Tagged: comics

0

Man’s Best by Pornsak Pichetshote, Jesse Lonergan, and Jeff Powell

If I were cynical – and I am, a lot of the time – I’d think of this book as “We 3, but with a happy ending!” or maybe, more vaguely, “We 3 in SPAAAACE!”

That might be reductive, but, really, how many other comics about three uplifted and cyborged animals fighting to save their humans can you think of? Sometimes, the precursor is glaringly obvious.

Man’s Best  is a 2024 SF comic, originally five issues long and then collected into a single book-sized volume, written by Pornsak Pichetshote, drawn and colored by Jesse Lonergan, and lettered by Jeff Powell. (I don’t usually credit letterers, but Powell is on the cover, and I try to defer to the book most of the time.)

There is a starship, heading to an alien planet to test a terraforming device. Earth, of course, is falling apart in the background, for thematically important but non-specific “people are fighting” reasons – it’s not quite the ’70s-standard population-bomb argument, but maybe a revised and updated version of that. Among the humans, there is a Captain and a Doctor, and then an undifferentiated mass of everyone else.

The Doctor – a woman, and very feminine-coded, with big fluffy hair and huge circular glasses – has three animals, said specifically to be for emotional support on this journey. (The Captain is similarly masculine-coded, all craggy features and eyepatch.) But the animals also are heavily cyborged, or maybe just lightly cyborged (one definitely has a new leg) and live inside exoskeletons that augment them. They are Athos, Porthos, and….Lovey; two dogs and a cat, with the cat as the leader in a twist that will amuse anyone who has ever met a cat.

For some reason – this really isn’t clear – the Doctor is running the animals through training sessions in what seems to be a Star Trek holodeck, in which they fight giant robots they call Klangers. This is the beginning of the story, so they do not work well together, and fail. This clearly sets up Narrative Tension for when the animals have to battle robots for real later in the book.

Anyway, the planet they’re supposed to test the terraforming doohickey on is missing, which leads to some doomy speeches from the humans. But a planet suddenly appears, and the ship crashes into it. The animals wake up, somewhat later, in the wreckage. The humans are all gone.

So they decide – not without squabbling, because we need to see them squabble a lot for aforementioned Narrative Tension reasons – to save the Doctor and the Captain, somehow, using their various technological enhancements and The Power of Friendship. (Well, they don’t say the latter.)

The planet they landed on is some kind of third-generation copy of the Well World, with various regions separated by some kind of gates – we don’t see big walls around the hex-equivalents, so it might be implemented somewhat differently, but it’s the same idea: a big planet full of sentients from lots of other planets all over the place, each in their own habitat. And, of course, there are robots that run the whole thing, which are hostile to Our Animal Heroes. Plenty of the inhabitants of the individual regions are somewhat hostile, too, so there’s a lot of running and fighting and squabbling, as the animals see their tech enhancements get degraded, destroyed, or removed along the way.

They also learn a bit about the purpose of this world, and do, of course, eventually get to the Doctor and the Captain, where there is a Shocking Revelation and a big Boss Fight with a robot that looks just like the one from their training. In the aftermath, the animals need to make a decision about The Fate of Earth, and we readers think they make a pretty good one – but it is a bit of a “Lady and the Tiger” ending as to whether their decision will work.

For all of the “Earth is doomed because people Can’t Get Along” talk and the eternally-squabbling animals, this is a fairly positive story: it does come down on the side of humanity being salvageable, which could be a bit of a stretch in a story about uplifted animals made to fight robots. I found it a bit talky but pleasant, and didn’t argue with the premises (how are these animals uplifted? they seem to be just plain shelter rescues who can magically talk to each other in clear idiomatic English and eventually communicate with humans, too) as much as I normally would. And Lonergan is a great story-telling artist, particularly for SF stories like this one: he gives the action sequences a lot of punch and energy.

I found Man’s Best to be somewhat lighter and fluffier than I think it wanted me to, but it’s just fine for what it is. And if you want cyborged-animals-fighting-robots action, it can’t be beat.

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

0

Bridge Planet Nine by Jared Throne

I came into this book with almost no expectations, and was happily surprised – it’s a taut, smartly-paced crime thriller in a lived-in SF universe. I’ll try not to spoil what turns into a twisty plot with a lot of revelations, but keep that in mind.

