Manga Friday: Toto & Tokugawa

Manga Friday returns after a brief hiatus — I was on a secret mission in Darkest Florida, and unable to read manga and coherently think about them for several days — with a look at two very, very different books. We’ll start with the easier one to explain.

Toto!: The Wonderful Adventure, Vol. 1
By Yuko Osada
Del Rey Manga, May 2008, $10.95

Toto! is an adventure story about Kakashi, a boy who desperately wants to get off the small island he was born on and get out into the wide world to have adventures. (Not to do anything in particular, just to "have adventures." Manga boy-heroes are often oddly nonspecific. Kakashi’s father, similarly, was famous as "an explorer.") While somewhere there is probably a humorous manga series about a guy who keeps trying and failing to leave his hometown — come to think of it, I’d like to read something like that myself — Toto! falls into the more usual pattern, and Kakashi stows away on a blimp almost as soon as the story begins.

(Toto! is set in the indeterminate future, not an alternate history, depsite the presence of airships. It is an iron rule of alternate-history stories that every possible world but our own is completely covered in zeppelins, and I guess the same may hold true for odd, indefinite futures.)

But just getting onto the zeppelin is not nearly enough; it has been hijacked by the Man Chicken gang, who forced all of the passengers and crew to dive into the sea as they stole the airship for a quick getaway to their secret hideout. (more…)

Review: ‘The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard’

leotard-1710289Eddie Campbell has always done comics his way, without worrying about other people’s expectations or preferences — one of his two major series has been a fictionalization of his own life as a comics creator, and the other, a superficially more populist sequence about Greek gods in the modern world, was itself about storytelling more often than not. So it’s no surprise that his latest graphic novel — co-written with Dan Best — is more about telling its story than it is the story being told.

The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard
By Eddie Campbell and Dan Best
First Second, August 2008, $18.95

[[[Monsieur Leotard]]] will be published by First Second — who published Campbell’s last book, The Black Diamond Detective Agency, and have been putting together an impressive list of graphic novels for adults and younger readers for the past few years — in August, and the first thing to note is that it’s not the story the reader expects.

You see, the famous acrobat Jules Leotard lies dying of smallpox on page 12. So, we think, the book will be a series of flashbacks showing his life? No, he’s dead by the bottom of page 13, and the story moves on. So far, so very Campbell.

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Review: ‘Too Cool To Be Forgotten’ by Alex Robinson

  • Uncategorized
  • May 13, 2008

cool1-8284965We’ve all occasionally wanted to go back in time — to fix something we screwed up the first time, to relive some particular time in our lives, or just to do something differently. But would we be able to do better the second time around? Alex Robinson’s new graphic novel — coming up in July from Top Shelf — asks exactly those questions.

Too Cool To Be Forgotten
By Alex Robinson
Top Shelf, July 2008, $14,95

In 2010, Andy Wicks is coming up on his fortieth birthday — he’s married with two daughters and working as a computer technician. And, to finally stop smoking, he agrees to his wife’s suggestion to get himself hypnotized.

He closes his eyes, listens to the doctor…and wakes up in his 15-year-old body, back in 1985. He soon decides that some kind of hypnotic construct — though he never internalizes that thought, or really acts as if it’s true — and that the whole scenario is designed to make him decide not to have his first cigarette, and thus stop smoking back up in his own time.

Now, I am a former science fiction editor, so I probably think about this stuff more than most people, but Andy never seems to really think through his situation, or quite decide how old he is. He never really thinks of himself as a 15-year-old; his self-image stays solidly middle-aged. But he also doesn’t think through the consequences of that — he thinks of other high-school students, who are exactly the same age he is, as “kids.”

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