Tagged: comics

The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber by Juni Ba and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

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Knowing what needs to be said in a story, and what can just be implied, is always tricky. We can all think of works that fail in both directions – overexplaining, or leaving things too murky.

I think The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber  doesn’t quite explain all of the things it should have – but it’s close, and some readers might find the way it implies its world is just fine. So let me just note that, and note that this is writer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s first graphic novel, and point out that traditionally ties go to the runner.

I have no quibbles about the art by Juni Ba, which is detailed in quirky, grotesque ways that fits this world perfectly. Also, I should say that the lettering is by Otsamane-Elhaou – the sound effects are particularly fun, and he makes the captions and dialogue slightly italic to give the book a distinctive look, too.

I don’t know if this book is specifically for younger readers, but it has a vibe that upper-elementary-school kids will probably enjoy, and the professional-wrestling influences also tend to make the violence stylized and bloodless in ways that are young-reader-friendly.

We’re in a world of monsters – think Monsters, Inc., where everyone is a slightly different kind of creature, and you’ll be close – where strength and fighting ability seem to be prized above all other traits. (Or, at least, this story deals with that side of this world.) A young, small monster named Felix is timid, bullied by a gang of other monsters from his school. They dare him to ring a random doorbell; he does. A craggy old monster answers the door, and seems to want to talk to this random small interloper for reasons that are never clear. He grabs at Felix, who runs away immediately, and loses his backpack to the old guy.

This is all heavily narrated, mostly in ways that tell us things we can already see on-panel rather than adding detail to the world – it’s a very story-book voice, as if telling the story many years later.

Anyway, Felix is bullied at school and browbeaten by his parents and denigrated by his teachers: he’s the usual mousy little guy who needs to learn to stick up for himself. In trying to get his backpack back, he accidentally stows away in the old guy’s car – I suppose I should make it clear that the old guy is Macabber, the other half of the title – as he goes back to the town of his birth.

Macabber is the former World Champion of Monstering, hugely dominant in his era. Monstering is basically pro wrestling, only in a society of monsters where everyone has completely different bodies from each other. He left this town to go off for the big fights, leaving his former best friend behind. He never returned – until now, of course – in however many years it’s been.

The town is a dump now, which everyone living there blames Macabber for. There’s no reason for this I can figure out: it’s a weird mix of “you’re supposed to support the old neighborhood” and “you left us behind.” And everyone is much more likely to resolve interpersonal conflicts by punching rather than talking about things, which may be one reason why we don’t get any clear, or convincing, explanations.

Anyway, the local hooligans – little guys in knight’s armor – find and harass and then recruit Felix, again for murky reasons. Macabber meets his once-best friend, sort-of apologizes for having a successful career elsewhere, and feels guilty. We get a lot of flashbacks to Macabber’s fighting career, which was zippy and action-packed.

That portion of the story doesn’t exactly resolve, but we flash forward suddenly, to see that Felix also goes into Monstering, and is even better at it than Macabber was – we get a few of his fights, too – but we mostly see him at the end of his career, rich and successful and done with it all.

Felix does not seem to have run away from any towns, or beaten up any of his best friends to do so, or run his career in any ways that would make us dislike him. But he has the same sad attitude at the end of his career Macabber did – not sad because it’s over, not sad because he stomped over people to get there, but just generally sad because he’s not sure if he’s a good or bad person, I guess.

I want to say that the lesson Unlikely Story is trying to make – or the lesson it comes closest to making – is that fighting people for a living is a bad idea; that violence is never the answer, little trooper. But it’s so clearly a book about how Monstering is fun and exciting and awesome that doesn’t really seem to fit.

So I’m puzzled by Unlikely Story. It seems to want to give me a Lesson About Life, but its two characters are not parallel in any ways that reinforce the Lesson it seems to want to push. What they have in common, at the end of their careers, is a habit of speaking in vague circumlocutions – this may be more Otsmane-Elhaou’s writing style – and a sense that they are sad because it’s all over and they’re no longer Monstering Champion of the World anymore, which, um, yeah, would be sad, wouldn’t it?

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

Laid Waste by Julia Gfrörer

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The best creators are unique, with styles and concerns different from everyone else. You know their work clearly: it is what it is, and it is intensely itself.

Julia Gfrörer draws thin lines, mostly all the same width. Her stories are set in the deep European past, told straightforwardly with a cold but not unsympathetic camera-eye. They are about death most of the time, I think.

