Category: Reviews

Review: Crossing Midnight, Vol. 2

The news of Mike Carey writing a fantasy/horror comic set in Japan sounded too good to be true, and when Crossing Midnight debuted more than a year ago it struggled to live up to that promise.

Carey created a deep and supernatural world to backdrop his story of mystery: Two twins, Toshi and Kai, were born on either side of midnight, leaving each with an otherworldly power and putting them at the mercy of dark forces. But Jim Fern’s stiff art and some uneven storytelling held the series back. When sales weren’t strong, the rumors of a looming cancellation kickstarted.

After the so-so showing of that first arc, I gave up on the series. But, when Vertigo sent over a copy of the second volume (the cover seen at right is from DC’s website, but isn’t the cover on the actual book), Crossing Midnight: A Map of Midnight ($14.99), I realized I just didn’t give the series enough of a chance.

The volume picks up with Toshi, the female twin, struggling as a slave under an apparently evil spirit. She must fly through Japan at night, cutting unpleasant memories from people’s dreams and collecting them for some unrevealed purpose.

Following the archetype of most stories featuring children, Toshi’s impudence puts her and others into danger as she squares off against one of death’s faces. Perhaps because of the more fantastical nature of the content in this volume, Fern’s art loosens and adeptly adapts an ethereal tone. Later, Eric Nguyen takes over on art and, if anything, is an improvement.

Meanwhile, Kai stumbles onto a group of “telephone club” girls — early teens working essentially as prostitutes — and must help save them from an evil spirit that’s on the prowl. While this storyline feels a bit tangential to the larger theme, it is easily the high point for the series. Carey clearly has strong opinions of such clubs (he denounces them in a postscript) and how deplorable it is that they operate uncensored.

It is only then that the book goes farther than dipping a toe into Japanese culture, and Carey unleashes his horror-writing instincts. Sadly, the series seemed to be finding its footing just as the rug was being pulled out from under it. As Carey wrote on his Web site, [[[Crossing Midnight]]] will be wrapped up at issue #19.

Carey wrote that he knew a cancellation might happen, and all the plot threads will be wrapped up in that final issue.

Review: ‘Confessions of a Blabbermouth’

Mike Carey is a noted writer of both comics and prose – Lucifer, The X-Men, the “[[[Felix Castor]]]” novels – but, one might ask, what does he know about being a teenage girl? Probably not a lot…but he does have a secret weapon on his side: his daughter Louise is a teenage girl, and she’s the co-writer of this particular project.

Confessions of a Blabbermouth is the most recent publication of DC Comics’ Minx arm, which aims squarely at teenage and tween girls. (You remember: the audience that never, ever would read comics, so it was no use ever trying to get them interested – no, really, it’s just not worth it…until Sailor Moon ignited the manga boom and suddenly American comics companies were sitting on the sidelines watching those girls buy billions of dollars of Japanese comics? That audience.)

I’ve reviewed Minx comics twice before for ComicMix – Re-Gifters and Clubbing last August, and The Plain Janes and Good As Lilly in September. And the book that was most successful out of those four was Re-Gifters, written by one Mike Carey (without any assistance from anyone in the target audience), so I had high hopes for [[[Blabbermouth]]].

 

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Early Review: ‘Justice League: New Frontier’

 

Like many of you out there, a bad taste was left in my mouth coming off of Superman: Doomsday, so of course I was wary of DC’s next direct-to-DVD flick. I wasn’t a huge fan of the graphic novels (Isn’t that what we call thick comic books these days?), but I am certainly a fan of the [[[Justice League]]] and its animated counterpart. 
 
I’ll start with a warning to those who aren’t totally familiar with The New Frontier and its universe, but ARE fans of the established animated DC universe: this is a whole new direction from shows like Justice League Unlimited and others, but it is full of exciting DCU fan favorites. In fact, my biggest complaint about [[[Superman: Doomsday]]] was that there were no outside DC heroes, even though they were all over the original story. But I digress.
 
