Tagged: Andrew Wheeler

Manga Friday: Three Books from CMX

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  • June 20, 2008

variante-6445598Just last week, a secret package of photocopied pages, marked "CONFIDENTIAL — DO NOT REPRODUCE" landed on my desk. Included were three books from DC’s newish manga imprint, CMX, from across the range of their titles. And so, through great personal travail — and with the assistance of someone at DC who must remain nameless, since there was no cover letter — here are the first ComicMix reviews of CMX books…

(Exciting, isn’t it?)

These are all forthcoming books, hitting stores starting in late September. So you can think of this review as a teaser, if you want.

Variante, Vol. 1

by Igura Sugimoto

DC Comics/CMX, October 2008, $12.99

This is the fourth and final volume of this Mature-readers series, so I’m going to be doing a bit of guessing about the beginnings that led to this ending. There’s a young woman named Aiko who’s being held prisoner by the requisite nasty corporation, Atheos. The head of Atheos is completely insane, and wants to turn Aiko into a goddess who will destroy the entire human race and create a new world just for him.

This is a not-impossible dream, since Aiko is a "second-generation chimera," a human with some sort of ill-defined powers — she seems to spead out her own flesh into shields and weapons, or maybe that’s supposed to be energy — who is also the daughter of people who also secretly had those powers. Also, Atheos has been involved, somehow, in turning people into chimera, which is nasty and unpleasant, even leaving aside the fact that chimera tend to go crazy and kill lots of people.

There are other bad guys — as usual, there are factions and intrigue within Atheos, and someone on the good guy’s side turns out to have worked for them long ago, before he turned good.

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Review: In Odd We Trust by Dean Koontz & Queenie Chan

In Odd We Trust
Created by Dean Koontz; Written by Queenie Chan & Dean Koontz; Illustrations by Queenie Chan
Del Rey, July 2008, $10.95

Odd Thomas, in a series of (so far) four novels from Dean Koontz, is a twenty-year-old fry cook in the small desert town of Pico Mundo, California. He has a tough girlfriend – Stormy Llewellyn, orphan and gun-slinging amateur detective – a great way with pancakes, many friends in town, and a secret: he can see the dead. The dead never talk, but they do find ways to communicate with Odd, and to get him to help them.

[[[In Odd We Trust]]] takes place when Odd is nineteen; it’s a prequel to the novels. Very early on, in a scene reminiscent of the great amateur “consulting detectives” stretching back to Sherlock, the local police chief, Wyatt Porter, comes to ask Odd for help. Joey Gordon, a seven-year-old, was killed brutally in a home invasion during the fifteen minutes between being dropped off after school by a neighbor and the arrival of his housekeeper/nanny. The killer left a cryptic note, made up of letters cut out of magazines, but no normal clues.

The police are baffled, as they so often are in stories like this. Sometimes I think the police exist in fiction merely to be baffled while the much smarter and more skilled amateurs do their legwork for them, and then sweep in at the end to do the actual arresting.

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ComicMix Columns/Features for the Week Ending June 15, 2008

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  • June 15, 2008

This week we’ve brought you a man-sized portion of columns and features by our intrepid band:

Strong enough for a man, but made for — well, everybody!

Manga Friday: Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting

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  • June 13, 2008

freak-4828629

This week it’s time to go back to what manga do best – or one of the things manga do best, anyway – stories about people fighting and killing each other, usually with long point bits of metal. To make it even more interesting, all three of the books I’m looking at this week are later books in series – and I’ve only seen the earlier books in one case. So this might just turn into another installment of Stump the Reviewer…

Freak: Legend of the Nonblonds, Vol. 3
Story by Yi DongEun; Art by Yu Chung
Yen Press, June 2008, $10.99

Three people –the increasingly oddly named Verna, Lorel, and Tublerun – live together (I think) and are the “Nonblonds,” a troupe of fighter/bounty hunter/martial artists, which apparently is a legitimate career in this world. (And that’s not unusual for manga, actually.)