Bridge Planet Nine  is Jared Throne’s second full-length graphic novel, and I think the first to be published by an established company – Top Shelf put it out in October. It’s the kind of book that takes unabashedly genre materials, uses them well, and mixes them to make its own story.

It’s the medium future. Humanity has expanded to some unknown number of other planets, and seems to be living under a mildly dystopian corporatocracy – well, about as dystopian and corporate-ruled as today, frankly. One of those corporations, Partna, has a string of “Bridge Planets” – uninhabited worlds used as refueling stations for automated transport ships. It sounds like the point is either to extract all of the mineral wealth from those planets or to degrade them enough that Partna can take full ownership for some other activity later – or maybe both.

Four people are planning a heist on one of those planets. Garrett was a VP at Partna before a scandal – which he claims he had nothing to do with – took him down, tossed him in prison, and ruined his life. He has the knowledge and the desire to hurt Partna. The other three are specialists: Hudson is a long-time criminal with a lot of expertise; Wes is the one who’ll get them through digital security, with his reprogrammed drone Etta; and Pearl, Wes’s sister, is the pilot. They have contacts so they can “borrow” a ship to get there and back – not in a lot of comfort, but good enough.

Garrett knows of a high-value ship, with extra security, coming into Bridge Planet Nine soon. The ship, and the planet, are completely automated – no staff at all. So the four heisters just have to get there, quietly take what they want, and get back out – a big payout for all four of them, minimal risk.

Of course it’s not that simple.

Before we meet the heisters, there’s what I might call a cold open. A group of people, on a planet somewhere, execute or sacrifice one member of their group by chaining him outside at night and removing the mask they all wear. Something in the environment kills him, unpleasantly, almost immediately. We don’t know exactly where they are. But we can guess.

Garrett and crew do get to Bridge Planet Nine without trouble, and park their ship away from the transfer station they plan to hit. They take a ground truck over, marvel at the ruined buildings from when this was an inhabited planet, and get to work on the security at the transfer station. They know their jobs, are smart and organized, and have planned carefully. (This is roughly a third of the way into the book.)

Things go badly in unexpected ways, as they always will in a heist thriller. The mission shifts, there are revelations of what Partna did and is doing on Bridge Planet Nine, and, of course, there is sudden violence and death. There are other characters, too, of course. You need to have a larger cast than just four people to have enough deaths to make a thriller.

The borrowed ship does lift off from the planet at the end of the story; I’ll say that much. It does return to Earth, with a crew and a pilot. The people on that ship are not unrewarded by their efforts on Bridge Planet Nine. It’s a good ending, a satisfying ending – one that fits for both a heist thriller and a gritty anti-corporate SF story.

Throne draws this in an indy-friendly style, with sharp spotted blacks, crisply distinct faces, and a good eye for design – both of his pages and for elements in his world. Suitably for both the heist and grungy-SF genres, most of the background elements look worn, lived-in, half-broken – he draws a universe that’s already seen a lot of activity, where the street has been making its own uses for things for a long time now. Bridge Planet Nine is impressive: it tells its cross-genre story well, with distinctive characters, a strong sense of place, and serious tension throughout.

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

0

The Joy of Snacking by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell

There were three major comics memoirs by women in the fall of 2025, all about the same cluster of topics: eating, cooking, family, and how those things are connected. I don’t know if it’s going to be surprising to anyone that many women have issues around both eating (their bodies are often policed by others) and cooking (they are generally assumed to be responsible for feeding the people around them), but the cluster is an interesting thing, and I hope someone better-qualified than me (an actual woman, at a minimum) digs in and looks at the three books together.

I first saw Jennifer Hayden’s Where There’s Smoke, There’s Dinner , published in November, leaning towards the production side of food and making comic hay about Hayden’s inability or unwillingness to do it well. Then I noticed My Perfectly Imperfect Body  by Debbie Tung from September, which is more focused on the consumption side of food, and a bout of disordered eating in Tung’s youth.

Published in between the two of those is The Joy of Snacking , from Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, whose work I’ve seen as a cartoonist in The New Yorker, but has also done a previous comics memoir, illustrated several other books, made a few documentary movies, and also works in burlesque.