Laid Waste  was her 2016 graphic novel; it followed Black Is the Color , and – if Wikipedia can be trusted – is still her most recent book.

It’s set during the plague: probably the 1300s, somewhere in Europe. In an unnamed town, there’s a woman named Agnes who seems to be immune to the plague – well, we first see her “die” of it as a baby, and then be pulled out of her grave, so the scientific explanation is that she survived it once and afterward was immune.

There could also be a supernatural explanation. The people in this world are more likely to believe that one. It doesn’t comfort them – nothing would comfort them right now, as all the people around them are dying, one by one, painfully and hideously, and the dogs and rats flourish, growing more bold every day.

The dead are all around. We see people die, we see the bodies piled in the churchyard and a ditch. We see the dogs fight over those bodies. We see the survivors – the current survivors; this isn’t over yet – continuing with their lives, milking cows and tending crops. Even when the world is ending, they still need to eat.

And we see Agnes at the center of this: strong and capable and healthy. She’s holding her older sister when she dies early in the book; she sees other deaths, lugs other bodies. What she’s going through is unendurable, we think – but what’s the alternative? She is still alive. So many others are dead.

The other main character is Giles, a neighbor. He also seems to be a lucky one, still healthy as we see him. But death strikes his family as well: no one in this village is untouched, not the children, not the plague doctor with his pointy mask.

Agnes and Giles connect: I’ll call it that. Cling to each other, I suppose, as two of the few people healthy enough to keep things going. As the ones who have to keep things going, until they fall themselves.

Agnes and Giles, and the rest of their village, believe in the supernatural – Death personified, saints and angels. They see and talk about that; it may be “real” in the world of the story, but it’s not nice and it’s not comforting. This is a hard world, full of death and woe, and no one talks about the joys of the afterlife, seeing their friends and family die in pain.

Laid Waste is a short book: about eighty pages, covering just a few days. It looks unflinchingly at this world of death and sadness, and we see it through the eyes of the inhabitants. It is powerful and chilly and unnerving and, maybe, with just a tiny bit of hope at the end. (If I had titles for these posts, this one would be “Let Me Walk You Home.”)

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

All Tomorrow’s Parties by Koren Shadmi

The Velvet Underground were famously the band who had only a very small fanbase while they were around – but, the joke went, every single one of those fans started bands of their own. So they were massively influential, which is nice, but not usually what people start rock bands to achieve.

Koren Shadmi’s 2023 graphic novel All Tomorrow’s Parties: The Velvet Underground Story  tells the story of the band in comics format. It follows Shadmi’s previous nonfiction books Lugosi  and The Twilight Man , more traditional pop-culture bios of a single person, as well as a number of Shadmi’s fictional works, like Bionic . He’s been making book-length comics for more than a decade now, through a bunch of variations, and clearly has the chops to do a more complicated book like this one, with multiple main characters and a lot of faces to get right on the page.

Now, I am not one of those fabled Velvets fans – I’ve heard their music, here and there, and obviously heard a lot of people influenced by them, but it’s never been my thing. I’m here partly out of vague interest in the famous story, partly for the mid-60s vibe around Andy Warhol’s Factory, and partly because I’m just keeping up with Shadmi’s career.

So I think Shadmi does this well, but I might not be the one you trust on that. He frames the main story with Andy Warhol’s 1987 funeral, the first time former Velvet creative titans Lou Reed and John Cale had spoken in nearly two decades, and tells the main story conventionally, starting with quick glances at Reed and Cale as tormented teenagers in Long Island and Wales, respectively, before bringing all the threads together in New York’s Lower East Side in the early 1960s.

The core of the book is the early days – say roughly 1963 to 1970 – when Reed and Cale first met and started making music together, then forming the band, connecting with Warhol and his whole weird entourage/machine, and finally recording their first two records. The book doesn’t exactly end when Reed kicks Cale out of the band unilaterally in 1968, but there’s only two short chapters after that point: one a vignette of the band’s life in 1970, their last failing grasp at popularity; and the other returning to the frame story in 1987 to show how Cale and Reed reconciled, made a record together about Warhol, and eventually had a small Velvets reunion in the early ’90s.

That’s probably as much of the story as I’ll bother to explain: the core audience for this book knows all of these details much better than I do.

