Author: Andrew Wheeler

Review: ‘Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow’

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  • April 26, 2008

Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow
By James Sturm & Rich Tommaso
Jump at the Sun/Hyperion, 2007, $16.99

This is a profoundly worthy book — produced under the asupices of The Center for Cartoon Studies, by two respected, serious modern cartoonists, published by the premier imprint for African-American children’s books, and about possibly the greatest pitcher in the history of baseball. Luckily, it’s not as dry and dull as that might make it sound.

It’s not really a biography of the great pitcher [[[Satchel Paige]]], though it looks like one — it follows the life and very abbreviated Negro Leagues baseball career of an Alabama man named Emmet. (His last name isn’t revealed.) Emmet faced Paige in one of his first at-bats for the Memphis Red Sox, but broke his leg in stealing home — he made the run, but lost his career. Emmet’s life intersects Paige’s again, much later, but he also follows Paige’s career, and compares it to his wn life along the way.

Satchel Paige opens with Emmet’s fateful at-bat against Paige, and then moves on from there, with a few vignettes of Emmet’s life from the late twenties to the early forties. Emmet’s a sharecropper, a poor man in a poor part of the world, and moderately oppressed by the local white landowners. (His son is beaten once, and we see the aftermath of one lynching, but Emmet himself kowtows enough to keep himself and his family safe. Perhaps the correct word for his condition is “terrorized.”) The book makes it clear that those white landowners own everything — at one point Emmet thinks “walkin’ out your door is trespassing if they choose to call it that.”

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Manga Friday: Shoulder-a-Coffin!

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  • April 25, 2008

This week, Manga Friday applies its lazer-like eye to one and only one book – luckily, this one is weird and confusing enough for any five regular volumes…

Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro, Vol. 1
By Satoko Kiyuduki
Yen Press, May 2008, $10.99

Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro is one of the few manga series I’ve seen with extensive color: about a half-dozen times in the first half of this book, a story begins with at least two pages in full color. That slows down as the book goes on, so I suspect this is done in Japan to launch “big” new series with a splash.

(I should also note that this probably hasn’t quite hit stores yet — the publication date is officially "May," which means it’s probably on trucks whizzing across North America right now. And "May" covers quite a bit of time, too.)

And, for those of us who have managed to train our eyes to read manga “backwards,” and have gotten moderately adept at that, Kuro throws us another curveball: it’s in 4-koma (four panel) style, so each page reads straight down the right-hand column and then straight down the left-hand column…unless one of the top tiers has a panel stretching across the page, in which case I have to read all the panels several different ways before I’m sure how it’s meant to go. Your mileage may vary, but do expect at least a few pages for your eyeballs to reboot on the new operating system.

And then, once I’d figured out how to physically read Kuro, I still had to work out what was going on. And that wasn’t easy, either. Kuro is the girl on the cover – she’s dressed up like a boy, and talks like a boy — so says the explanation; this may be clearer in Japanese — and thus people tend to assume she’s male. She’s also carrying a coffin, and refuses to explain exactly why. (It’s more likely to be for her than for whatever she’s looking for, though — that much is clear.) (more…)

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Review: Chris Ware’s ‘ACME Novelty Library, Vol. 18’

acme1-7237097ACME Novelty Library, Vol. 18
By Chris Ware
Drawn & Quarterly, 2007, $18.95

My friend and former colleague James Nicoll once said “Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.” For me, Chris Ware fills the same function – Ware’s work is almost terminally depressing, but executed with such craft and skill that it’s impossible to look away.

This edition of [[[ACME Novelty Library]]] continues Ware’s current graphic novel, “Building Stories” – at least, that’s what this has been called before; there’s no page with that or any other title in this book – with a series of interconnected short stories about an unnamed woman who lives on the top floor of that apartment building. (Parts of this volume also appeared in The New York Times Magazine in 2007 as part of their cruelly-misnamed “Funny Papers” feature – Ware might have been the most bleak thing in that comics space so far, but all of it has been serious, most of it has been dour and none of it has been funny.)

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Review: ‘Fantasy Classics’ edited by Tom Pomplun

fantasy3-7944618Fantasy Classics: Graphic Classics Vol. 15
Edited by Tom Pomplun
Eureka Productions, 2008, $11.95

The “[[[Graphic Classics]]]” series most of the time sticks to a single author per volume, but not always – they’ve had [[[Horror Classics]]], [[[Adventure Classics]]], and [[[Gothic Classics]]] already, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more along those lines. (There’s no one chomping at the bit for a full volume of Sax Rohmer or Anne Radcliffe, for example, and it’s also a way to do more Poe or Lovecraft without doing a full-fledged “volume two.”) 