Snacking is mostly about eating – young Hilary was what we call “a picky eater,” and that’s continued into her adult life. (She’s now in her early thirties.) The spine of this book is, as the title implies, “snacking” – Campbell is one of those people who eats lots of little bits all day long, isn’t terribly fond of big meals, and tends to focus on a few preferred, beloved, standard snacks. (She also says this is a youngest-kid thing, which made me realize my younger son is also a grazer – there’s a kind of bowl that he uses to gather stuff to eat, and we see them pile up in the sink – so I tentatively think her theory has some merit and she should get a major research grant to investigate it.)

Campbell organizes Snacking into loose chapters, bouncing between two timelines: her childhood and young-adulthood, as she discovered new foods and mostly tried to avoid them, and the last few years and her tumultuous relationship with a man she calls E. Separating scenes or sections are cookbook-like pages, which are each about a food Campbell likes – apples and peanut butter, or “a baggie of goldfish,” or “a bowl of potato chips,” or Cool Ranch Doritos – with details on how to “prepare” them, when and where to eat them, and their significance to her.

It might be the fact that this isn’t her first memoir, but I found Campbell to be harder on herself than other people – in particular, E comes across (maybe, though, because I am a man) as a fairly reasonable guy trying to live with Campbell’s issues, as the two of them snipe at each other in that deeply nasty way some couples develop. I’m sure he had his flaws, but I felt that Campbell presented him in a mostly-positive light: he’s a guy who is in many ways her opposite (a foodie who works selling wine to restaurants!), but they made it work, more or less, for a number of years.

This is not a how-I-changed book, or a I-fixed-my-problem book. Campbell likes snacking. She’s going to continue doing it. On the other hand, this isn’t entirely a celebration, since she’s also clear that she had a weird, often unpleasant childhood because of her food issues, and that it’s affected her adult life in ways she doesn’t like. That tension plays out throughout the book – can she be herself, eat the stuff she likes (and maybe “normal” food, too, OK, sure, sometimes), and go through life with less stress and anxiety? Well, maybe. But how about some popcorn and white wine now, while she thinks about it?

This is a big book, with some aspects I’ve not even mentioned – Campbell traces the eating habits of her parents as well in flashback sections, so it’s not just a book about her individually – and a warm open-heartedness I found deeply engaging. Campbell has a cartoony, dense style here: her people are loosely defined with thin lines, her panels are many and jammed together without gutters, her dialogue is long and rambling, like real people. This is a fun book about a distinctive person who’s not afraid to show herself being odd and quirky – that’s the whole point of the exercise. I don’t know if anyone else eats quite like Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell does, but, then again, do any of us really eat like all of the rest of us? This book made me wonder that – and that’s a good thing to wonder about.

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

0

Hi, It’s Me Again by Asher Perlman

I bemoan the sorry state of single-panel cartoons a lot here – because I like them, and because they used to be a massive tide rolling across popular culture, so there were many more of the things I liked, albeit mostly before I was born – so it’s nice to be able to balance that out now and then.

Asher Perlman’s first book of cartoons, covering a decade or so of toil and strife, was published last fall: Well, This Is Me . It was a best-seller, says the publisher, and I believe them. The reason I believe them is because they backed it up: they published what looks very much like a sequel to the first book just about exactly a year later, which is the time-honored model for a publisher that has found a good thing and wants it to continue as long as they possibly can.

The 2025 Asher Perlman collection is Hi, It’s Me Again , featuring the same character (and a variation on the joke) from the cover of the first book. Again, “hey, this is a sequel!” is a reaction you aim for when the first thing did well, so I am happy for Perlman and for comics-in-book-form in general.

Like the first book, it has three new short page-formatted comic sections to organize it (Introduction, Interlude, Epilogue), all with the “real” Perlman taking to another character about his work, in the usual half self-deprecating, half self-aggrandizing manner appropriate for comedy.

In between are two big sections, transparently called Part One and Part Two, each with eighty or ninety single-panel cartoons. The whole book is just about two hundred pages long, so it has almost that many pages of Perlman art and gags.

The only remaining major regular outlet for single-panel cartoons is The New Yorker, and Perlman does appear regularly there. According to the copyright page, nine of the cartoons here first appeared in that magazine – it’s possible that some of the others appeared elsewhere, but likely the vast majority of them are new to this book. (At least as far as the general public goes; my guess is that they were part of Perlman’s weekly “batches” over the past who-knows-how-long, though potentially reworked or finished for this book.)

As always, it’s difficult to say anything specific about a pile of nearly two hundred individual cartoons. Perlman has a fine modern cartoon style, with confident lines mostly of a single weight and various tones overlaid for texture and depth, and his ideas and punch lines are funny. (At least, I think so, and I’m the one reading the book.) A lot of people liked the first book; if you were one of them, this second book is more of the same stuff you already liked.