Shadmi focuses on the band members in a rough scale of importance: primarily Reed, only slightly lesser Cale, and then a big drop down to guitarist Sterling Morrison (who’s part of a lot of scenes, but not as active), and then even more down to drummer Mo Tucker (who seems to have been pretty quiet to begin with). Nico is there but oddly, not really fitting in – just as she was in real life. He’s good at their faces, though at times the book is oddly a series of images of Reed’s craggy face masked by sunglasses – just as it was at the time, of course.

There’s a lot of material here, and Shadmi has good control of it. I did wonder about some threads that never quite get resolved – Reed probably kicked his drug habit somewhere between 1970 and 1987 (or possibly even before 1970), but it doesn’t happen in the book. But this is a big, messy story about a bunch of messy, complex people who fought a lot, did a lot of weird things, and were never that consistent about what they did or how they explained it afterward.

I’m slightly surprised there was a comics biography of the Velvets in the first place. I’m happy to see it’s this serious, comprehensive, and through.

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

Two Dead by Van Jensen and Nate Powell

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I’ll probably be short here – my time is limited this morning and my old instincts in writing about mysteries (from doing reader’s reports for a decade and a half for bookclubs) is to explain everything in order, using every character’s name prominently. And that is, frankly, a lousy model for writing about mystery stories, as anyone can see.

Two Dead  is a mystery, or maybe a thriller, since we know most of the details from the beginning. It was written by Van Jensen and drawn by Nate Powell, telling a story of cops and criminals in 1946 Little Rock – a city they both know well, though maybe not in that era. (They’re both somewhat too young to have been around then – frankly, nearly everyone in the world at this point is too young to have been around eighty years ago.) It’s a graphic novel, in an oversized format, which presents Powell’s characteristic ominous chiaroscuro art well.

Like many stories about crime and criminals, it’s a book of dualities – there are four main characters, in groups of two. Gideon Kemp is a young WWII veteran, who just joined the police force as a detective and is secretly working for the mayor to root out the organized crime that at least partially runs this city. He’s mentored by Abraham Bailey, the haunted middle-aged Chief of Detectives, who is teetering on the edge of some kind of mental breakdown. (He sees visions of his original, long-dead partner all the time, for the most obvious manifestation.)

On the other side of one line in town – the color barrier – are brothers Jacob and Esau Davis. (Jensen may be just a bit too obvious with the names here.) Jacob is another WWII veteran, and head of the unpaid, volunteer Black police force that patrols their neighborhoods: it’s a bit more than a neighborhood watch, since there’s some backing from the government, but they are not cops and they are not equal to the White population and they seem to mostly try to keep things from exploding. Esau works for the criminal gangs that run Little Rock, and, as the book begins, has just attracted the attention of one of the leaders, Big Mike.

The story of Two Dead is what those four characters do – how Gideon and Abe try to stop organized crime, in their own ways (and what they find along the way, how that crime has infiltrated local government), and how Jacob and Esau are caught in the middle of it, pulled to one side or the other. And how Big Mike and his compatriots fight back, in the typically violent ways of organized criminals in an era when they could do nearly anything.

It’s not a happy story: both Gideon and Abe are suffering PTSD for different reasons, the Davis brothers are Black in a deeply racist town a decade before the Civil Rights era could give them any serious hope. And the title is Two Dead. It’s not quite noir, but it’s in the same broad territory – crime fiction set in a world with only shades of grey, where everyone has an agenda and most of them are at least slightly unbalanced.

An afterword explains that it’s all based on a true story – how closely isn’t clear, but it sounds fairly close. So the ending was baked in from the beginning: this all happened, more or less, eighty years ago. Jensen and Powell turn it into fiction – into a story, with structure and weight and solidity, not just a series of things that happen – and do it compellingly.

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

Spy Superb by Matt Kindt

Matt Kindt has been making stories about spies since the beginning of his career – but he’s found a new take this time.

Spy Superb  has a title that echoes his early success Super Spy (and its loose Lost Dossiers  follow-up), and that is definitely intentional – but Kindt is substantially less serious this time out than he was in his previous stories of spycraft.

This, instead, is a take on the James Bond idea: the suave, omnicompetent operative who can go anywhere, do anything, and always wins out for his side. (Which is, as it must be, our side, the side of freedom and democracy and English-speaking peoples.) Like so many other people doing James Bond takes over the past few decades – most obviously Austin Powers – Kindt makes that idea an obvious fake: no human being could actually do that, so what’s the real story?

