Category: Reviews

Night Drive by Richard Sala

This was Richard Sala’s first book; this edition is (at least for the moment) Richard Sala’s last book.

Sala died in mid-2020, alone at home, of what turned out to be a heart attack. He didn’t die of COVID, but I have to believe he’s one of the many, many people who would have had a much better chance of surviving that horrible year – getting better health care, being seen by more people who could notice something was wrong, etc. – if it hadn’t happened. But that’s the deal with the past: it’s already happened, its horrors and unfairnesses already baked in. And that’s a pretty solidly Richard Sala thought, frankly.

The original Night Drive was self-published by Sala in 1984, a 32-page comic in 500 signed copies. It got appreciative reviews, sold a decent number of those copies, and was useful for Sala to open doors to get illustration work – and then the long last story, “Invisible Hands,” was picked up by MTV’s Liquid Television, which gave Sala another paying gig to help get his career started.

This expanded edition of Night Drive  came out this May, just about doubling the size of the original and turning it into a small hardcover book. It includes a foreword remembering Sala by his friend and fellow comics writer Dana Marie Andra, an interview section with answers from Sala about this book over the span of several decades, and a number of stories and illustrations from the same era – some almost made it into Night Drive, some were for the potential follow-up that was shelved when his work on Liquid Television and illustration jobs got too busy.

The art is both deeply Sala – scratchy, black-and-white, with scrawled lettering and quirky misshapen faces – and deeply 1980s, full of design-y borders and title panels. His work got somewhat easier to visually “read” later, when he moved into working most commonly in watercolors, but this is Sala at his darkest and most cryptic, all of his old horror-movie and noir influences coming out in a flood of tropes and dialogue and ideas. The pieces here are more vignettes than stories, as if Sala was trying to get down all of his inspiration and his ideas his way as fast as he could. He got clearer than this, he told more complete and satisfying stories than this – he definitely got better at his craft and I think moved closer to doing exactly what he wanted to do – but this package is full of pure unfiltered Richard Sala, early in his development and heady with the possibilities of comics.

“Invisible Hands” is still the standout here – long enough to give Sala room to maneuver, full of fiendish plots and mysterious characters, shocking reverses and new complications, quirky and entirely Sala but close enough to a normal narrative for the parallax to be deeply satisfying. But the whole package is fun, a deep dive into the beginnings of a unique artist and the style of a very distinctive, and now long-gone era.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

REVIEW: Spenser for Hire: The Complete Series

Dick Giordano was a major Robert B. Parker fan, which is how I first learned of him and his creation, Spenser. In fact, I once spent a lengthy lunch hour in line at the Fifth Avenue Barnes & Noble to get the latest release autographed for Dick. From there, I began reading the books and fell in love with them, reading his oeuvre until Parker’s passing.

As a result, I missed the ABC adaptation Spenser for Hire, which aired from September 20, 1985, to May 7, 1988, and only knew it as the show where fans first discovered a pre-Star Trek: DS9 Avery Brooks, who played Hawk.

Thankfully, Warner Home Entertainment has now released the three-season, 66-episode series in a DVD box set, basically collecting the previous DVD releases with no new extras and not even a Blu-ray upgrade.

Robert Urich played the eponymous lead, backed by Brooks, Richard Jaeckel, and Barbara Stock (whose Susan Silverman was only in the first and third seasons). The ever-growing rich supporting cast of the novels was still developing at this stage, so they are absent, although a few of the existing ones (i.e., Henry Cimoli or the other cops) could have been used to enrich the show.

John J. O’Connor noted at the time in The New York Times, “Not surprisingly, many of the plots are merely serviceable, dotted with the perfunctory shoot-outs and car chases. Nevertheless, the series has managed to establish a distinctive personality. The key characters are well conceived, as are such regulars as the police lieutenant (Richard Jaeckel) and the police sergeant (Ron McLarty). Furthermore and not least, a good deal of the location shooting is actually done in Boston, lending the shows a precise and well-defined sense of place, which is rare in American prime time.”

Apparently, the ratings were good despite ABC’s persistence for moving its air dates, and it was finally felled by the expensive location shooting in Boston, which is a shame since it is basically an entertaining private eye show.