None of them are blonde – which I wouldn’t have been sure about if Tublerun wasn’t the guy on the cover, but leave that aside – but I have no idea why that matters. Oh, and Verna – a dark-skinned woman, when the other two are light-skinned men – has been spending too much time in “Cerebro” lately, to make more money for someone who’s been in a coma for fifteen years.

Anyway, in this book, Tublerun – who I think was previously the goofball of the group, or perhaps even the explicit comedy relief, takes a solo job up near the North Pole. There, a girl named Marti, who calls herself the personal secretary of President Magnus and says the quest is an unofficial GIA event, tells an assembled group of tough characters that they are going to go into “an ancient site where the method of liquid metal-making was created” to find and retrieve a capsule for a vast reward.

With her is a guy who is, in order, Mr. Ecliptor, GIA’s security chief, and the son of “our President.” (He’s also, once he puts on a mask, the powerful and deadly Chroma – this may be a secret identity.)

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ComicMix Columns/Features for the Week Ending June 8, 2008

Greetings from the MoCCA Art Fest, where ComicMix will be out in force today!  We’re probably having the time of our lives, having prepared this roundup well beforehand.  Good thing, too, as we keep adding more new features!  Here’s the scoop on what our columnists and feature-ists have brought you this past week:

Back to the fun at the Puck Building!  Or is that the pun at the F– no wait, that can’t be right…

Manga Friday: Korean Road Trip!

The two books this week are actually manwha rather than manga, since they come from Korea and not Japan. Other than the reading direction, both of these books are more similar to their Japanese counterparts than to American comics, which I will demonstrate, viz:

Croquis Pop, Vol. 1
Story by KwangHyun Seo; Art by JinHo Ko
Yen Press, June 2008, $10.99

Da-Il is a young man who either wants to be a manwha artist more than anything in the world — because he told his now-dead mother that the only thing he wanted to do with his life was to make pictures that made her happy — or he fell into the job as a high school student because making comics "looked like fun." Or maybe both, since the story tells us both things and gives us no reason to disbelieve either of them.

Da-Il has just come to work for the manwha-ga Ho Go, who has just moved into a big house with his two other assistants, the punctilious senior assistant Ho-Suk Yang and the gorgeous and mysterious Hang-Chu. (Either in Korea in general, or just in this kind of manwha story, the staff of a particular story live with their boss.) But the hiring procedures are a bit lax, since Da-Il can barely draw. (more…)

Review: Out of Picture, Vol. 2

picture21-3506137Out of Picture, Vol. 2
no editor credited
Villard Books, June 2008, $tk

No one will admit to editing [[[Out of Picture 2]]], though they seem to be proud of it – buried deep on the copyright page is the “produced by” credit I’ve pulled out for the bibliographic information above, but that doesn’t necessarily mean those were the editors. Ah, well – someone was in charge of this book, even if we’re not sure who that was.

Out of Picture 2 is the second book from a group of animators and illustrators connected to Blue Sky Studios – the first Out of Picture was published by a French house, caused a stir at some conventions, and was reprinted by Villard in December. (And I reviewed it then.) Basically the same crew is back for this volume, though they don’t all work at Blue Sky anymore.

And I see, looking back at my review of Out of Picture 1, that it was a gorgeous book, but a bit lacking in the story department – somewhat obvious and clichéd. I’m sorry to say that Out of Picture 2 is the same kind of thing – amazing art, reproduced fantastically well on large pages of nice paper…but telling stories that aren’t all that special.

This time, we open with Jason Sadler’s wordless “[[[Sub Plotter]]],” a cute little story about the effects of sneezing on a gigantic war-map of an ocean. It seems to be set during WWII, and it’s quite visually inventive, using the space of the large pages very well and popping up with more insets than I would have thought possible. But the story told is a silly little vignette, and, even more so, it’s a vignette that would probably be better animated than in its current form.