In Kindt’s version – and this is explained in the first pages; no major spoilers here – the “spy superb” was constructed from the beginning in WWII as the perfect operative, by the fictional Half-Huit organization (co-run by the US OSS and their French equivalent). There was an original Spy Superb, but he died, stupidly, in his first mission, an immediate failure.

No matter: the organization realized they didn’t need a Spy Superb: they needed the idea of a Spy Superb, and a series of patsies to do the actual work – each one handled by career spies, generally given one small task to do, usually not even aware they were doing spycraft, and often liquidated afterward for maximum secrecy. Then all of the successes of Half-Huit would be attributed to their immortal, unstoppable premier agent.

Fast forward several decades. The most recent Spy Superb has been killed by someone unknown. And a disk he had, containing details of all the previous Spies Superb and other damaging details of the program, is on the loose. So all of those other spy agencies could learn the secret: it was all a trick.

To respond, the masters of Half-Huit activate the most delusional patsy possible: Jay, a wannabe novelist who is the guy on the cover. And their adversaries, sensing something big, send their best operatives: a Russian codenamed “Roche Chambeaux” and a Chinese woman who turns out to be a double (triple? quadruple?) agent, to kill what they still assume is a deadly super-agent.

Jay, of course, believes he is the best at whatever he does: he’s the kind of guy who mansplains absolutely anything at the drop of a hat, even though (no: entirely because) he knows nothing about it. He wanders through assassination attempts and globe-hopping adventure, surviving due to luck and his unassailable belief that he’s actually good at all these things.

There’s a good fight scene early where Jay accidentally kills three highly-trained Russian agents in his kitchen, just by trying to talk to them. After that, the random luck quiets down: I would have liked to see more of that, more of the clearly ludicrous silliness. Kindt instead mostly plays the action scenes straight, having Jay accompanied by a competent agent who wants him alive for most of the rest of the book, and so Jay mostly survives because of someone else’s ability rather than his own stupid incompetence.

That’s my overall take on Spy Superb: it’s fun, but doesn’t go quite as big or silly as it could. Jay is an idiot: that’s very clear. But we only see his idiocy save him once or twice – it could have been a lot funnier if it happened more often, more obviously, more blatantly.

There’s no reason there can’t be a sequel, though: even if Kindt doesn’t want to use Jay again, the concept means there will always be more Spies Superb, someone else even dumber and less connected to reality. And what we have here is funny – and having it in the same scratchy, rough art style that Kindt uses for his serious spy stories makes it that much funnier.

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

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 4: The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy by Stan Sakai

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The fourth collection of Stan Sakai’s long-running Usagi Yojimbo series collects a long – some would say “epic” – storyline that started in 1989 and ran through six issues of the comic. It’s largely the “gather all of the popular, previously separate, supporting characters” arc, and it has the same largely historical accurate but softened for tween readers tone as the rest of Usagi. [1]

In the interests of clarity, I should note that “Dragon” is a metaphor and “Conspiracy” is overblown: this is one feudal lord, conspiring with only his own lord and minions, planning in secret to launch a rebellion that could, potentially, maybe, topple the Shogun and would definitely knock off a couple of his local rivals and give him much more power and influence. “Dragon Bellow” is an artsy way of saying he’s going to use guns to do that.

Thus Usagi Yojimbo Book 4: The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy . There are basically two intersecting stories, neither one of which initially involves Usagi, our rabbit-samurai hero.

In the main plot, good-guy (super-literally: he is drawn as a baby panda) Lord Noriyuki thinks his neighbor Lord Tamikuro is up to something mischievous. Tamikuro is a supporter of Lord Hikiji, the big bad of the series, who is continually scheming to depose the shogun. (Everyone seems to know this – perhaps except for the shogun.)

So Noriyuki sends a delegation to visit Tamikuro, led by the female samurai Tomoe Ame, who Usagi met and almost had a romance with in a previous story. And of course Tamikuro is scheming, having gathered a large stockpile of guns, and will be attacking Noriyuki any day now. Tomoe attempts to get back to her lord with the big news, but is captured.

Meanwhile, the ronin Gen (a big, mostly honorable rhino) is chasing the blind swords-pig Ino for the bounty on the latter’s head. Both of them had been occasional allies of Usagi in the past, and they’re heading through this same territory right now.