While the cases are fine, the real fun is in the chemistry between Spenser and Hawk, two badasses who are complex figures in their own right. When Susan gets pregnant, she considers abortion, something the Catholic Spenser could not abide, and she departs. As a result, during the second season, ADA Rita Fiori (Carolyn McCormick) becomes a potential romantic interest. In both cases, the women were not written as strongly as the men.

None of the novels was used as source material, something that happened in subsequent adaptations, although none have captured the spare writing style that was uniquely Parker. (For the record, Ulrich and Brooks made four telefilms for A&E, none of which are included.)

Had the writers and showrunner John Wilder hewed closer to Spenser’s worldview and avoided case-of-the-week syndrome (still the standard in the 1980s), it could have developed a far more distinctive personality.

Free Pass by Julian Hanshaw

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Comics are about sex less often than most artforms. Call it a lingering prudishness, the hangover from long decades seen as a medium just for kids, or just the fact that drawn sex is inherently a bit more fleshy than the written kind. But it’s true: comics avoid sex a lot of the time, and often only wink when they come close to that territory.

Free Pass , Julian Hanshaw’s 2022 graphic novel, isn’t winking. Hanshaw avoids drawing the nitty-gritty of sex most of the time, or obscures it, but this is a book about one couple and their sex life – and they’re young and reasonably energetic. And…but then, I’ll get into the plot in a moment.

The book opens with the couple – Huck and Nadia, young British tech workers who are maybe thirty, maybe a few years one side or the other of that – talking sex, while we see their house from outside, porno movies playing on a big screen we can see through a sliding door. They’re discussing having sex with other people, we come to realize, possibly partner swapping. They haven’t done it yet, but they’re both intrigued, and running through the other couples they know, the times they wonder if it might have happened, and what comes next.

Eventually, they decide to make “Free Pass” lists – five celebrities for each of them, people they could have sex with guilt- and consequence-free if it somehow happened. We see Huck making his list over the next few days – the book mostly follows him, mostly lets us understand what’s in his head – in his job at a tech company, Abrazo.

They both work at Abrazo, which is mostly a fictionalized Facebook: big, all-encompassing, dominant. Nadia is a programmer; we don’t see a lot of what she does, but she’s more technical, more specifically skilled, than Huck is. Huck is on a moderation team, maybe a low-level supervisor there. We don’t see the things he moderates, just the complaints about them, and something of the internal Abrazo double-speak about what they get rid of and what they don’t.

Frankly, I think Hanshaw has a specific political point here, and it’s a bit opaque to me. In the US, especially now, three years later, what we saw the big tech companies trying to do with moderation was largely getting rid of the worst of the worst: hate speech, death threats, attacks on people with racial and sexually-charged language. The complaint with that approach was that they tended to censor right-wing voices – the unspoken underpinning was that the right wing was deeply hateful, sexist and racist, but that they saw that as a good thing and wanted free rein to spew their anger and vitriol everywhere, to yell as loudly as they could and take over any spaces they could drive other people out of. I’m pretty sure Hanshaw isn’t saying he’s in favor of that, but, from a US perspective in 2025, I’m not sure what else he means. Maybe it’s some more lefty flavor of Abrazo being too chummy with the government, and getting rid of anything against their interests.

Because, you see, there’s an election coming up. The candidates are fictional, and we don’t know what parties they represent. But there’s a “four more years” person (Libby) and a “change it all” person (Maynard) – which I think codes them as Tory and Labour, respectively. The book is organized by the days until the election: we start a little more than two weeks out. But, like Abrazo’s moderation decisions, any actual political policies are presented in coded, nonspecific terms – so I think what it means is clearer if you’re British, particularly if you are British and it is 2022, looking towards the general election that eventually happened in 2024.

The election itself is mostly background, but Abrazo’s moderation decisions are a huge part of Huck’s day, and a source of stress to him. He’s listening to podcasts from “the other side” – I think Hanshaw means people like the EFF, free-internet types, rather than Nigel Farage and the kick-out-the-foreigners crowd – which some of his co-workers look askance at. He’s also a bit awkward, in that tech-guy way, and for a while I wondered if he was meant to be seen as incel-adjacent, as having picked up some of those thoughts and ideas despite being in an on-going successful relationship.

