Author: Andrew Wheeler

The Art of Bryan Talbot Review

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  • December 27, 2007

There are plenty of comics writers and artists (and combinations thereof) who have never been fashionable, but who do good, interesting work, and even dive in and out of “mainstream” comics as they go. I’m thinking about people like P. Craig Russell, Eddie Campbell, and – most to the point right now – Bryan Talbot. They mostly keep control of their own work, so they never end up as fan favorites for their run on Ultra Punching Dude, but, as consolation, they do get to do their stories their way.

The Art of Bryan Talbot is a 96-page album-sized softcover, with text by Talbot and a short introduction by Neil Gaiman, which traces Talbot’s varied career. After the requisite page of juvenilia, the book moves into Talbot’s first published comics, the “Chester P. Hackenbush” stories in his Brainstorm comic of the mid-‘70s. It all looks very late-underground; interesting but clearly at the far, tired end of a movement.

After that, Talbot’s career goes all over the place, with stints on “Judge Dredd” and “Nemesis the Warlock” for 2000 AD, a pile of art about the singer Adam Ant, some random minor comics projects, and posters/pin-ups on musical and SFnal themes. Talbot refers to himself as a “jobbing illustrator” at one point, and that describes his work in this section. It’s all technically well done, and the pieces are generally excellent for what they are, but they’re extremely various. (Also around this part of the book is a longish section of life drawings Talbot did for a class in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Pencil life drawings are great for an artist’s development, but can be slightly less compelling in the middle of a book of ink and color comics art. They really don’t seem to mesh with the other pieces of art surrounding them.) (more…)

Exit Wounds Review

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  • December 26, 2007

Here’s another example of how international the world of comics is – a nearly two-hundred page graphic novel by an Israeli writer/artist little-known here. It’s published on this continent by Drawn & Quarterly, a smaller publisher from Montreal that specializes in stories that don’t have people flying around in their underwear.

Koby Franco is a cab driver in Tel Aviv, a young man whose mother died a few years back and whose father Gabriel has been out of touch nearly as long. A female soldier, Numi, gets in touch with him to tell him that she thinks his father was killed in a bombing the month before. There was one body left unidentified, and Numi saw a scarf she knitted for Gabriel lying on the street during the TV coverage.

Koby and Numi investigate, tracing the unidentified body from the morgue to a “John Doe” grave and back to the blast site. Along the way, Koby learns things he didn’t expect about his father – not to mention about Numi and himself. (more…)

Manga Friday: In Medias Res

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  • December 21, 2007

We all want to get on the ground floor, but that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes, we find ourselves walking into a movie two reels in, munching popcorn and whispering to each other “And who is that guy?” In honor of those confused moments in all of our lives, this week Manga Friday read Book Two in a short stack of manga series, and tried to figure out what the heck was going on.

First off is Spiral: The Bounds of Reasoning. The division into volumes is a bit odd here, since the first section of Vol. 2 is the third and final part of a locked-room mystery. So we get that old-fashioned mystery-plot staple: the detective explaining everything and talking at great length to all of the characters, who wonder why he’s gathered them all there. It’s very talky, of course – that’s the whole point of that kind of exercise – but it summarizes the first two parts of this particular story well enough for me to understand the ending.

After that are two one-part stories and then a two-parter, which explain a bit more about the premise, and expand out the cast a bit. The detective from the first story is a teenager named Ayumu Narumi, and he’s the other stereotyped manga teen boy: the uber-competent whiz kid (as opposed to the amiable slacker – no manga teens that I’ve seen are just pretty good at a couple of things). He’s both a deductive genius and a world-class pianist, but is tortured because he’s not as good at either of those things as his older brother, who disappeared mysteriously (swell ominous music).

The antagonists are a group called the Blade Children; we don’t learn all that much about them in this book, but they all are missing one rib (surgically removed in early childhood), are even more tormented than Ayumu (and linked to him and/or his brother somehow), and possibly have some kind of secret over-arching plan. Two major Blade Children are introduced in this book: Eyes Rutherford, the goth-y English teenage piano sensation (the world within a manga is a deeply silly place, sometimes, full of people named “Eyes”), and the sneaky, monologuing Kousuke Asazuki. I’m not entirely sure if they’re supposed to be villains, per se, which might explain why they’re not terribly frightening – or comprehensible. All in all, I could follow the main plot of Spiral, but the first volume might have explained the point of it all in a way that I really needed. (more…)

The Art of Bone Review

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  • December 17, 2007

The first thing I should mention is that, although this book is credited to Jeff Smith, it doesn’t seem to have been written by him. I think the text in it – aside from a stilted introduction by Lucy Shelton Caswell, curator of the Ohio State Cartoon Research Library – was actually written by the editor, Diana Schutz, but the book itself doesn’t actually say. The text talks about Smith in the third person, and doesn’t show any strong connection to his personal thoughts, so it certainly looks like it was written by someone else.