Usagi gets pulled into the story as he’s also traveling through this region on foot: he sees Tamikuro’s forces riding off with a captured Tomoe and tries to follow. But a rabbit on foot is no match for multiple…cats?…on horseback, so he’s quickly left behind. He did hear her call out something about warning Noriyuki, and is torn between saving the damsel from unknown peril or warning the lord “hey, your samurai damsel is in some kind of peril.” While pondering, he wanders into what had been a secret ninja village – they’re like carpenter ants, there’s one behind every hillside in this region – to find all the inhabitants had been slaughtered.

Quick background note, to explain what readers learned in bwa-ha-ha style gloating dialogue among the villains: this particular group of ninjas is opposed to Hijiki, for whatever reason, and has been spying on Tamikuro, trying to figure out his plans. So Tamikuro had his men slaughter their village.

Anyway, Usagi is an honorable rabbit, so he drags all of the dead bodies into one hut, in hopes some kin will eventually bury them. He is witnessed leaving the village, with not a little blood on him, by Shingen, a leader of those ninja, who has the reasonable misapprehension that Usagi was responsible. So he starts following Usagi to take his vengeance.

After more than a little swordfighting and yelling at each other, the good guys not in Tamikuro’s prison – to sum up: Usagi, Shingen, Gen, and Ino – meet, work out their differences at least temporarily, and band together to assault Tamikuro Fortress with a force of those handy ninja.

There are battles, there are deaths, there is a conspiracy foiled. But, in the middle-grade friendly standard for the series, no recurring characters are harmed in the melee. As usual, I’m finding Usagi Yojimbo to be well-constructed, beautifully drawn, and compellingly told – but inherently a watered-down story for young readers. It definitely has a niche, but I’m finding that niche increasingly restrictive as the story goes on.

[1] See my posts on books one , two , and three for more details on the series, if you’re interested.

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

Fly By Night by Tara O’Connor

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Do you ever find yourself complaining about the genre premises of a work? It’s not helpful, I can tell you. And it can waste a bunch of mental energy while reading until you realize that’s what you’re doing.

For example, in a graphic novel mostly aimed at teen readers, with a mostly teen cast and a thriller/mystery plot, the reader needs to remember that the characters have to solve the dangerous problem themselves. Sure, they might be in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, a preserve of ecological interest to at least a national if not international audience. And they might also be right in between two massive media markets full of reporters who would be happy to make a lot of noise about this particular issue. But adults sweeping in – even if the teens strategize and find those adults – is not what this kind of story is about. So I really shouldn’t have spent so much time thinking about the ways these characters could have done any of that.

My foibles aside, Tara O’Connor’s Fly By Night  is a thrill ride with heart, a few good fakeouts, and an ending that goes big when it has to. I grabbed it randomly from the YA GN shelves at my library – it’s set in New Jersey, where I live, and that sealed the deal – but I’ve never read any of O’Connor’s work before.

Dee Ramirez’s twin sister Beth has disappeared mysteriously, in the small Pine Barrens town where they both spent their childhood. After their parents divorced about six years ago – in middle school; the girls are high school seniors now – Dee went with her father to live in a new town, Westbury (and eventually with a new wife) while Beth stayed with their mother. O’Connor is a bit shaky on some details, both here and later – how exactly did Beth go missing? have the girls really not been in touch at all for six years? what actually is the name of this town? – but it works, psychologically. 

(I also initially thought that Dee was the older sister, and her talk about graduating meant she was nearly done with college – the twin thing isn’t mentioned until a number of pages in. Fly By Night trips over its own feet a few times like that.)

Anyway, Dee is back in her childhood home, with her ex-cop (or maybe still currently cop, somewhere else?) dad and something-or-other mom, as they squabble with each other over everything. (They got divorced for a reason. Mom is a bit passive, but Dad comes across as a minor-league asshole a lot of the time.) Dee is going to snoop around at school to find out what happened to Beth, even as a police investigation continues. She meets back up with her old friend Tobi, and spends some time with Beth’s boyfriend Lucas, who has a gigantic “Suspect Me!” sign on him but she still goes out into the Barrens with him alone.

At the same time, there’s a big evil company – Redline Oil, recently taken over by your standard evil businessman, Marshall Monroe – intending to run a big pipeline through the Pine Barrens. It’s not clear where this pipeline is going or why – I gather there is actually a similar pipeline proposal in the real world, so maybe it’s a big natural gas feeder from Philly to Atlantic City or something, but O’Connor just focuses on Big Evil Scary Polluting Horrible Thing – and the local students, led by teacher Mrs. Ruby, are predictably organized against it. Monroe more-or-less admits that he’s buying his way into this project, and we assume it must have some expected profit for him, but it’s mostly “I’m rich and powerful, and I want to do this, so I will buy it, and the rest of you can go pound sand.”