That’s all swirling around, when Huck gets a new product to test – from Ali, the male half of the couple he and Nadia hit upon as the perfect choices for their first swinging experience in the first scene. It’s an AI sex robot, Ali says. It comes in a big box; it’s a blank humanoid form that has a tablet to control it. On that tablet is a menu of people, men and women, and the user can choose who the robot turns into. And, of course, the robot is a wonderful, perfect, lover, in that time-honored way that traces back to at least Tanith Lee’s Silver Metal Lover (or maybe Barbarella, or even, if you accept much more winking and hinting, “Helen O’Loy”).

Many stories with a sex robot like that would be about jealousy, about a break-up, but Huck and Nadia are enthusiastic and experimental and geeky, and they take to their new fuck-buddy like fish to water. Hanshaw presents this imagistically, but I think it’s mostly “turn it into a man for you, and then into a woman for me,” with maybe some three-way fun along the way. But they have a lot of sex – even more so once Nadia realizes she can mildly hack the tablet and turn the robot into anyone, not just the hardcoded choices. They spend something like a week just fucking celebrity simulacra, and seem to be fantastically happy at it, if maybe a bit sore and tired by the end.

But, meanwhile, Nadia has been interviewing with a newer tech company, Hapus, which promises to be more responsive and independent. They specifically do not moderate in the way that’s problematic with Abrazo, whatever that’s meant to be. She gets the job, and Huck is supportive, but maybe not entirely happy – because she might be moving away from him or because he feels guilty about what he does for Abrazo, or both.

Huck and Nadia actually call out sick from work for several days for their fuck-fest, which is yet another element that leads to a confrontation between Ali and Huck. They give back the sex robot, and the election happens.

I think we’re meant to guess who won; Hanshaw doesn’t say. The last section jumps ahead a year: Nadia is happily working for Hapus, Huck is running for a local political office, and the sex robots are rolling out broadly. I think it’s meant to be a happy ending, but I don’t know what party Huck is standing for or what his platform is, and ubiquitous easily-hackable sex robots might not be the most stabilizing element to add into a society. So maybe ambiguously happy.

Hanshaw has a fairly lumpy way of drawing people, which is surprisingly excellent for this story: his people are real and flawed, not porn models. Huck and Nadia look like relatively fit, fairly young, absolutely normal people, and even the sex robot doesn’t come across as pure pneumatic distilled sex, just another body with which they can have fun.

And Free Pass is absolutely packed with ideas and thoughts – about sex, relationships, online discourse, how to think about governments – mostly posed in non-specific, non-partisan ways, so it doesn’t trip anyone’s propaganda detectors. It’s a fun, quirky, mostly positive book about a couple who have a lot of sex with a sex robot and come out of it (and associated events) with a stronger relationship.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The Black Incal by Alexandro Jodorowski & Mœbius

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I read The Incal at least thirty years ago, during the burst of Mœbius republications from Marvel. As I recall, I thought it was OK space opera, with an annoying main character and more mystical mumbo-jumbo than I preferred. (At the time, I was much more enthusiastic about the Blueberry stories, a long Western series drawn by Mœbius and written by Jean-Michel Charlier.)

Humanoids republished the original Incal series – in six volumes this time, matching the original French albums, unlike the Marvel 2-in-1s – in 2012, going back to the original French colors by Yves Chaland and taking out some minor censorship that had crept into English-language editions in the ’90s. And so, for no good reason, I’m taking another look at this series.

The Black Incal  is the first of the six albums of the main series, written by Alexandro Jodorowski and drawn by Mœbius. The stories originally appeared in Metal Hurlant in the early ’80s; Jodorowski went on to write a lot more in this universe – some of it under an “Incal” title and some not, a few with Mœbius but mostly not. And I have to admit that I do not have a high opinion of Jodorowski’s work, though I’ve mostly read the comics he wrote for Mœbius – he’s also a filmmaker and has done lots of other projects, so I may be reacting most strongly to their gestalt. (The worst thing I’ve seen is Madwoman of the Sacred Heart , if you want to see my heights of spleen and bile.)

