Tagged: Andrew Wheeler

Review: ‘Three Shadows’ by Cyril Pedrosa

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This book will break your heart; I warn you now.

Three Shadows
Cyril Pedrosa
First Second, 2008, $15.95

Louis and Lise are farmers somewhere quiet and untouched, doting parents to their small son Joachim. Their life is bucolic, idyllic: “Back then…life was simple and sweet. Everything was simple and sweet…The taste of cherries, the cool shade, the fresh smell of the river… That was how we lived, in a vale among the hills…sheltered from storms…Ignorant of the world, as though on an island…Peaceful and untroubled…Then everything changed.”

Three figures appear ominously one evening, on horseback at the horizon. Somehow, everyone knows that they’re trouble, but they can’t be confronted. They disappear into the mist, into the distance. Joachim’s dog Diego disappears, and the shadows use his barking to lure the boy – and almost get him.

So Lise goes to the nearest big town to consult with Mistress Pike, whose sign reads “Midwife. Exorcist. Sympathetic Ear.” The truth is what they fear most: the shadows have come for Joachim. And they’re not going to stop.

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ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending March 30, 2008

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  • March 30, 2008

Wow, March seemed to fly by even faster than February, didn’t it?  But opening day is finally upon us, allergy season is already in full swing and ComicMix columnists are nipping things in the bud as usual:

Congrats to Martha and Michael on their columns reaching the Big Five-Oh!  Presumably Dennis O’Neill is on spring break, and we look forward to his return.

Review: Terry Brooks’ ‘Dark Wraith of Shannara’

Dark Wraith of Shannara
By Terry Brooks, Illustrated by Edwin David, Adapted by Robert Place Napton
Del Rey, 2008, $13.95

I am morally sure that the following conversation took place somewhere, among some people, before this book came into existence:

“It’s not fair! All of those other fantasy writers are getting comics based on their books!”

“Yeah! Why Salvatore and Hamilton but not Brooks?”

“What do they have that he hasn’t got? He’s at least as popular as Feist!”

I have no idea who said it, or who they said it to, but, somehow, the influence of the Dabel Brothers has led to ever more epic fantasy writers getting the urge (or maybe just the contract) to create graphic novels based on their work.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that; American comics have been a closed guys-in-tights shop for a generation now, and anything that opens that up is nice. But it is a bit weird, personally, when the two sides of my world collide quite so violently.

Dark Wraith of Shannara, unlike most of the recent epic fantasy comics out there, doesn’t adapt anything; it’s a brand-new story set in Terry Brooks’s very famous (and very bestselling) world of Shannara. For continuity geeks – and aren’t we all that, about something? – this takes place soon after the end of the novel The Wishsong of Shannara, and involves much of the cast of that book. Wishsong is the third of the original Shannara “trilogy:” they’re nothing like a trilogy, despite being three books about members of the same family published relatively quickly and all having the word “Shannara” in the title, but fantasy fans will call any conglomeration of three books a trilogy if you don’t stop them with heavy armament.

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ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending March 23, 2008

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  • March 23, 2008

I’m still recovering from my yearly giggle-fest as my husband and I spent last night MST-ing the Biblical epic The Ten Commandments, which for some reason was shown on Easter weekend rather than Passover weekend.  Always remember, Eliezar, he passed over your holiday!  So many great quotable lines in that film.  ComicMix columnists have been serving up their own quotables this week as well:

Here at ComicMix, love is not an art to us, it is life to us!

Manga Friday: Fairy Tail

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  • March 21, 2008

I suppose I should start off by saying that Rave Master is the name of Mashima’s previous manga series, not his nickname. (Though it does make a great nickname, actually.) Rave Master ran thirty-five volumes – of which twenty-seven has been published in the US to date – and was a fairly typical young-guy-with-great-power-battling-the-forces-of-evil story.

But that story ended, and now Mashima is back with…

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Fairy Tail, Vols. 1 & 2
By Hiro Mashima
Del Rey Manga, 2008, $10.95 each

The first two volumes of his new series in English – published simultaneously on March 25th by the good folks at Del Rey Manga.

Fairy Tail breaks completely with Rave Master, because its young, untried, magically-powered person fighting evil is a young woman. How ‘bout them apples, huh?

All kidding about the genre markers of shonen manga aside, Fairy Tale is somewhat generic, but still distinctive. It’s set in one of those not-quite-medieval worlds, with magic, walled cities, and mostly low technology – though there’s an exception for trains, as so often is the case. It seems to be ruled by some sort of aristocracy, since there are people with power called “Duke,” but that’s not entirely clear.

Similarly, it’s hard to tell how the working world is organized, but the magical people have a structure of guilds (helpfully explained, with diagrams, in the second book), and, of course, there’s then Tokyo University-level competition to get into the “better” guilds. Presumably, most of the other occupations are regimented in a similar way, but Fairy Tail is not a book that spends much time among the peasants.

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ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending March 16, 2008

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  • March 16, 2008

Can it be?  Is convention season well and truly underway?  No, I’m not ready yet!  Need job first!  Hello to everyone at WizWorld LA, LunaCon and everywhere else I can’t afford to be.  At least I and our other weekly ComicMix columnists can engage you from the comparative safety of our home keyboards:

Forecast for the last half of March: more pavement-pounding, but at least it won’t be in the snow any more!

ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending Mar. 9, 2008

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  • March 9, 2008

Where does the time go?  Why does nobody complain about having an extra hour to sleep in the autumn?  And does anyone really feel the need to answer rhetorical questions?  Our weekly ComicMix columnists may not have the answers, but they still make for good reading on a truncated Sunday:

And don’t forget our special ComicMix TV broadcast covering the midnight release of the Dark Tower comic sequel!  Now can that wind stop howling please?  Some of us are trying to catch an afternoon kip.

ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending Mar. 2, 2008

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  • March 2, 2008

I love March, particularly the way the winds blow in such promise for the year to come.  Spring training, buds on the trees, the hope that we can avoid any more snowstorms, it’s all fraught with positivity.  Even our weekly ComicMix columnists seem to be more enthusiastic than usual (particularly Michael Davis with his Obama-at-SDCC teaser):

Spring forward, fall back into bed now…

Review: Bryan Talbot’s ‘Alice in Sunderland’

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Alice in Sunderland
Bryan Talbot
Dark Horse Books, 2007, $29.95

Even for an artist as hard to pin down as Talbot, [[[Alice in Sunderland]]] is odd and unique: it’s one-half a local history of the town in northern England where Talbot lives now and one-half a popular history of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) and Alice in Wonderland. And then both of those halves are wrapped up in a metafictional package, since there are two narrators (the Pilgrim and the Performer, both of them Talbot) and one audience member witnessing this performance (the Plebian, who is also Talbot). To make things even more confusing, about half-way through the book Talbot breaks down and admits that Sunderland, the town he claims he lives in, doesn’t actually exist!

Except even that is a trick: Sunderland is a real town in the northeast of England, on the coast near Newcastle upon Tyne. And the various facts Talbot presents, about the history of Sunderland and of Alice, and the many connections between the two? Well, there’s an extensive list of sources in the backmatter, so I think they’re real. At least, most of them. I think.

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ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending Feb. 24, 2008

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  • February 24, 2008

Ah, it’s Oscar time again!  I know I’ll be glued to my seat, whilst falling asleep in it at the same time!  Look for all the geeky movies to win the usual geeky (technical) awards, most of which won’t be given out on the air.  Better to get your geek on reading our ComicMix columns for this past week:

I know Ratatouille will probably win for Best Animated Feature, but I’m still rooting for Persepolis, so there.

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