08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail
By Michael Crowley and Dan Goldman
Three Rivers Press, January 2009, $17.95

Typically, there are two kinds of non-fiction books about big events – first are the quick-and-dirty ones that come out almost immediately, pulled together from news reports or written on the fly or just knocked out by a writer with lightning fingers. The other is the “think piece” – longer, more measured, with time for distance and clarity. They each have their strengths: the quick books can crystallize a mood, and remind us of what we felt at the time, while the slower books tend to be the ones that last. It happens with all kinds of nonfictional topics, from biographies (the quickies come out after the personage has done something major, such as died) to political scandals to social movements.

But the area that attracts more quick books than any other is high-level politics – since the energy available to be expended on political arguments, thoughts, and post-mortems is effectively infinite; the winners are always happy to relive their victories and the losers are desperate to know how to win the next time. So every four years there’s a wave of books about the US presidential race: it starts slow, about a year out, with potted campaign biographies and thinly disguised position papers and various attempts to influence the debate. Once the race gets going in earnest, the Swift Boats start running – quick-and-dirty books (usually as dirty as possible) aimed at real or perceived weaknesses, plus new or updated versions of the first kind of books. And then there’s another rush after the election is done, praising or damning the winner, and explaining how everything will be utterly different, unless it’s going to be completely the same. At the same time, reporters bash their campaign columns into shape and shove them out the door as books, or quickly explain for posterity how they knew all of the important things all along. Finally, the slower, more thoughtful books – things like [[[What It Takes]]] and [[[The Selling of the President]]] – come along a year or so later…just as the machine starts to gear up for the next time around.

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My reading has been rejuvenated over the past couple of weeks by infusions from the Eisner Overmind – I’m a judge this year, and so I’m reading ahead in preparation for the big judging weekend coming up at the end of March – in particular by these three recent, and unique, manga volumes. All are complete stories in themselves, which seems rare for manga, and they range pretty far – from each other, and from the well-trodden paths of shonen and shojo.

Disappearance Diary
By Hideo Azuma
Fanfare/Ponent Mon, October 2008, $22.99

Azuma has worked in manga since 1969, and is known as the father of “Lolicon.” He created many long, popular series for the Japanese market – Futari To Gonin and Fujouri Nikki, for example – over several decades. But this is something different.

In 1989, Azuma ran away from his home and work, and lived as a homeless man for months. He did it again in 1992. And then in 1998, he was forced into rehab to recover from his alcoholism. Disappearance Diary is the story of those three times in his own life – a memoir comic of some very dark moments.

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