The Incal, on the other hand, starts off as more-or-less conventional skiffy adventure, with only a few eruptions of Meaning. Our hero is John DiFool (a worrying name, admittedly), a “Class-R” private investigator in one of those ultra-urbanized, stratified medium futures, in an underground city on what seems to be Earth. He starts out being beaten and terrorized by mysterious masked figures, is thrown to what should be his death, and then saved by the Cybo-Cops. He tells them a plausible story – which might even be mostly true – about him bodyguarding an aristo woman for a night of debauchery among the lower classes before things went sideways and he ran away and was knocked out in the inevitable gigantic service tunnels.

John neglects to mention that he got a strange box from a gigantic dying “mutant,” or that other mutants and the alien Berg (from another galaxy, Jodorowski offhandedly remarks, to underscore how little he understands how any of this works) are fighting over this MacGuffin.

The MacGuffin itself is The Incal, a small luminous pyramid that talks and can bestow strange and wondrous powers on its possessor in ways that aren’t clear at all in this book. Descriptions of the series call it “The Light Incal” in distinction to the Dark Incal, the title object that John is sent by the main Incal to find in the back half of this book.

Most of this book is frenetic action overlaid with lots of talking. It’s the kind of action story where people narrate their every last action and emotional state, like a ’60s Spider-Man comic with slightly less quipping but vastly more emoting. John gets one story of What He Needs To Do and What It All Means from the Incal, but, as I recall, this changes somewhat as the series goes on, and the story gets bigger and more grandiose. There are various forces arrayed against John, but we’re not clear yet on who they all are, how they connect to each other, or what they want. But it is clearly John on the run with the vastly powerful thingamabob, with All Hands Against Him.

Oh! Also, near the end, one group of villains hires the Metabaron, a sleek figure in a metaleather jacket with a metashaved head and steely metaeyes, to find John and retrieve the Incal in his metacraft. (OK, not every noun associated with him has “meta” attached to it – but a hell of a lot of them do, in a way that gets silly within two or three pages.)

It ends entirely in the middle of the action; John has been captured yet again by someone we’re pretty sure is a villain and the Metabaron is getting metacloser. I suspect every volume ends more or less that way; I’ll see.

The Dark Incal is stylish and would move really quickly if it weren’t for all of the repetitive dialogue. Mœbius’s art is detailed – maybe to the point of being overbusy a few times, but mostly right in that sweet spot of Big SF action, with lots of gigantic constructed stuff looming and swooping around. I have the lurking suspicion that it will all add up to less than it seems, but that may be my memories of the last time I read it. It is the epitome of ’80s SF adventure in French comics, in all of the good and bad ways.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Who Is AC? by Hope Larson & Tintin Pantoja

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If this were a TV show, it would be a pilot that didn’t get picked up: it obviously aimed to start a series, and, a decade later, it didn’t. There are a lot of plot points, themes, and ideas that aren’t completely explained or fleshed out here – but of course there would be, if it were going to be a series. Those are hooks for later stories, for further details to come later, room for the story to grow.

But, for whatever reason, it didn’t. Who Is AC?  is a decade-old standalone now; I suppose it’s just possible that writer Hope Larson and artist Tintin Pantoja could get back together and tell us what happened next, but this was a Sailor Moon-inspired, manga-styled graphic novel about superheroes and social media aimed at tweens. That audience is now in college; the phones they used in 2013 are four generations out of date; and the ways all of us interact online has shifted and altered. Any follow-up would either be a period piece or a full reboot.

But, if you can ignore the fact that the main character gets her superpowers from a candybar phone, the likes of which were I think solidly out of date even in 2013, AC is a fast-moving, if somewhat superficial, adventure story about one girl who gets superpowers and discovers there are Trolls lurking out in the world.

Lin just moved with her family to the small college town of Barnhurst – location deliberately left unspecified, but  notably small and far away from everything. On the flight over, her phone rang while in airplane mode, and something happened that transformed her. She can use that phone contact, in a way the book doesn’t over-explain, to turn into a costumed superheroine with what looks like a big spear and some vaguely computer-esque powers.