If you weren’t one of them, well, a lot of people liked the first book, so the odds you’ll like this one are solid – give it a try, won’t you? Help keep single-panel cartoons alive; it’s your civic duty.

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

0

Laser Eye Surgery by Walker Tate

In a city somewhere, there’s a tall man, bald on top. We don’t know his name. We don’t know his job, or if he has one. We know he lives in a small apartment, plagued by a mouse he keeps trying to catch, and that he eats some kind of canned food, maybe exclusively, and gets big packages of the cans in the mail. We think he’s some kind of a nut, or a hermit, or similar – one of those urban types who radiate a “don’t talk to me” aura as you see them stalking down the street or ranting on a corner or staring intently at something you can’t see.

This man has bad eyesight: he wears glasses sometimes, contacts sometimes. One day, he finds a flyer about eye correction – a local clinic is offering a two-eyes-for-the-price-of-one deal, with the testing upfront thrown in free and satisfaction guaranteed. He puts the flyer away, but remembers it when, the next morning, he accidentally steps on his glasses, breaking them.

So he goes to the clinic, which we readers see is shadier than he realizes. He’s tested, has the operation. He seems to stay in that clinic, just lying on a table recuperating, for many days, and eventually goes home, his sight hugely improved. But he has floaters – more than before, sometimes overwhelmingly so. (As someone who has had his optometrist say to him “you have a lot of floaters” basically every yearly visit for two decades, I sympathize but also think he’s over-reacting. But I think his deal is to over-react.)

Things escalate; the man, as we may have expected, tends to be paranoid and subject to conspiratorial thinking…and may also be right.

This is Laser Eye Surgery , the first graphic novel by New York cartoonist Walker Tate. Tate works in thin lines, tightly defined and precise, almost mechanical but with life and energy to them. His writing is laconic and minimal; the story told mostly through images.

The defining image, in fact, is of this man, striding at pace – often away from the viewer, usually at an angle. Always without eyes – either his face is turned away or Tate just doesn’t draw that level of detail. His eyes show up in close-up, and drive some imagistic sequences where the floaters wander about and proliferate, in a way we think the man considers deliberate.

Tate tells this story quietly, with an assurance that the reader will pick up the nuances and connect the dots – there’s no narration, and minimal details. This is a book about seeing, and so the reader must see it. I don’t know if I got all of the things Tate was trying to say, but I’m impressed by the power of his images and by the confident way he constructed this story; I want to see more of his work.

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

0

Jim Henson’s The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow adapted by Roger Langridge

I knew I was going to be writing this post on Thanksgiving morning, so I picked an appropriate book. Of course, since time flows forward, you’re reading this much later, untethered from any holiday (unless you celebrate Three Kings’ Day, in which case, go you), but that’s the reason for it.

Jim Henson was the kind of creative personality who generated a lot of ideas. My sense is that most of them never happened; I don’t know what that meant for his focus on the projects that did happen, but the work was generally top-quality, so I don’t suppose it matters. He generally worked with screenwriter Jerry Juhl, who put Henson ideas into a usable form, and they were credited together with scripts for a lot of projects that did come to fruition.

As well as a lot of things that are still sitting in trunks at the Henson Company, or Disney, or wherever.

One of those was a script from the late ’60s for a Thanksgiving special, to include both Muppets and live-action actors. So not quite an early precursor to Emmett Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, but clearly coming from the same strand of Henson’s creative output. The special was never made; it’s ’60s enough that I doubt it ever would get made now.

But, about ten years ago, the Jim Henson Company decided, for whatever reason, they wanted to get this project out into the world somehow, and connected with cartoonist Roger Langridge. Langridge took the Henson/Juhl script, turned it into four issues of comics, and drew it all, with colors by Ian Herring.

And that’s how we got to Jim Henson’s The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow .

Somewhere fairly rural in New England, in a region with a lot of turkey farms, is the small town of Turkey Hollow. Living there is Timmy Henderson, a boy who wants to learn to play his guitar but is finding it difficult, his hippie-ish older sister Ann, their aunt and guardian Clytemnestra, the grocer/mayor/sheriff/postmaster Grover Cowley, and nasty evil landowner Eldridge Sump.