Looking at the animation first, I was very pleased that Bruce Timm (main creator of the animated DCU) and Darwyn Cooke (wirter/artist of The New Frontier graphic novel) were able to find a happy medium between the already established look of the animated Justice League and the very stylized look of Cooke’s art, thought I do think the eye-slits works much better for Superman than the baby blues. The entire artistic feel practically beamed with that golden age look, which is what attracted me to the books in the first place.

 

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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.

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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

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Graphic Novel Review: Akira Club

You can tell how popular any particular media event or personage is by how many ancillary products emerge. Something really popular will metastasize into toothbrushes, sports cars, sleepwear, foodstuffs, architecture, and so on – the specifics depend on what the original piece was, and who the audience is, but the number of those products is a good guide to the popularity of its original.

Akira Club, thus, shows that Otomo Katsuhiro’s epic comics story [[[Akira]]] is at least moderately popular, at home in Japan and here in the USA. Akira was turned into a movie and had the usual small flood of licensed goods, and it was also thought worthy of a book to document all of the odds and ends – both the bits of art from the original serialization that didn’t make it into the collections, and some records of those many ancillary products.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Some Greasy Kids Stuff

 

 

dinos-6479331Today I’ve got three books that either are for kids or look like they should be, so, if any of you are allergic to greasy kids stuff, just move on to the next post.

[[[Dinosaurs Across America]]] is the new book by Phil Yeh, who has spent the last two decades promoting literacy and art across the world in various ways, including lots of comics. In fact, this book was originally a black-and-white comic that was sold at various Yeh events. It’s a quick look at all fifty states in the US, with a concentration on quick facts and learning all of the capitals. One of Yeh’s recurring characters, Patrick Rabbit, has been suckered, and a group of dinosaurs (also recurring Yeh characters) set him straight on the real facts. There’s no real story here, but it’s a great book for kids interested in state capitals or geography in general. (Or even for kids who aren’t interested in that, but need to learn some of it.)

 

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[[[Korgi]]], Book 1 is the first in what’s planned to be a series of all-ages wordless comics stories. It’s by Christian Slade, and seems to be his first major comics work. It’s cute and fun and adventurous by turns, though the wordlessness doesn’t always help with a fantasy story like this. (The dogs, such as Korgi, are obvious Special somehow, but it’s hard to convey the specifics of something like that without words.) This is perhaps pitched a bit older than Andy Runton’s [[[Owly]]] books – also wordless comics stories from Top Shelf for all ages – simply because there’s more action and suspense in Korgi. (There’s certainly nothing here I’d worry about giving to my six-year-old.) Slade uses a lot of scribbly lines for shading and tones, and – especially after reading James Sturm’s America recently – that looks a bit amateur to me. Slade is very good at it, but it does leave an impression of lots and lots of little lines all over the page; it would be interesting to see him use other ways of showing tone and shading, and concentrate on drawing just a few, bolder, stronger lines. Or maybe not; he gets some great effects with his many lines, creating clouds and rocks and monsters that come to vivid life on the page.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Shortcomings

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Adrian Tomine is an anomaly on the current alternative-comics scene – his stories are absolutely realistic, in both their artistic look and their mundane events, but aren’t obviously autobiographical at all. The closest comparison I can think of is that he’s a Northern Californian Gilbert Hernandez – deeply concerned with ethnicity and identity – but working more as a miniaturist. (Tomine is clearly influenced by the modern New Yorker school of short prose fiction; many of his stories could have been adapted straight from a Raymond Carver short story.)

Shortcomings is Tomine’s longest story to date – his first graphic novel-length tale at all – reprinting a three-issue storyline from Tomine’s irregular comic, Optic Nerve. But his virtues and interests are still those of a short-story writer: close evocation of character, realistic dialogue, small-scale events. None of the events are overly dramatic…but the main character certainly is.

