Author: Andrew Wheeler

Manga Friday: Out of the Past

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  • November 9, 2007

This week, Manga Friday heads into the past…sort of. I picked up the first volume of two extremely popular manga series, to see what they’re all about. But we’ll start with something even less likely.

Siku is the pseudonym for a British cartoonist of Nigerian heritage who’s worked extensively in the British comics industry for the last ten years, including the obligatory stint on Judge Dredd. But he’s done something very different now – a book called The Manga Bible. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a retelling of the entire Christian Bible, in a manga-influenced art style, in two hundred pages. The script was written by Akin Akinsiku, another Nigerian-British comics creator, and there’s a lot of script.

Now, I’ve read Bible comics before. (You might not know this, but your humble Manga Friday correspondent won his church’s Bible Olympics two straight years back in his ill-spent youth.) There was a set of ten or so books that I particularly remember from that time, which adapted the entire bible, one chunk per book. And even those comics were pretty wordy – folks in the Bible tend to talk a lot (even with a New International Version translation, like the Manga Bible uses), and descriptive captions are often required to explain what’s going on and who all of these people are.

The Manga Bible is extremely wordy; each page is nearly covered in captions and dialogue balloons, to the detriment of the art. Yes, the characters are drawn in a manga-influenced style, but the storytelling doesn’t owe much to manga at all. It’s exceptionally compressed, like an early ‘60s Superman story, without the expansiveness and flowing layouts of real manga. The art is eye-catching, though not so stylized as to appear completely alien to American eyes. So it’s a shame that it’s so cramped, shoved into small panels by the relentless flow of words, words, words. (more…)

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Life, in Pictures — Review

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  • November 8, 2007

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OK, so you all know Will Eisner is a genius of comics – inventor of The Spirit, possibe coiner of the “graphic novel” term, namesake of awards, grandfather of every autobio cartoonist of the last three decades – right? But how many of you have actually read his stuff recently?

(Or is it just me – am I the only one who had spent more time reading about Eisner than actually reading his works?)

Eisner, at the end of his life (he died in early 2005), made a deal for much of his extensive backlist to be republished by the very classy – and previous not open to comics – publisher W.W. Norton. They published his last graphic novel, the not entirely successful The Plot, are in the process of reprinting many of his works, and, in particular, assembled three big omnibuses of Eisner’s best stories. The Contract With God Trilogy came out in early 2006, Will Eisner’s New York in late 2006, and now Life, in Pictures collects three of his most autobiographical graphic novels (and a couple of shorter stories).

Eisner was born in 1917, and turned back to comics after his retirement in the mid-‘70s, so it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s something old-fashioned about his stories. But yet these stories are so relentlessly old-fashioned, and so steeped in a New York that was obsolete before I was born, that it needs to be noted. (The story set the closest to modern times in Life, in Pictures is the earliest story, “A Sunset in Sunshine City,” set roughly contemporaneous to its 1985 publication. Other than that, the stories here reach up to WW II at best – and, then, only at the very end of a long story.

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Manga Friday: Superpowers

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  • November 2, 2007

alice-2476961Only two books for Manga Friday this week; the deadline crept up on me and found me with a smaller “read” pile than I expected. But they’re both pretty good, and both are brand-new, which may make up for it.

First is Alice on Deadlines, which is the first time I’ve hit a concentrated dose of that Japanese-comics staple, the panty shot. Lapan is a Shingami — essentially an angel of death, or one of a legion of Grim Reapers, or something in that line of work. He and his co-workers travel to Earth to bring back dead souls who don’t come on their own, which sometimes requires a lot of “persuasion.” Lapan is also a fine example of that stock manga character, the horny creep. (We first see him absorbed in a dirty magazine at his desk.)

And, on the other side, Alice is a voluptuous young woman — presumably in high school. She’s terribly normal and average, except for being gorgeous (and it looks like all the other students of her all-girls school are also gorgeous).

Due to a mix-up, Lapan ends up in Alice’s body instead of the skeleton he was supposed to inhabit. And Alice is bounced into the skeleton. Wacky hijinks ensue, mostly involving Lapan-in-Alice’s-body trying to find a quiet place to fondle himself, and falling all over the other students. Along the way, the two of them do manage to take care of a few shishibitos (souls that cling to life instead of moving on, and which sometimes manifest magical abilities).

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The Legend of Grimjack, Vol. 8: Review

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  • October 30, 2007

Yes, we’ve hit the point where reprints of medium-level ‘80s comics can run to eight volumes – and, since the comic in question is GrimJack, that is perfectly dandy with me. Since GrimJack was gone for a good decade (before the recent Killer Instinct miniseries, and, of course, these trade paperback reprints), I suspect that some of you might not know what the man and his world.