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ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending June 1, 2008

As readers doubtless have noticed, we’ve been adding a lot of regular features to ComicMix in addition to our columnists.  So it’s time to add Van’s Weekly Haul comic reviews to our rotation!  Here’s what we’ve done for you this past week:

In addition, here’s the listing of all the ComicMix Six fun we’ve come up with so far:

  1. April 2: Alan Kistler – Worst Moments in Skrull ‘Invasion’ History
  2. April 9: Alan Kistler – Why Marvel’s ‘Secret Wars’ Was Better Than ‘Civil War’
  3. April 17: Martha Thomases – Top Political Campaigns in Comics
  4. April 24: Alan Kistler – The Worst Superhero Names in Comics
  5. May 6: Chris Ullrich – The Worst Movies Adapted from Comic Books
  6. May 14: Alan Kistler – The Worst Supervillain Names in Comics
  7. May 21: Chris Ullrich – The Best Movies Adapted from Comic Books
  8. May 28: Martha Thomases – Biggest Tease in Comics (Male)

And with that, we bid our numbering goodbye!  Next week we’ll start adding in our Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica reviews (from Rick Marshall and Chris Ullrich respectively) to the roundup…

Review: ‘Batman Grendel’ by Matt Wagner

 batman-grendel-4721219Batman Grendel
By Matt Wagner
DC Comics/Dark Horse, February 2008, $19.95

[[[Batman Grendel]]] collects two short series – each one was just two 50-page issues long – originally titled [[[Batman/Grendel]]] and [[[Batman/Grendel II]]]. The slash has disappeared for the collected edition – perhaps because now the names of two male characters separated by a slash brings with it entirely different expectations?

(I’m reminded of Terry Pratchett’s never-quite-named character, from a tribe who are called after the first thing the mother sees after birth, who wished, desperately, that his name was Two Dogs Fighting.)

(And the very small “Vs.” on all of the online bookshots does not actually appear on the book itself, which is simply titled Batman Grendel, as if it were the product of some comic-book equivalent of a corporate merger.)

So what we have first is a 1993 story with Batman battling the original Grendel, Hunter Rose – who is in many ways something like an evil Batman, or a twisted mirror image. Rose is a self-made man, master of arcane fighting arts, and the scourge of the underworld in his hometown…although that’s because he took over in his town. Rose is incredibly violent in a very comic-booky way – he has the typical nonpowered superhero’s utter control of violence and movement, but uses it to slaughter at will.

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Review: The Complete Peanuts, 1967 to 1968 by Charles M. Shulz

peanuts67-3642515

The Complete Peanuts, 1967-1968
By Charles M. Schulz; foreword by John Waters
Fantagraphics, February 2008, $28.95

By 1967, [[[Peanuts]]] wasn’t just another comic strip in the local newspaper, it was a media phenomenon. The first TV special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, had won an Emmy amid universal acclaim two years earlier, and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown was about to open on Broadway. It was the epitome of mainstream entertainment – on May 24th, California Governor Ronald Reagan and the state legislature even proclaimed it “Charles Schulz Day.” The strip hadn’t quite hit its ‘70s mega-merchandising heyday, but it was getting there.

At the same time, not all that far from Schulz’s Santa Rosa home, Berkley was roiling with anti-war fervor and the Summer of Love had hit San Francisco. Peanuts had been seen as an edgy, almost countercultural strip in the early 1950s, but those days were long past, and Peanuts was the Establishment. In those days, you were with the pigs or with the longhairs, right? And where did Peanuts stand?

From the evidence here, Peanuts stood where it had always stood: on its own, only rarely commenting on specific issues of the day (such as the “bird-hippie” who would become Woodstock in another year or two), but talking around those issues in ways that most of America could laugh at… some more uncomfortably than others. Schulz was never one to declare himself on one side of an issue or the other; he’d just write and draw his cartoons, and let others make their interpretations.

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