Ben Tanaka is a young Japanese-American man living in Berkeley – managing a movie theater, in a rut with his live-in girlfriend Miko, denying that he’s obsessed with blonde Caucasian girls, and only really connecting with his lesbian friend Alice. He’s angry about nothing in particular, and frustrated about his entire life without quite realizing it himself. He’s our viewpoint character – in every scene, and at the center of most of them – but it’s hard to identify with him, since he is such a prick. He’s young and disaffected, but doesn’t think of himself that way – he thinks he’s doing all right, and doesn’t realize that he’s a complete jerk.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Two More Minxes

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A few months back, I reviewed the second and third graphic novels from Minx (DC’s new line aimed at teenage girls, published in a manga-ish size and format but not otherwise much like manga). I’ve since dug up the first and fourth Minx titles, The Plain Janes and Good As Lily, for another compare-and-contrast.

The Plain Janes was the Minx launch title, back in May, and was the only one of the first wave of Minx books to have any female creators involved. (Which lack, if you recall, caused somewhat of a hue and cry in some circles.) The writer, Cecil Castellucci (that single female creator), is an established Young Adult novelist, and, perhaps because of that, [[[The Plain Janes]]] is the closest to mainstream realistic fiction of any of the Minx books I’ve seen so far.

Our heroine, Jane, is a young teen who lived in “Metro City” until she was caught at the edge of a random bombing, which made her parents paranoid enough to move the family to the suburbs. (Jane is presumably an only child; we don’t see any siblings.) The bombing affected her just as strongly as it did her parents, but in a different way: it shocked her out of her old complacent life (concerned with boys and clothes) and turned her into An Artist. So she resists the urge to fall in with the same sort of crowd she hung out with at her old school, and tries to make friends with a group of outcast girls.

Unfortunately, those girls are straight from Central Casting: the brainy one, the sporty one, and the theatrical one. (There’s even the school’s token One Gay Guy, who gets involved later on.) Worse, their names are all versions of “Jane,” telegraphing the manipulation even further. They’re all decent characters – well differentiated from each other and generally believable – but it didn’t make much sense to me that the three of them would be friends, and each have no other friends, when they have nothing in common but their outcast status. (Then again, I was never a high school girl, and the social structures boys set up can be quite different.)

Our Jane has to work to get the other Janes to like her – she’s pretty and should be popular, so why would she be hanging out with them? – and keeps turning down the friendship advances of the local Queen Bee. But, eventually, her plan comes together, and she recruits the other Janes into her secret organization P.L.A.I.N. – People Loving Art in Neighborhoods – to do various bizarre “art” events secretly around town. They are, of course, the very po-mo kind of art that doesn’t require any ability to draw or paint or otherwise create something specific; it’s all installation-style pieces that only are art because someone says they are.

This leads to the expected, and overwritten, trouble from the authorities, who clamp down hard on any sign of rebellion in their community. (Sadly, this was all done more deftly, and with a lighter touch, in the ‘80s movie Footloose. Yes, it’s that sort of thing all over again.) But, in the end, art, and P.L.A.I.N., prevail.

So The Plain Janes is a bit obvious and a bit too much – at least for me, jaded thirty-something that I am. It may be much more exciting for a teenage girl who hasn’t seen this plot before and doesn’t realize she can pick her friends and do the things she wants to do. And, if so, then it will do its job just fine.

(I don’t have much to say about the art – it’s solid, in a mostly mainstream-comics style, with lots of close-ups on faces. It’s noticeably less stylized than the art in the other Minx titles I’ve seen, which fits this more grounded, mostly real-world story.)

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MINI-REVIEW: Groo 25th Anniversary Special

Let’s see… we need a couple of sure-fire topics of humor. How about… child labor exploitation and the deadly thievery of Big Pharmaceutical makers? I’ll bet you’re giggling just thinking about that stuff.

Well, in the hands of Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier, or, more appropriately, in the hands of Groo, the laughs work out just fine.

These are two of the topics covered in the [[[Groo 25th Anniversary Special]]] released by Dark Horse last week, and as one of America’s pre-eminent creator-owned series it deserves serious recognition for its success. But when it comes to Groo, it’s so damned hard to be serious.

So, suffice it for us to shout a big Happy Anniversary to the intrepid bumbler, his dog Rufferto, and his chroniclers Sergio and Mark. It’s quite an achievement.

If you haven’t checked out the Groo 25th Anniversary Special, just go out and read a newspaper. Then you’ll really need Groo.

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