Well, let me quote myself to bring you up to speed:

John Gaunt, aka GrimJack, is a cop/secret agent/PI in an aggressively multi-dimensional (and arbitrarily immense) city, and he walks down those mean streets, yadda yadda yadda. It’s hard-boiled fantasy adventure, in a setting where anything can pop up and probably will. Everybody betrays everybody (especially the dames), and everybody but our hero is corrupt as all hell. This is the kind of comic that the comics world thinks of as being vastly different from superheroes, even though John Gaunt:

  • wears the same clothes all the time, which instantly identify him
  • saves people (and the world) regularly
  • has what amounts to a codename
  • has a couple of similar friends who he "teams up" with on occasion
  • appears in 4-color pamphlet form

This volume reprints issues 47 to 54, right in the middle of the 81-issue run, with stories that originally saw print at the end of the ‘80s. Most of this book consists of the end of a long storyline that started in the comics collected in Volume 6 and saw John Gaunt killed and resurrected, among other changes. That big storyline (which doesn’t seem to have an official name) had kicked off when Tom Mandrake took over penciling this series, which was the first time he and Ostrander worked together extensively. (They would later rack up long, successful runs on Spectre and other series at DC.) (more…)

Hellboy, Vol. 7: The Troll Witch and Others — Review

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  • October 29, 2007

This is another one of the periodic clean-up volumes to collect shorter Hellboy stories – like The Chained Coffin & Others (volume 3) and The Right Hand of Doom (volume 4). Shorter doesn’t necessarily mean less interesting, but these aren’t stories that advance the Hellboy mythos or continue his main story – they’re all set in his past (from 1958 through 1993, up until about the time of the first major Hellboy storyline, Seed of Destruction) and mostly feature retold bits of folklore or tales.

The most substantial work here is Makoma, a two issue series written by Mignola and with art mostly by Richard Corben (inside a Mignola framing story). It’s a little odd to see Hellboy drawn by someone else – Mignola has let other hands illustrate the B.P.R.D. stories, usually Guy Davis, but this was the first Mignola Hellboy story of any length illustrated by someone else. Makoma retells an African folktale – of the “series of trials of the hero” variety – with Hellboy taking the place, and name, of the original hero. Corben’s people are less stylized and fleshy than they sometimes are, which suits my tastes, but it might feel like lesser Corben to those who prefer him at his most distinctive. The story itself is pretty straightforward, and adapts well to Hellboy – Makoma also was the kind of hero who walked up to giant monsters and started hitting them until they either died or gave up – though it’s fairly thin. (more…)

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Del Rey Manga Round-Up, Part Two

  • Uncategorized
  • October 26, 2007

Welcome to the second week of Manga Round-Up! This time, we have four more books from [[[Del Rey Manga]]] – all first volumes in series, as new-reader-friendly as it’s possible to be – which are aimed at a slightly older audience (sixteen and up) than the books I looked at last week.

And you know what “older audience means,” don’t you? That’s right – gore! (Did you think I was going to say “sex?” That’s the 18+ manga, which none of the publishers have sent me yet.)

Leading off the parade of blood-spattered stories is Hitohi Iwaaki’s Parasyte, in which alien spores drift down to Earth and creep into people’s ears to eat their brains. The parasites, who have no name for themselves – no culture or language of any kind, actually – then eat other humans, in very violent ways. It’s hinted that this is possibly a reaction by someone or something to save the Earth from us horrible humans. (But only hinted, at the beginning, and not brought up again.)

Our viewpoint character is a teenage boy named Shin, saved from having his brain eaten because he had his earbuds in while he was sleeping. (Possible life lesson #1: never, ever stop listening to music. Possible life lesson #2: don’t sleep on the floor, as the Japanese do.) Unfortunately, the parasite still got into his body – it just took over his hand instead. Shin names the parasite Migi (since it is his right hand, and that’s the Japanese word for “right”), and tries to live with it. But the parasites are utterly amoral and protective of their secrecy, so the mere fact that Shin knows they exist means that other parasites (the ones that ate brains, and so control whole bodies) want to kill him as soon as they learn about him. And getting along with an amoral, alien right hand that can transform instantly into whirring engines of death is not easy.

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Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography review

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  • October 25, 2007

Charles Schulz‘s life is already turning into a legend, in large part because he did the one thing a man can rarely control: he died perfectly, at the precise right time and place. Late in the night before his final Peanuts strip would appear in newspapers, on February 12, 2000, Schulz slipped into immortality.
 