[[[Fantasy Classics]]] has two long adaptations – of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and of H.P. Lovecraft’s “[[[The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath]]]” – that each take up about a third of the book, and some shorter pieces that fill up the rest. They’re all fantasy, as advertised, but they’re very different kids of fantasy from each other – many, in fact, consider [[[Frankenstein]]] to be science fiction, indeed the ur-SF novel – and none of them are much like what’s mostly found in the “Fantasy” section of a bookstore. There are no Tolkienesque elves or post-[[[Buffy]]] vampire lover/killers here.

The book leads off with a single-page adaptation of Lord Dunsany’s “After the Fire” by Rachel Masilamani; it’s fine for what it is, but basically a vignette.

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Review: ‘J. Edgar Hoover’ by Rick Geary

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  • April 21, 2008

J. Edgar Hoover: A Graphic Biography
By Rick Geary
Hill & Wang/Serious Comics, 2008, $16.95

Rick Geary has spent the last decade quietly turning himself into America’s most prolific and accomplished historical cartoonist, primarily with his long sequence of “[[[A Treasury of Victorian Murder]]].” (If I were Larry Gonick, I’d be very careful crossing the street, knowing someone so accomplished, so talented, so close in the alphabet, and so well-versed in murder methods was out there.) But with [[[J. Edgar Hoover]]] Geary branches out slightly – he’s still within the world of crime and criminals, but he’s on the side of the “good guys” (more or less) and telling one life story instead of focusing on a particular crime.

Hoover was an exceptionally divisive figure throughout most of his life: loved by the law ‘n order crowd and loathed by those he spied on (which was nearly everyone to the left of Spiro Agnew). These days, though, I’d guess Hoover is mostly thought of as a quaint figure – the supposedly cross-dressing boogey man of someone else’s youth.

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Manga Friday: Plight of the Themeless

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  • April 18, 2008

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Here’s the manga I read this week (no, seriously, that’s the only thing they have in common) –

Kaze no Hana, Vol. 1
By Ushio Mizta and Akitoski Ohta
Yen Press, 2008, $10.99

Momoka Futami is just your normal teenaged manga heroine – an amnesiac orphan who’s coming to live with her unknown family four years after the mysterious death of her parents. Oh, and she learns that she’s the rightful wielder of one of eight ancient magical swords that are need to keep back various monsters that regularly pop into existence in this town.

Kaze no Hana has a lot of characters, and they’re all related to each other somehow, and most of them have magical swords, and…it just turned into a Russian novel in my head, with the added problem that I couldn’t even keep some of them straight visually. (This is mostly my problem; they don’t look identical, but they’re different in manga ways rather than Western ways, which means I can’t tell people apart unless they’re in the same panel and I can compare them directly.)

So, um, Kaze no Hana is complex and interesting, but it made my head hurt, OK? And I really don’t need that from a comic about the secret family of people that kill monsters – I can get secret families killing monsters in a dozen places without any headaches.

Your mileage may vary…

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Review: Three More Books for Kids

Here are three more graphic novels for readers of varied ages, gathered together for no better reason than because I read them all recently:

Gumby Collected #1
By Bob Burden, Rick Geary, & Steve Oliff
Wildcard Ink, 2007, $12.95

Bob Burden’s connection with Gumby goes back twenty years, to the great [[[Summer Fun Special of 1988]]] (illustrated by Art Adams), and he’s pretty much the dream writer for a modern Gumby comic. (Although Steve Purcell, writer of the equally-great Gumby Winter Fun Special, did a damn good job as well.)

But the idea that a big media creation – even an old and quirky one like Gumby – would actually end up being written by an oddball outsider like Burden, instead of some safe writer of corporate comics, is…well, it’s as unlikely as any Bob Burden story, which I guess makes it doubly appropriate.

This trade paperback – which has an ISBN and price only on the inside front cover, tucked away like an afterthought, so it may be difficult to track down – collects the first three issues of what is supposed to be an ongoing Gumby series. (It’s been late regularly, though, so it’s anybody’s guess how long it will continue. But this book came out, and that’s more 21st century Gumby comics than I ever would have expected to begin with.)