(Frankly, everyone seems to be against it, because it is cartoonishly evil. We have a couple of scenes of board meetings, and even the random adults don’t seem to want any of this.)

The where-is-Beth plot and the stop-the-pipeline plot are never as connected as they feel like they should be. They intersect, sort-of, out in the Barrens, but they diverge in the end. Oh, and I probably should have mentioned this before, but the Jersey Devil is real – this is a supernatural story. There is a big confrontation in the woods at the end, which for dramatic purposes happens right in the middle of the prom – this is the kind of town so far away from anything that they have the prom in the high school gym, which I didn’t think was a thing in NJ anymore – and there are dramatic revelations about the evil CEO and a big fight.

At this point, modern media actually becomes relevant, after I spent three hundred pages having the argument at the top of this post in my head. But there is a moderately happy ending.

Fly By Night looks gorgeous, has strong naturalistic dialogue, interesting and distinctive character designs, a strong sense of place, and a lot of ideas whirling around inside it. I didn’t think it quite pulled all of those elements together as well as it should have, but it does a decent job, and it’s a solid environmental thriller for teens, especially those with any connection to Jersey.

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

Superman Isn’t Jewish (But I An…Kinda) by Jimmy Bemon and Émilie Boudet

With supposedly-nonfiction books, I’ll focus tightly while reading on how true they are, looking for any crack in the verisimilitude that might imply some fiction has made its way into the mix. I think that’s pretty common: we want to know what kind of stories we’re being told, how constructed they are, to know how to respond.

But it’s not always clear how much the book is claiming to be nonfiction. This graphic novel – or bande dessinée, since it’s originally from France – is in the “Life Drawn” series from Humanoids, which I thought meant it was clearly, well, drawn from life. But I just took a look at their website, and the series is described as “Biographies and slice-of-life tales that show us what it means to be human” – and, more specifically, Wander Antunes’s adaptation of Twain’s short story Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg , which I read recently, is also included in the program. So my assumption that of course anything published as “Life Drawn” would be nonfiction has been proven to be inoperative.

In other words: this is probably close to true, more or less. But only…kinda.

Superman Isn’t Jewish (But I Am…Kinda)  is a coming-of-age story told in the first person by a French boy, Benjamin, and covers mostly his youth in the late eighties and early nineties, in a large extended family with a (now-divorced) Jewish father and Catholic mother. It was written by the film director and screenwriter Jimmy Bemon and drawn by Émilie Boudet, first published in France in 2014 (when Bemon also made a related short film with the same name) and translated by Nanette McGuiness for this 2018 English-language edition.

Jimmy is immersed in Jewish culture and history by his father’s side of the family, encouraged to believe himself part of a long, storied cultural tradition stretching back five thousand years, one of the chosen people. And he’s happy with that part.

But being Jewish also meant that he was circumcised at birth – which is vastly less common in France than it is in the US, something Bemon didn’t need to point out to his original audience but might make his histrionics come across weirdly to American readers – and so he is Different From Other Boys.

There are other issues as he grows up – undertones of how much “Jewish” means “Zionist” to a bunch of schoolboys, some of whom are Arabic, things like that – but the chopped willy is the big one. Benjamin is worried that, when he ever gets together with a girl, she will point and laugh, and then tell everyone else.

Superman Isn’t Jewish is relatively short and conversational, like a film driven by a single narrative voice. We don’t see a whole lot of Benjamin’s young life: just what matters to his possibly-Jewish identity. He has classes with a rabbi, and celebrates his bar mitzvah. There’s a moment where he’s pulled in to be the tenth man for a minyan. But he doesn’t quite feel Jewish, and eventually works up the courage to tell his father that. This is a mostly amiable, positive book, so that goes OK in the end.

I do wonder a bit how much of Jimmy is in Benjamin, and what there is of Jimmy that didn’t make it into Benjamin. But that’s the inherent question of semi-autobiographical fiction, isn’t it? In the end, this is a nice story about a good kid who figured out how he wanted to live and found happiness, in bright colored pencils and big faces from Boudet’s art – that’s a fine thing to have.

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

Black Is the Color by Julia Gfrörer

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I often find I’m thinking about or focused on the wrong things in the books I’m reading – that I need to specifically tell myself to ignore something so I can move on.

For example in Julia Gfrörer’s short, dark, creepy 2013 graphic novel Black Is the Color , the story opens on a wooden ship, far out in the ocean, several hundred years ago. One of the leaders – not the captain, maybe the first mate or owner – tells two sailors that they are, unfortunately, running lower on provisions than expected. So he’s going to kick the two of them off the ship, into a small open boat, to die in the middle of the sea.

And my first thought was: was that a thing? I’ve heard of crews going on half-rations, or even less – stretching their food farther and farther. And I know that a merchant ship, which this one appears to be, had a small, tight crew to begin with – especially compared to a warship, which would be swarming with gunhands and marines and others. So it didn’t quite make sense that they could or would just kill two of a very limited crew at the first sign of trouble.

But that’s how Gfrörer gets to the story she wants to tell: this is about two men, in that open boat, and what happens to them. So the setup almost doesn’t matter: it’s plausible, it’s quick, it gets them out there, under a baking sun, with no food or water.

And then the mermaids come out to investigate.

Black is the story of one of those two men: Warren. He lasts longer. He’s…befriended? made a pet? visited? by a mermaid, Eulalia. We see him alone in the boat, slowly dying. We see him with her, being comforted or having sex or being a new object of interest. We see her down in the depths, among her people, callous and self-centered and flighty. We see that she and all her people view humans as amusing distractions, as entertainment – interesting in the moment, maybe, but nothing more important or significant than that.

Gfrörer’s art is detailed and organic, her lines dark black and usually thin, her borders in this six-panel grid just slightly irregular, her people with sharp defined faces, her seas a mass of lines rippling and undulating, endlessly. This is a book that’s black in multiple ways: story, theme, characters, often visually. Black is the color here.

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

The Cat from the Kimono by Nancy Peña

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This graphic novel says it’s based on a folktale, and I have no reason to doubt that. Whether it’s an ancient, well-known folktale or one made up by creator Nancy Peña to fit the story she wants to tell…there I do wonder a bit.

It’s such a wonderfully visual story, one perfectly aligned with Peña’s illustrative, pattern-filled pages. It’s open-ended, with a clear beginning that turns into multiple possibilities – which also feeds the style she uses to tell this story, switching from storybook-style big images with captions for the pure folktale into comics-style grids (mostly three tiers) with speech balloons for the complications, the portions that are clearly and entirely Peña’s.

It doesn’t really matter whether she found a folktale she could adapt so well or made it up, but it does make me think about the creative impulse, and wonder which of the two it was.

The Cat from the Kimono  was published in 2020 in France – Peña is French; she works in that language – and translated into English by Montana Kane for this 2023 edition.

The legend goes that, sometime long ago in Japan – I would guess after unification, during the Edo period, but time is rarely specific in folktales – there was a beautiful young woman, the daughter of the owner of a silk mill. The best weaver in the mill was in love with her; she did not reciprocate. He made her various beautiful kimonos to show his love; she only loved the very first one he made, printed all over with cats. He got angry; things went bad, somewhat supernaturally, on the kimonos. And one cat from that first kimono ran off the silk and out into the real world.

This is the story of that cat’s adventures – perhaps somewhat later in time, perhaps meant to be right after running away. Again: folktales don’t say “and then, three days later, on the fifth of March” or anything like that.

In Peña’s story, the cat stowed away on a ship and made its way to London, where he weaved through the stories of a few Victorian-era people – a girl named Alice, a brilliant consulting detective, and a few less-obvious characters. Peña tells her story in alternating sections – first the folktale, then some comics pages, then usually a blackout page, and back to the folktale. Sometimes we get multiple comics scenes, with one set of characters and then another, and sometimes we just get one group, and then back to the folktale.

Peña tells the main folktale in full at the beginning – up to the cat running away. When she returns to it, it’s for a series of variations and questions: where could the cat have gone? what are the versions of the story? how many endings does this story have? And she closes with the folktale as well, giving – in that very fabulistic manner – mostly questions and options, before ending with a slender thread of “well, there is one version of the story that says thus.”

Peña’s folktale pages are lush and ornate; her comics pages are precise and detailed. She moves from one format into the other effortlessly, back and forth, to tell one story in both modes. Cat from the Kimono is a wonderful expansion of a fable, no matter its origins.

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

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