Trace is a young man, about the same age, who lives in Barnhurst. He works in a copy shop, where he meets Lin making her zine. He’s got a crush on Mel, who works next door at the get-your-photos-taken-in-old-timey-garb shop (which is sustainable as a business in a small college town? Barnhurst must get substantially more tourist traffic than it seems to). Mel is a bit self-centered, the stereotypical pretty girl, but seems like a basically nice, normal person, not an airhead or a spoiled brat. The two have a date, which does not go well, largely because Trace is even more self-centered and full of unwarranted assumptions about every last thing in the world than we expected. (He’s also about sixteen or so, which means it comes across as young and unformed and needing some life experience rather than completely horrible. But he is clearly reminiscent of That Internet Guy, who was a loathed type even in 2013.)

The same night as that date, Lin witnesses a hold-up at the copy shop. She transforms into her alter ego, saves the day, and captures the crook (who is a sad-sack guy trying to get money to pay for dental work). But she also transforms again on the way home, to see how it works, and causes an accident for an already-mad Trace and his bike.

Trace posts an angry rant online about the superheroine after he learns about the holdup, calling her Anonymous Coward. (Presumably, if there had been a series, AC would have stood for other things – but that’s the source of the name here.) At about the same time, a shadowy figure in a repurposed Pizza Hut somewhere nearby – clearly the Big Villain of the series, but not completely identified in this book – tempts Mel into becoming what I suppose I have to call an Evil Minion.

Mel and Trace are going to meet someone isolated the next night, where Mel will presumably use the power of the Negative Internet to change Trace into another Evil Minion like herself. But Lin shows up, and there is a battle with lots of 1s and 0s in it, and the hold of the Troll (I guess we can call the big villain that – he’s called a troll in the book, which implies he may not be alone) is broken.

Lin’s secret identity is still, we think, safe, though her costume doesn’t cover her face all that much. Mel and Trace are back to being friends, we think, and maybe, if there were a Book Two, might move on to more. But AC doesn’t have a real superhero name, the origin of her powers and the Troll are still mysterious, and it’s not clear what the significance of the plot of the book was.

So: very much an introductory first volume, mostly set up and mysteries. All things that will now never be cleared up; this is all we have. Pantoja gives it an energetic, mildly manga style, and Larson, as always, is good with the big personalities of young people. It’s not quite a complete story, but it’s fine as long as you think of it as a pilot episode getting burned off one random night in the summer.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol. 1

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I’ve been known to bemoan the fact that the caption was basically wiped out of mainstream US comics in an extinction event roughly congruent with the big ’90s crash. I’ll admit that captions may have made a comeback since, like tiny mammals after the Chicxulub impact, but I read mainstream comics only rarely these days, so I don’t really know either way. But my point was that captions were useful, and did work well in a lot of the iconic ’80s stories, so, geez, maybe don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater?

Well, I hadn’t taken a look at any bathwater for a while. My opinion may have shifted somewhat.

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson, Vol. 1  is the first of three fairly large volumes collecting their combined run on the Daredevil character, from 1979 through 1982. Now, there’s an asterisk there – several asterisks, actually – since this is corporate comics, and it was created assembly-line style. Janson was the inker before Miller joined as penciler, working over Gene Colan, and took over as penciler/inker afterward. And Miller started off as “the hot new artist,” picking up co-plotting after a few issues and eventually taking over as writer as well. So what most readers think of as “the Frank Miller Daredevil” starts up about halfway through this book.

But comics fans are completionists, and this is a complete package, so that’s a good thing. It also has extensive credits of who did what – something comics weren’t good at for a long time, but they made up for it starting sometime in the 1970s, and became obsessive about it in the flood of reprint projects starting in the ’90s.

Included in this book are:

  • Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man issues 27 & 28, written by Bill Mantlo and inked by Frank Springer; it’s basically a Frank Miller try-out, I guess, since Daredevil guest-stars
  • Daredevil #158-161, 163-166, written by Roger McKenzie (with Miller contributing for 165 and 166)
  • Daredevil # 167, written by David Michelinie and Miller
  • Daredevil #168-172, written by Miller

Now, Bill Mantlo has definitely written better comics than this. So has Michelinie. I don’t know McKenzie’s work well, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. But the stories here – even the ones when Miller takes over at the end – are filled with long, verbose, tedious captions that “set the scene” and “provide color commentary” but mostly tell us what we’re looking at and repeat standard phrases about the character and world.