But no one reads a book like this for the text: the pictures are the main draw, and this is full of pictures. Over two hundred large, well-designed and cleanly printed pages showcase lots of Smith’s Bone art, from early sketches to final color work. The text tends to be descriptive – dating particular pieces, or explaining where in the process they were created – rather than more discursive.

The Art of Bone begins with a 1970ish comic from a very young Smith, in which a very Carl Barks-ian Fone and Phoney Bone have an adventure trying to retrieve a lost gem. (This is clearly juvenilia, but has some cute touches, such as a “title wave” which is not a misspelling.) There are a few other bits from the prehistory of Bone as well, such as a few strips from the Thorn comic Smith drew for Ohio State’s Lantern daily paper. (I’d love to see a full collection of these; the art is clearly professional quality, and the fact that he re-used a lot of the plot in Bone proper is no longer a big problem, since Bone is complete.)

(more…)

Manga Friday: Miki Falls

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  • December 14, 2007

miki-spring-2228449Mark Crilley has been influenced by Japan before: his best-known work, the long all-ages Akiko series, is about a Japanese girl who has various adventures on alien worlds, and various elements of Japanese culture found their way into that book. But Akiko was still clearly a Western comic by a Western creator.

Miki Falls, on the other hand, is a deliberate attempt at what’s called an "OEL Manga" – something that follows many of the conventions of Japanese comics but was written as an Original English Language work. Crilley doesn’t draw his book backwards – wisely, I think, since if it can be difficult for a reader to switch orientation, I can only imagine how difficult it would be for a creator to do so – but it’s otherwise a very manga-influenced work. And so I’m looking at it this week as our "Manga Friday" feature.

Miki is just starting her senior year of high school in a fairly rural area of Japan. She’s determined to be really herself during this new year – not to go along with other people because it’s easier. (This seems to be a common desire for manga protagonists, possibly – he said, putting on his armchair group psychologist hat – because Japan is such a homogenous, conformist society.) But, since this is a manga story – and, to be less culturally specific, because it is a story about a teenage girl, and mostly written for other teenage girls – she meets a boy. A new boy in school. A mysterious, attractive, fascinating, keeps-to-himself boy. A boy named Hiro Sakurai.

Miki tells herself that she’s not falling in love with Hiro, but of course she is. And of course he’s utterly aloof, ignoring her – and everyone else in the school – at all times. Spring is the story of their meeting, and Miki’s budding love-hate relationship with Hiro (love him because he’s a dreamy boy, hate him because he won’t even look at her). At the end, we learn the secret, very manga-esque, reason why Hiro must hold himself aloof from all love…nay! from any normal human emotion! (Oops. I’m channeling Stan Lee there. That’s not a specific hint, but Miki and Hiro’s relationship does have aspects very familiar to Western comics readers, with a large helping of angst.)

(more…)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier Review

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  • December 12, 2007

Ambition, all by itself, is neither good nor bad. The greatest artistic works wouldn’t exist without vast reservoirs of ambition, but ambition by itself doesn’t guarantee anything. Even ambition combined with proven ability isn’t necessarily successful. And just because one work by a particular creator (or creators) was transcendently wonderful, that doesn’t mean the next related work will be equally so.

And that brings us to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, which, I’m sad to say, is pretty much the Tom Sawyer, Abroad of our day – a book that should have been something really special, given its predecessors’ pedigree, but which instead is self-indulgent and shows signs of existing purely because of contractual reasons.

But let me back up. There have been two League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stories so far, both of which were excellent pulpish adventure, homages to writer Alan Moore’s favorite British stories from the turn of the last century. There was something of a tendency to paint the lily even there, though – to cram in references every which way, to show either how smart Moore was or how much genre fiction he had read. But the references were only rarely important to those two stories, and the times they were – the revelation of the first “M,” for example – they were very obvious references, which nearly every reader of the comic would grasp quickly. Neither of the first two League stories was great literature, but they were excellent adventure stories, though they did imply that Moore took old pulpy stories more seriously than perhaps he should.