On the other hand, he was close to immortal already; Peanuts was one of the biggest comic strips in this history of the medium, one of the largest licensing empires in the world, and one of the most beloved set of characters in the USA. And, since Schulz famously wrote every word and drew every line of the 17,897 strips from 1950 through 2000, it was purely his own achievement. Snoopy sheets would never have been big business if kids hadn’t already loved Snoopy, and they never would have loved Snoopy without Schulz. It’s difficult to overestimate what Schulz meant to cartooning over the past fifty years: he reshaped the newspaper strip in his image, brought a new tone and style to public discourse, and was hugely influential far beyond the bounds of the newspaper page.
 
And now, seven years after Schulz died, comes the first full-scale biography of the man who changed the face of newspaper comics forever. (more…)

House of Clay: Review

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  • October 24, 2007

Naomi Nowak is a cartoonist resident in Sweden, of Hungarian-Polish ancestry, and presumably works in English, since this book doesn’t credit a translator. She is thus more cosmopolitan than most of us ever dream of being. This is her second graphic novel, after Unholy Kinship (which I haven’t seen).

My first impression is that Nowak must be influenced by P. Craig Russell and by manga – there are a lot of flowing layouts following ideas rather than action, and the delicacy of the figures and the flamboyance of some of the drawing is very reminiscent of Russell. But, given that she’s European, those may or may not be trustworthy comparisons. I can’t be sure what Nowak’s real influences are, but — looking at House of Clay — I do see what looks like a lot of manga and Russell in its DNA.

House of Clay has an atmosphere of unreality about it; Nowak’s style keeps the story from ever feeling completely real — it’s more like a fever dream or a retold legend. This is the story of one young woman, but it’s also a more primal story, an archetype, of all young women everywhere. (more…)

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Postcards edited by Jason Rodriguez

Everyone has a story – at least one. Every human life could be told in some way, to illustrate a point, or evoke an emotion, or just entertain an audience. Postcards attempts to tell some of those stories, or to create stories based on tiny pieces of real people’s lives, almost randomly – to invent stories out of the smallest of seeds.

Jason Rodriguez, author of the Harvey-nominated Elk’s Run, gathered up a bunch of vintage postcards, sent them to various artist-writer teams he knew, and asked for comics about the people who sent the postcards. In theory, it’s a great idea. (Of course, everything is wonderful in theory.) In practice, this particular collection of postcard-inspired stories are nearly all sad, depressing tales, and the relentless one-note gloom keeps any of the stories from really standing out. It’s not clear whether Rodriguez’s instructions were responsible for this, of if the choice of creators led to the unremitting bleakness, or if it was just bad luck. Rodriguez’s prefaratory notes to each story do make him seem like a micro-manager, though, with explanations that he gave this postcard to this person expecting X, and that he was sure another artist would be just right for another postcard because of Y.

(more…)

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Graphic Novel Review: Del Rey Manga Round-Up, Part One

shugo1-8375909Let me be honest: I don’t know all that much about manga. I’ve read a few series (going back to Area 88 and Kamui, twenty years ago during the first attempt to bring manga to the US), but I’ve never really gone really deeply into the field. Well, I’m hoping to remedy that now. I’ve got a big pile of first volumes of various manga series, and I’ll be doing weekly reviews of about four of them at a time. (I’m aiming for Fridays; let’s see if I can hold to that schedule.)

We’ll start off with some books from Del Rey (all originally published by Kodasha in Japan), mostly aimed at young teenagers. (At least, all but one of these is marked “Teen: 13+,” but, from the content, I suspect the real Japanese readership, and possibly the American readership as well, is tweens to young teens.) This week’s batch also are primarily aimed at girls — I think.

First up is Shugo Chara!, which translates roughly to “Guardian Characters.” It’s by two women who work under the name Peach-Pit, and it’s about a fourth grader who discovers three eggs in her bed one morning.

Okay, I have to back up already. Amu, our heroine, is explicitly in fourth grade — we’re told that several times — though the structure of the school, and the maturity of the characters, would seem to put them more naturally in middle school. (Trust me; I’m the father of a fourth grader.) And, from an American perspective, it’s really bizarre that a story about fourth graders would be marketed to teens – or even tweens, as I suspect is actually the case here. In the US, kids generally only want to read about other kids their own age (maybe) or, preferably, a few years older. Fourth and fifth graders read stories about middle schoolers, middle schoolers read Sweet Valley High and the like, and high school students either stop reading for pleasure entirely or read stories about people in their twenties. Maybe, like so much else, that’s different in Japan – there is the well-known love of the small and cute there

(more…)

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