Sump wants to drive the Hendersons from their land, for the usual I’m-evil, I-want-to-take-everything reasons in stories for children. He is thoroughly one-note, and you probably can already picture him in your mind: black clothes, white hair, little round glasses, goatee, sharp face, always scowling and declaiming.

Timmy is out practicing his guitar in the woods one day near Thanksgiving, and a meteor – which we saw crash-land three hundred years earlier in a prologue – opens, with five furry “monsters” emerging. They don’t talk, but they’re musical Muppets – each one makes a particular sound/note, and they help him with his song. He tries to hide the monsters from everyone else, but Ann and Aunt Cly soon find out, and love them just as much as he does, including at least one musical number. (This was going to be a musical, so the cast breaks into song every ten pages or so.)

Meanwhile, Sump has heard the monsters, and wants to use them to force the Hendersons off their land. He’s also got a plot – possibly originally unrelated – to steal all of the other turkeys from all of his neighbors for unspecified reasons, which he puts into action, framing the monsters. The monsters are thrown into jail for eating turkeys, even though we readers know they only eat rocks.

Timmy helps the monsters escape jail – because it’s difficult to hold rock-eating monsters in a stone building – and it all comes to a head on Thanksgiving, with a thug hired by Sump running around with a shotgun trying to kill the monsters, Grover investigating both real crimes and the ones Sump alleges, and other tomfoolery.

In the end, there’s a song, good wins out, and the missing turkeys are found unharmed and stolen in Sump’s house – so they can all be slaughtered and eaten in the final scene. (I mean, yes, that’s how it works, but you don’t expect it to be so blatant in a story for kids.) Oh, and Grover finally admits he’s hot for Aunt Cly, so they start dating.

This would have been a perfectly cromulent 1968 TV special, which would have been re-run annually for much of the ’70s and then probably half-forgotten, with revivals now and then. It wasn’t, but it’s a comic now, so that’s close enough. It’s not a lost classic, but it’s a very Henson-y thing, with all of the music and found-family stuff, and this package also includes photos of the puppets Henson’s team built for the network presentations back in 1968 and some other historical material, which adds to the package.

If you’re looking for a Thanksgiving-themed comic to read – and I was – there’s not a lot to choose from, but this is a solid choice. Langridge always does good work, particularly when trying to depict music on the page or when doing Muppet-adjacent stories, so this fits well with his strengths.

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

0

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Time Trout by Doug Savage

First up: I know I missed one. In between the original Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy  and this book, there was Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Disco Fever, which is unavailable from any library near me, digitally or physically. (In fact, none of the nearby libraries seem to have any of the Laser Moose books in dead-tree form, which shocks and annoys me.) I may have to read it in a bookstore at some point, assuming I remember.

But I’m pretty sure there weren’t any shocking revelations or major change in Disco Fever: this is a middle-grade graphic novel series about a moose who shoots lasers out of his eyes and his best friend the slightly more reasonable rabbit, and that’s going to be the whole point. Oh, and they fight crime. Well, maybe not crime as such, since they’re out in the woods – but they help nice people and foil miscreants, so basically the same thing.

OK, so maybe Laser Moose gets a little wild with his eye-lasers, and cuts off the deer Frank’s leg once in a while. These kinds of things will happen when you’re defending the forest. And, anyway, Doc the raccoon can sew Frank’s leg back on. Again.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Time Trout is just what the title implies: another adventure of Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, in which they meet and help out a time-traveling fish. A time-traveler from the polluted far future came back to their bucolic wilderness and dropped his time gizmo, which the fish immediately ate. (Because “I thought it might be a grasshopper. I tend to eat anything in the river, just in case it’s a tasty grasshopper. You don’t want to find out that it was a grasshopper later, when it’s already gone,” which makes just as much sense as anyone’s motivation in this series.) 

This makes the fish travel semi-randomly in time: a big purple vortex appears repeatedly to pull him off when he thinks about past events and then again to return him to the present day. Our heroes – plus the evil Aquabear from the first book – get caught up in the shenanigans, with the usual time-travel complications, including changing the past and seeing how current-day things actually got that way. Oh, and dinosaurs. Time-travel stories are required to have dinosaurs.

In the end, Moose and Rabbit put (nearly) everyone back in their proper times, get the time gizmo back to the traveler, and watch the fish follow the traveler off to the future in search of adventure.