Daredevil doesn’t have a single phrase that gets beaten into the ground like Wolverine’s “I’m the best at what I do and what I do isn’t pretty,” but both “man without fear” (including related references to DD never giving up on anything ever) and “hey, don’t forget this guy is, like, totally blind!” come up like a bad penny every few pages.

The stories are also…what’s a more polite word for cliched and standard? There were a lot of comics like these in the 1970s and 1980s, and only slightly different before and after that – superhero yardgoods, rolled out to fill up pages and entertain an audience that just wanted to see this guy in this costume punching a particular group of villains and repeating his catchphrase.

Miller was an solid artist from the beginning, which is good. And Janson supported him well. They worked well together to make eye-pleasing pages full of superhero action, only slightly marred by the reams of words pasted on top of all of it.

Once Miller starts writing the stories, the elements of his later work slide in. The last five issues here are one plotline, in which The Kingpin – up to this point entirely a Spider-Man villain, and at that point retired in Japan – comes back to New York for a vaguely described plea deal in which he will hand over a dossier on his successors to the Manhattan DA in return for complete immunity on all of his previous crimes. (Which is, what thirty years of murders and gang-lord-ing and attempted spider-squashing? Nice deal.) We also get a flashback to Daredevil’s college days, to meet the One Great Love of His Life, Elektra, the beautiful daughter of a Greek diplomat who drops out of school when Daddy is murdered by terrorists that not-yet-Daredevil isn’t quite able to stop. She drops out, of course, to become an international assassin in a skimpy costume made up of mostly red straps.

As, of course, you do. In superhero comics, at least.

Bullseye, the most iconic Daredevil antagonist – basically his Joker or Lex Luthor – turns up several times, with a lot of hugger-mugger and opportunities for Daredevil to emote and express his pure goodness and desire for justice, including during the Kingpin plotline at the end. (I do have to admit that Miller makes better use of him, with less histrionics, than McKenzie did.)

So the front half of Vol. 1 is just a slight step up from a standard Marvel comic of 1979 – Miller is energetic, but there were plenty of good, energetic artists then. The end shows more promise, but Miller is still working in the same mode: characters talk too much, and the narrative voice might be pulling back just slightly, but it’s still too intrusive, and spends far too much time telling the reader things he should already know or can see right there in the same panel.

I’m assuming all that gets better in Vol. 2; I’ll have to take a look.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Last Kiss: Sex Day by John Lustig

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I try not to be a gatekeeper. I have standards and expectations – and, like everyone else, some tropes and styles and story-structures I like better than others. But I like to think I can take the how and what as it comes.

So I haven’t mentioned the syndicated comic “strip” Last Kiss here before, as far as I can tell. But I’ve been aware of it, and read it here and there, and I’m definitely not against it. (I’m sure some people are – repurposing of art brings out a lot of thoughts and emotions in some people.)

The deal of Last Kiss is that John Lustig takes panels from mostly ’50s romance comics – a lot of Dick Giordano and Vince Colletta, I think, a lot of people who can’t be exactly credited seventy years later – edits them a bit, has them recolored, and adds new, humorous dialogue and captions. It’s all juxtaposition humor, with those clean-cut young men in crew cuts and young ladies in classy gowns talking about Gangnam style or whatever. Last Kiss has been running for quite some time – I want to say something like twenty years, in CBG and as a few issues in comics format and mostly on GoComics – but there’s a deep well of original material to work from, and I don’t think Lustig pushes out lots of material at any one time.

Last Kiss: Sex Day  is a mildly themed – sex is the theme, though that’s at least an underlying theme a lot of the time in Last Kiss, since it starts with romance comics to begin with – collection of the strip from 2013, a short book of about sixty pages. As far as I can tell, it’s only available digitally, which is just fine for this kind of frivolous exercise.