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Review: Three Pieces of Middle

These three books have almost nothing in common – they’re from three different publishers, in entirely different genres, and by very different creators. But they all are middle chapters in long-running series, so they raise similar questions about maintaining interest in a serialized story – when the beginning was years ago, and there’s no real end in sight, either, what makes this piece of the story special? (Besides the fact that it’s printed on nice paper and shoved between cardboard covers.)

exmachina-621-7885143Ex Machina, Vol. 6: Power Down
By Brian K. Vaughan, Tony Harris, Jim Clark, and JD Mettler
DC Comics/Wildstorm, 2008, $12.99

Ex Machina gets to go first, since it’s the shortest and it’s also the closest to the beginning of the series. (Both in that it’s volume 6 and because all of the [[[Ex Machina]]] collections are so short – this one collects issues 26 to 29 of the series, so we’re only into the third year of publication.) The premise is still the same – an unknown artifact/item gave then-civil engineer Mitchell Hundred the power to hear and command all kinds of machines, which he used to first become a costumed superhero (stopping the second plane on 9-11, among other things) and then successfully ran for mayor in the delayed election of 2001-2002.

This storyline begins in the summer of 2003, and provides a secret-historical reason for the blackout of that year. (This is too cute a touch for my taste – Hundred’s world is different enough from our own that this “explanation” couldn’t be true in our real world, and so the fact that both worlds had identical-seeming massive blackouts, on the same day, from different causes, stretches suspension of disbelief much too far.)

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Review: ‘Tônoharu, Part One’ by Lars Martinson

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Tonoharu: Part One
By Lars Martinson
Pliant Press/Top Shelf, 2008, $19.95

This is another one of those books where it would be dangerous to assume too much, but it’s so tempting to do so. Martinson is a young American cartoonist who “lived and worked in southern Japan as an English teacher for three years.” The main character of this book, Dan, is a new English teacher in the Japanese town ofTônoharu. To make it even more complicated, [[[Tônoharu]]] has a prologue from the point of view of another English teacher in Tônoharu, Dan’s successor, who may or may not be Martinson. From the prologue, we already know than Dan will only last a year in Tônoharu, and that he’ll go home with “that ever-present look of defeat on his face.”

We also know that Dan’s unnamed successor isn’t particularly happy with his life in Tônoharu – the prologue sees him wrestling with the choice of staying for a second year, or bailing out – and the beginning of Dan’s story shows his unnamed predecessor leaving Japan after only a year, along with the predecessor’s only friend, another American teacher. So what is it about Tônoharu – or about Japan in general – that burns out and drives away Americans?

The main part of the story shows Dan feeling isolated and cut off from Japanese society, but he also doesn’t seem to be making much of an effort to connect to it. He has long periods of idleness at the school, which he’s supposed to use to prepare for class, but his language skills don’t get any better, and he’s always badly prepared. He doesn’t have much of a life in Tônoharu, but it’s hard to tell why that is – he says, at one point, that his hobbies are watching TV and sleeping, and he’s apparently honest about that. Honestly, he doesn’t seem to do anything, or to want to do anything in particular – he just wants not to be doing whatever he is doing.

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Review: ‘Paul Goes Fishing’ by Michel Rabagliati

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Paul Goes Fishing
By Michel Ragabliati
Drawn & Quarterly, 2008, $19.95

[[[Paul Goes Fishing]]] is the fourth in a series of semi-autobiographical graphic novels by an illustrator-turned-cartoonist from Montreal named Michel, about an illustrator-turned-cartoonist from Montreal named Paul.

Nosy Parkers, such as myself, will immediately start wondering just how “semi” this autobiography is. Paul and Michel are about the same age, in the same line of work, from the same city, and have the same family details (a wife and one daughter). On the other hand, these semi-autobiographical cartoonists are sneaky – and someone like Ragabliati could also easily have just done a pure autobio comic (there’s no shortage of those). So I’ll refrain from assuming that anything about “Paul” is also true of Rabagliati.

Like the other “[[[Paul]]]” books, Goes Fishing wanders through Paul’s past, with some scenes set when Paul was young (mostly when he’s fifteen and so frustrated with his life that he tries to run away) and some when he’s an adult (mostly in the mid-90s). There’s some narration, in the voice of a contemporary Paul, to organize it all, and explain when each scene is taking place, but the structure is quite fluid, with scenes flowing according to memory or other connections than along purely chronological lines.

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