It is aimed at middle-graders, which may be a detriment for some readers. I love the goofy tone, and the plot’s zippiness, and creator Doug Savage’s clean cartoony lines, all of which make it a lot of fun and solidly land it in that genre. Graphic novels for pre-teens can often be substantially less serious than those for older readers, and I appreciate that a lot. Savage is particularly good at that kind of thing.

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

0

Graylight by Naomi Nowak

Naomi Nowak published three graphic novels in the Aughts – I missed the first one, Unholy Kinship, but covered the second one, House of Clay, for ComicMix at the time. And now I’ve finally found my way to the third book, 2009’s Graylight .

At the time, I referred to her as “a cartoonist resident in Sweden, of Hungarian-Polish ancestry” and noted that she seemed to work in English. She might not be making comics, but she seems to still be in Sweden, and still making art – paintings and jewelry, these days. I don’t want to say art is art – I like to see narrative work, and have a bias in that direction – but it’s great to see artists having what looks like a reasonably sustainable career, making the things they want to.

Graylight is an allusive, imagistic book, colored out to the edge of the pages in tones that look just a bit desaturated to my eye – a unique, particular palette surrounding and supporting Nowak’s complex lines and complicated page structures. Lines defining people sometimes fade out or end unexpectedly, while objects – especially thematically important ones, seem to be closer to the surface of the page and shown in more detail.

The underlying story isn’t as complex as the way Nowak tells it: there’s a young woman, Sasha, in this unnamed village that we assume is somewhere in Sweden. She’s a bit flighty and self-centered: we see her with her friends and meeting a reporter, Erik, in town to interview a famous reclusive author, Aurora, who lives in the woods nearby.

Sasha impulsively – we think she does everything impulsively; she’s that kind of young person – goes along with Erik as his “photographer,” though we don’t see her holding a camera at any point. Aurora and her grown son Edmund are not happy there’s someone else with Erik for the interview, so Sasha flounces off, but not before (impulsively) stealing a book from Aurora’s house.

Sasha, over the next few days, starts a no-strings relationship with Erik – this somewhat frustrates him, since he wants more. 

There’s also something of a curse that starts to hit her, in ways Nowak presents almost entirely imagistically. Aurora knows she has stolen the book, and believes Sasha has the same kind of power she does – she’s a witch, more or less, and calls on two others like her to make the traditional trinity to call down her curse on Sasha.

There’s also what the book description calls a love triangle – Edmund hangs around, watching Sasha during the days before the curse comes on – but it’s not entirely clear if he’s in love with her, fascinated with her as an example of the outside world he’s unfamiliar with, or just keeping an eye on her for his mother. In any case, he eventually comes to see her, as the curse starts affecting her more strongly, and retrieves the book and breaks the curse (these may be the same action).

Again, Nowak tells this story through gesture – drawn in an idiosyncratic way – and allusive dialogue and imagistic pictures, rather than by explaining in any detail. It’s a visually fascinating book, full of striking images, with a story that I suspect different readers will take in somewhat different ways.

So many comics are easily pigeon-holed; it’s refreshing to find one as specific and different, in both style and substance, as this one.

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

0

Dear Beloved Stranger by Dino Pai

Everyone has one book in them, they say. Usually the “how I got here” story – whatever was unique or special or striking about childhood or life in general. I don’t think that’s dismissive; I like to think of it as celebratory: everyone can make at least one work of art, if they put in the time and effort and have the drive.

And when I come across a book that is “how I got here,” I wonder if this was the one book, or the springboard to a continuing career.

Dino Pai’s first major work was the 2013 graphic novel Dear Beloved Stranger . It’s somewhat autobiographical: Pai was a new graduate from art school, and his central character here is a new art school graduate named Dino. I never want to assume with semi-autobiographical stories, though: “semi” is a huge territory, and just using your own name doesn’t mean any particular moment or thought is taken from life.

Stranger is largely about the desire to create: Dino is out of school, looking for a job without much luck so far, and feeling stuck. So he starts making a story, after running into former classmate Cathy. That story is the story we’re reading, more or less, framed by letters to an unnamed “Dear Beloved Stranger.” I thought there was going to be some romantic tension with Cathy, or that she was the one Dino was writing to – I’m not sure if that was my misreading, Pai making that a possibility deliberately, or an unfortunate choice in the work.