Last Kiss is all individual panels, and they’re presented one to a page here, with an occasional second page to show what the art looked like in its original form and with its original dialogue. (Lustig’s is always funnier, but often vastly less weird.) It’s sarcastic, it’s at least mildly “weren’t those old people totally squaresville” humor, and it’s all in the same territory of jokes. So this is a good length, and an amusing package: if you like the idea of Last Kiss, and don’t mind some mildly risqué humor, Sex Day is a fine sampler.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

REVIEW: Avatar Legends: City of Echoes

Avatar Legends: City of Echoes
By Judy L. Lin
320 pages/Amulet Books/$21.99

I know this much about The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, so I approached this first novel in what is being billed as the Avatar: Legends series. Is the title intended to be about stories set in and around the Avatar series, or is the legend in question the protagonist in this Young Adult novel? That’s open to interpretation.

Set in Ba Sing Se, the last major city in the Earth Kingdom, mainly in the Lower Ring, we come across refugees from the atrocities committed by the Fire Nation, as they seemingly rampage across the world. The Avatar is nowhere to be seen and is rumored to be dead (we know better, right?). We focus on Jun, a sixteen-year-old whose family has been lost, so she and her grandfather take refuge wherever they can. She enrolls in school, utilizing her skills as a calligrapher to do what she can to support herself.

Jin’s best friend, Susu, is from a family that owns the popular Wen Bakery. Things kick off when Susu signs a contract to serve the Upper Ring after her father gambles away the bakery. Jin promises to find a way to raise the funds to settle the debt and regain her friend. This results in allying herself with the somewhat aloof Xuan, a classmate whose family runs the apothecary where she gets her grandfather’s medicine.

From there, she takes on increasing risks to find money and Susu, becoming a messenger for the Black Market Silver Fangs before being initiated into their ranks. When she encounters Susu, she is a brainwashed member of the Joo Dee and does not recognize her bestie. As the Fire Kingdom’s soldiers invade the city, she also becomes part of the resistance.

Our focus rarely leaves Jin, who is constantly challenged about her assumptions regarding people, as well as her nascent skills as an Earthbender. Her growth drives the narrative as she befriends other refugees-turned-freedom fighters, including Smellerbee and Longshot.

Lin keeps the story moving along at a good pace, offering each character just enough of a personality to be interesting, but none are provided much in the way of depth. Conversations that would have allowed the characters to grow are truncated in favor of advancing the plot. The contrasting lives of the two rings are also given short shrift, so she imagines her readers can picture the locales based on the animated series. Speaking of which, we see Jet’s familiar attack on the Pao Family Tea House from Jin’s point of view, giving you an anchor as to where this fits into the overall continuity.

Events present obstacles and challenges, but few of the characters are truly endangered, blunting the edge this could have had.

Clearly, I am not the audience for this work, but it was an entertaining enough read and fans of the series should enjoy this self-contained story.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 7: Gen’s Story by Stan Sakai

This one collects seven more issues of the early Usagi Yojimbo comic, plus a story from Critters, though the dates in the book are a little confusing. The book itself claims a first edition in September 1991, but says the stories included are copyright no earlier than 1992. Now, Stan Sakai is a fantastic creator, but I do think he’s bound by linear time, so issues 32-38 of Usagi, which were published from February 1992 through March of 1993, could not be collected in late 1991. Given that it has a 1996 Sergio Aragones introduction, and the second edition is said to be December 1997…I’m wondering if that first edition is a typo or just a mistake inserted onto the copyright page so long ago everyone has forgotten about it.

This book is also the end of the initial Fantagraphics run of Usagi. A second edition started up – checks notes – what looks like the very same month from Mirage . That one only lasted sixteen issues, but then Dark Horse picked it up and ran for another twenty-plus years for over a hundred and fifty issues.

So I’ll look to see if the beginning of the eighth volume seems to be more of an attempt to onboard new readers; this seventh volume, Gen’s Story , is much like the books immediately preceding it. There’s one long story that gives the book its title, this time featuring the return of the irascible rhino bounty hunter Gen, and featuring some historical backstory for him, alongside a cluster of shorter, relatively standalone stories.

We meet a female thief, Kitsune, who may be a love interest for Usagi, and then she returns in a later story. We’ve got a ghost story, in which Usagi is able to lay the spirit of a general he served under. We’ve got two shorter stories, one mostly humorous about young Usagi with his sensei and one where he’s narrating an encounter with an evil witch-like character to Noriyuki, the young panda lord who has showed up in this series a few times. And there’s “The Last Ino Story,” in which Gen and Usagi find that blind swordspig and nurse him back to health, learning what’s happened to him after their last meeting. (With about a hundred and eighty issues of later Usagi, I’m vaguely dubious anything of this era is “the last” anything, but it’s possible he never shows up again.)

As always, Usagi is upstanding and righteous, closely following the code of bushido and not particularly suffering because of it – this is a lightly moralistic series for younger readers, so the character with the rigid moral framework will be correct in every situation and events will arrange themselves so that he succeeds in his endeavors. Gen in particular exists to show an alternative to Usagi – not quite villainous, but clearly Not Right, like a young man bandying a girl’s name in a Wodehouse novel. The fact that this entire social setup was exploitative and corrupt, enabling a vicious caste of violence experts who were able to terrorize peasants basically at will…well, that’s just the way of the samurai, isn’t it?

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Anna by Mia Oberländer

Books that are obvious metaphors can be tricky. Especially if you’re not quite sure exactly what they’re a metaphor for.

I think Anna  is Mia Oberländer’s first major graphic novel – it says it was created as part of her thesis in illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences – so I don’t have any prior work to check, to see what her usual method of working is. (The edition of Anna I read was translated by a person whose name was printed, vertically, in a fussy scripty font – apologies if I get it wrong but it seems to be Nika Knight.)

In the German mountain town of Bad Hohenheim, we see three generations of women, all named Anna. Perhaps for clarity, the grandmother is Anna1, her daughter Anna2, and our blonde narrator Anna3. And we immediately think that this will not be a naturalistic, straightforward story.

Anna2, and eventually Anna3, are exceptionally tall. Extraordinarily tall, strikingly tall, unusually tall, remarkably tall, uncomfortably tall. They have gangly super-long legs and torsos maybe a bit longer than normal. They tower over all of the rest of the people in the town – even the men, I think, though the point seems to be that they’re too tall for women, and that makes them generally unattractive to men and that they stand out in a way women shouldn’t.

There’s clearly an element of feminism in this metaphor – there’s a TV talking head who has an extended sequence giving advice to exceptionally tall girls which is the clearest indication of that part of the theme – but Anna2 and Anna3 are also clearly meant to be strange for women, outside of the norms, different in an unsettling way. They can’t be feminine in the way their society expects – they’re too big, taking up too much space, gangling randomly about, clearly out of place. We see Anna2’s size being commented on when she’s still a baby, her long legs erupting from a carriage to splay all over.

Is the metaphor about women who “take up too much space” – who are too big, too dominant, too much not deferential and quietly “feminine?” Maybe, but I think Oberländer’s point is more focused on tall than big – it’s tricky to know her connotations for both words, since she originally worked in German, but height is important here.

This is a mountain village, after all. Mountains are tall. Mountains can be climbed, perhaps more easily with long legs. Tall people can see farther at the top of mountains, and may be more at home there.

Oberländer tells this story in chapters, skipping around in time. We see Anna2 as a baby, Anna1 as a young girl with a dog with equally long and gangly legs, Anna3 as a young woman telling us the story and looking for love herself. Oberländer has a conversational tone in her captions, as if Anna3 was telling us this, in fits and starts, coming back to one thread and then another, telling us her family’s history.

Oberländer tells her story in big blocky drawings, characters often seen head-on. She typically has only a few panels to each page, jammed next to each other with thin ruled borders. Her lettering is florid, scripty, a bit difficult to read to slow the reader down. The drawing, though, is much cleaner, clearer: the pictures are understood instantly, while the words take just that bit of effort.

Again, I can’t tell you exactly what the metaphor means. It may not be that precise, to have a single meaning, in the first place. It’s a story about women that stick up, that can never hide in the crowd, that are out of place where they grew up and need to make or find places for themselves. That’s the general territory: a family of women, how they interact, what the “normal” grandmother thinks and does and says when her daughter and then granddaughter are notably different, when they stick up out of normal life so much it can’t be overlooked.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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