Black Dossier is not the third major League story; that’s still to come, in a year or three, from a different publisher in an unlikely format. It’s instead a weird hybrid of story and background, with a League story set in the 1950s wrapped around a collection of documents from the past of that history; those documents, of course, comprise the titular dossier. In the frame story, a young blonde couple steal the dossier and run away with it, pursued by nastier fictional characters. To understand the villains, the reader must recognize James Bond (not too difficult), remember Harry Lime (somewhat tougher), and have some idea who Bulldog Drummond is (exceptionally difficult). (more…)

Shh! Reviews of two Wordless GNs for all ages

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  • December 11, 2007

These two books were both published as graphic novels for younger readers, by very different publishing houses – Owly comes from the small, quirky comics-oriented press Top Shelf, while The Arrival is a rare graphic novel from the childrens’ publishing juggernaut Scholastic – and they have interestingly different reasons for being wordless.

Owly is more obviously for kids; it’s drawn in a somewhat fussy comic-book approximation of a clean-lined animation style, with big eyes and heads on small bodies. The characters, with the possible exception of a friendly storekeeper, are all clearly meant to be kid-equivalents; this is a world like Arnold Lobel’s “Frog & Toad” stories where pseudo-children live on their own and deal with kid-sized issues themselves. It’s pretty obviously wordless so that even kids who can’t read yet can follow the story. (Talking about wordless comics can cause troubles with explaining just what “reading” means in a particular case – there are a lot of kids who can “read” the Owly books even though they can’t decode words in English yet.)

In the first three books, our main character, Owly, has made friends with a worm (Wormy – not Dave Trampier’s character, though), a snail, a butterfly, and what I think is a chipmunk (or maybe a field mouse). The stories are all about friendship: learning to trust each other and to make friends with creatures that you suspect might want to eat you. Since these characters are all in a sweet all-ages comics story, everything works out fine, but I do have to wonder about the lesson. (Or maybe this is exactly the lesson kids need right now, since they already get way too much of the opposite lesson: to hate and fear anything unexpected, strange, or different.)

In this book, creator Andy Runton introduces yet another character, an opossum. He, too, is scared of Owly – as an opossum should be; owls are serious predators, and real-world owls are probably the scariest, nastiest things these kind of small animals will ever know. (If Owly runs much longer, Runton’s reliance on the introduce-a-new-character-who’s-scared-of-Owly plot could cause trouble; it’s hard to have a large cast in a book where no one speaks or has names in the main story.) Everything works out well in the end, of course, though it gets a bit weepy along the way. Some kids who are physically able to follow this story might find it emotionally hard to take. But, if they’ve read the first three Owly books, they’ll be expecting the friendly, happy ending.

The Owly books do have some appeal to adults, particularly mushy, sappy adults who have young children (like myself). People who exclusively read mainstream comics would probably find Owly intensely sappy; I think it’s exceptionally sweet. I like Owly and his friends, and I want to see them happy. (more…)

Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil Review

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  • December 10, 2007

The old Fawcett Captain Marvel (as opposed to all of the other Captains Marvel since him) is a character that pretty much all comics kibitzers agree should be handled with a light, semi-humorous touch, kept out of tight continuity, and allowed to be fun. But we’re usually left deploring the situation when he’s given yet another grim ‘n’ gritty makeover to be “relevant” and to shoehorn him into continuity. But Jeff Smith is on our side – as a million comics bloggers have mentioned before me – and his Captain Marvel is much closer to Otto Binder & C.C. Beck’s than it is to Judd Winick’s.

Smith spent his first decade-plus in the comics industry working on one long story – the bestselling and critically acclaimed Bone – so the first thing The Monster Society of Evil does is prove that he’s not just a one-trick pony. (It also shows, by implication, that the center of gravity of the field has still not shifted: even a massively successful independent creator, who could do anything at all for his second major project, will still have a tendency to want to work on a superhero for the Big Two, featuring a character created decades before he was born and owned by an international conglomerate.) Smith, as we all suspected, is just a good storyteller, and the odds are that he’ll have a lot more stories to tell over the next few decades.

The Monster Society of Evil is a very loose retelling of the story from Captain Marvel Adventures of the same name, serialized over more than twenty issues during World War II. (Which, incidentally, proves that it wasn’t all “Done in One” stories back in the Good Old Days – there have always been different kinds of stories.) The original story was very much a serial, like the movie serials of the day, with cliffhanger endings and escalating dangers from episode to episode. It’s a fun roller-coaster ride, but, re-reading it these days, it’s also very much of its time. (more…)

Manga Friday: Wandering Assassins

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  • December 7, 2007

gin-5066764Manga are just as full of fossilized genres as any other popular media, as I’m coming to discover. A case in point is this week’s haul: three series, all from the same publisher, all of which can be vaguely characterized as being about a wandering assassin.

OK, I’m stretching the term too far with the first book, Gin Tama. Our title character, Sakata Gintoki, is a samurai on a near-future Earth economically dominated by aliens, where carrying a sword has been outlawed. He doesn’t actually go around killing people for money – though he will kill them along the way to doing other things, if they really deserve it – but instead works various odd jobs, which tend to require violence by the end. At the beginning of the book, he picks up a sidekick, our viewpoint character, Shinpachi – who was also trained to be a samurai, but has few skills and is in the book mostly to be the reader identification character (pop-culture- and food-obsessed, slightly overweight, glasses wearing – these Japanese creators know how to pander like no one’s business). They pick up a third member of their team in the middle of this volume, but I shouldn’t give away her secrets ahead of time.

Gin Tama doesn’t take itself all that seriously; it’s clearly a historical story (set in the Meiji period, more or less) moved bodily into a SF setting, with only minor changes to make things fit. And, like a lot of comics, it’s easier to enjoy something mildly silly if it knows that it’s silly – Gin Tama is quite aware that it’s quite generic, and quite hard to believe, but it’s ready to entertain anyway. I appreciate that, even if I find the winking at the audience and obvious melodrama a bit much. This isn’t the greatest samurai comic out there, but it’s a fun samurai comic that I don’t expect will ever get terribly serious, and there’ll always be a market for that.

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Manga Friday: Girl Boy Girl

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  • November 30, 2007

There are only two books for Manga Friday this week; I promise to do better next time but the end of the week snuck up on me while I wasn’t looking. (And I didn’t really have a third book that fit so nicely with my theme, anyway.)

There have been sex comedies since the days of the ancient Greeks – every culture does them, and every culture thinks slightly different things are really funny. (I’ve mentioned the common manga shorthand horny = nosebleed before; it is impressively visual, but it can look really weird to Western eyes, particular when exaggerated.) But sex comedies tend to cluster around a few major ideas – for some cultures, it’s cuckoldry, but in most of the modern world, the major plot line is about a horny young man and one or more attractive young women. That simplifies things down enough that the standard sex comedy travels internationally better than more culturally specific kinds of comedy.

(Or maybe I’m just babbling for a while before I get into the specific bizarre plots here. Well, let’s stop wasting time.)

The set-up in Strawberry 100% is straightforward, if a bit unlikely: fifteen-year-old Junpei Manaka accidentally sees the strawberry-bedecked panties of an attractive girl in his school when she falls on him up on the school roof. (I said “straightforward,” not “makes a lot of sense.”) He immediately falls in love – or maybe lust – with this girl whose identity he’s not sure of. And then, very soon, he starts dating his gorgeous classmate Tsukasa, mostly because she tells him that she wears strawberry panties.

But we the readers strongly suspect that class brainiac (with her hair in a bun, glasses, etc. to keep her from appearing sexy) Aya is actually the panty-wearer of Junpei’s dreams – and the two of them start studying together.

So we’ve got a classic love triangle: boy is in love with girl, but not the girl he thinks he is, and is entangled with girl #1 while girl #2 is quietly crazy about him. A wonderfully serviceable plot that’s kept plays and novels and stories humming along for a few thousand years now. Kawashita doesn’t mess with the successful formula all that much, but he uses it for as many panty shots as he can squeeze in (can you blame him?) and lots of close-ups of people looking longingly at or thinking about each other. It’s not quite as madcap and zany as Love Hina, but being within the realm of reason isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Strawberry 100% is a cute sex comedy for teenagers; it’s rated for “older teenagers,” but that’s mostly because there’s sexual attraction involved. (There’s no actual nudity or violence, though it does get quite suggestive. (more…)

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