But Cathy is really just the catalyst here, so making her an attractive classmate, of the gender Dino is attracted to, feels like a distraction – she could have been a male classmate, or a teacher, or some other mentor, and that would have made that role more distinct from the “Dear Beloved Stranger.” (Of course, maybe the answer is Pai wanted that ambiguity, or simply that “Cathy” was the real person in Pai’s actual life, and that bit is less “semi” and more fully autobiographical.)

The book is in multiple sections, in somewhat different art styles: the story of the young artist Dino, the work he’s creating, and how they merge together in the end. Pai moves from mostly greyish tones for the “real” scenes and soft colors for the fantasy sequences, both with an attractively detailed, just-this-side-of-fussy style.

We do learn who the stranger is in the end; I won’t spoil that here. It’s personal and important for Dino, and probably equally so for the real Pai, but I did wish it had been weaved in earlier in the book, and that Cathy wasn’t there as such an obvious red herring. But the story is satisfying; we feel for Dino and think that Pai did well in this first major work.

And if we then search to see what he’s done since – which I did – we find that he’s mostly been working in animation since then, making stories, but that he seems to have done some comics as well. I’m always happy to see that: I want creators to keep creating, for the people who make “here’s how I broke through and actually started making art” stories to keep doing that, in whatever ways they can and want to. So Dear Beloved Stranger was the beginning, but there’s more after it: this launched Dino Pai, and he’s been going since then.

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

The Disappearance of Charley Butters by Zach Worton

Charley Butters is probably dead. He was a painter in his mid-life during the later 1950s, so by the time of this 2015 graphic novel – set, as far as I can tell, basically contemporaneously – he would have been at least in his eighties. But there are two more books in this series, so I suppose he may show up as a centenarian eventually.

This is not really the story of Charley Butters, though. He’s in the title, and his model and mystery is important, yes. But it’s the story of Travis, a young man who works in a record store and sings in a black metal band.

Travis and his two bandmates are going off into the woods with filmmaker Stuart, to gesticulate and grimace in extreme makeup – they’re making a video. The four guys are bickering, complaining about each other, nagging, picking on each other – they’re grumpy and combative, in a bad mood.

That’s probably good for death metal, though. You don’t want to be too happy when you’re invoking the devil.

After a couple of hours of mugging in one clearing, they head over to their next filming location – but stop when they see an old shack. Maybe there’s something cool there they can put into the video?

They “break” into the shack – the door was jammed shut but not locked, and the place is decades old, untouched for who knows how long. Inside, they find a lot of notebooks, some old canned goods, and what looks like a couple of dozen versions of the same painting.

This was Charley Butter’s cabin: he built it, after running away from the art scene in whatever the local city is. (This is set somewhere in Canada, probably around one of the smaller cities in Ontario – creator Zach Worton is from Mississauga, so that can be Guess #1.) The guys poke through his stuff, realize he was a “schizo,” and head off to finish up the video.

But Travis comes back later, to collect all the notebooks, to read Butters’ diaries. He’s becoming fascinated with what I suppose I should call The Disappearance of Charley Butters .

Travis is unhappy – he started this band on a lark, but it’s not his kind of music, and central figure Mike is an alcoholic asshole with very particular, demanding notions of what’s appropriate for black metal. So he quits the band, cuts his hair, starts dating a girl named Kat, and spends a lot of time reading the Charley Butters notebooks.

Parallel to Travis’s story, we get flashbacks to Butters – he has a successful gallery show, but starts having auditory hallucinations, which leads him out to that wooded cabin. He becomes entirely reclusive, avoiding all people.

Travis is becoming fascinated with Butters’ story – and, coincidentally, so is Stuart, the filmmaker who made their video. The two decide to make a documentary about Butters, with Travis as the on-camera interviewer and Stuart directing. Their first interview is with Butter’s wife (ex-wife? widow?) Eleanor, which doesn’t go well – Travis keeps interrupting her, and asking the wrong questions first – and gets cut off early.

But they still want to make the documentary. That’s where this book ends: they know that Butters existed, that he lived in the woods for a while and then wandered off somewhere else, and they intend to keep investigating.

Worton has a fine storytelling eye here; he’s mostly working in a four-panel grid, and has a crisp style that’s particularly good in silent panels and contemplative moments. The story is obviously not done, but what’s here is satisfying enough while clearly being the first part of a longer piece. (Worton did make two more graphic novels to complete the trilogy between 2016 and 2018; I haven’t seen them yet.)

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

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks