Tagged: novel

Review: ‘Maps and Legends’ by Michael Chabon

mapslegends2-9137528Maps and Legends
By Michael Chabon
McSweeney’s Books, May 2008, $24.00
 
Michael Chabon has had the good luck to be writing in an era when it’s possible to both be a respected, bestselling literary writer and have a public, abiding love for some of the more disreputable genres. His best-known novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, is not only a fictionalized story of the fledgling comic-book industry during World War II, but also has a very definite fantasy element. And his latest novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, is a detective story set in an alternate history – tying it into two types of genre fiction.

If he’d started writing twenty years earlier, or even ten, he probably wouldn’t have been able to do that; only in the last decade or so have writers like Chabon (and Jonathan Lethem, who transitioned from genre science fiction straight into the “literary novel”) been able to admit to their love of genre. Previously, literary writers could go slumming and use genre ideas once in a while – think Doris Lessing with the “Canopus in Argo” series, or The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood – but they could never admit to reading or liking books actually published in that genre. Kurt Vonnegut, after all, was only taken seriously because he ritually denied being a SF writer every day before breakfast.

But Chabon goes even further than his pop-culture-loving compatriots do; he doesn’t just admit to liking science fiction and detective stories – he’s even willing to claim that comics can be pretty damn good, and that some of them have influence him.

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The Squires of Science, by Dennis O’Neil

We were the Squires of Science, my friend Mike and I were. He went to public school and I was a sixth- or seventh grader at St. Louise de Marillac, but that didn’t keep us from palling around together, watching Tom Corbett, Space Cadet on his family’s television set and doing chemistry set experiments in his basement. Actually, I don’t remember doing many experiments – we squires weren’t really much into real science – but Mike, who was good with tools, made us a plaque and, well…we believed in science. Maybe not as much as I believed in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, but still a lot.

I was also reading a lot of science fiction, thanks to the public library, and I guess Mike was, too.

Adolescence disintegrated the Squires of Science. I was off to a Catholic military school – and yes, you may snicker – and Mike went…I don’t know – probably to Beaumont High, which we Catholic kids thought was kind of wicked, in some ill-defined way.

About then, I began to realize, dimly, that science involved mathematics. I had never been really good at arithmetic, which caused me a lot of grief at old St. Louise, and I seemed to be getting worse as I grew older. Then I flunked freshman algebra. Had to go to summer school. It wasn’t exactly a disgrace, but it wasn’t exactly not a disgrace, either.

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Review: ‘The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard’

leotard-1710289Eddie Campbell has always done comics his way, without worrying about other people’s expectations or preferences — one of his two major series has been a fictionalization of his own life as a comics creator, and the other, a superficially more populist sequence about Greek gods in the modern world, was itself about storytelling more often than not. So it’s no surprise that his latest graphic novel — co-written with Dan Best — is more about telling its story than it is the story being told.

The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard
By Eddie Campbell and Dan Best
First Second, August 2008, $18.95

[[[Monsieur Leotard]]] will be published by First Second — who published Campbell’s last book, The Black Diamond Detective Agency, and have been putting together an impressive list of graphic novels for adults and younger readers for the past few years — in August, and the first thing to note is that it’s not the story the reader expects.

You see, the famous acrobat Jules Leotard lies dying of smallpox on page 12. So, we think, the book will be a series of flashbacks showing his life? No, he’s dead by the bottom of page 13, and the story moves on. So far, so very Campbell.

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Review: ‘Blue Pills’ by Frederik Peeters

blue-9583352Blue Pills
By Frederik Peeters; translated by Anjali Singh
Houghton Mifflin, January 2008, $18.95

This is another one of those semi-autobiographical graphic novels; I’m not going to assume that this is all “true” (whatever that means), but I will note that Peeters’s bio says that he lives with his girlfriend, her son, and their daughter — and that [[[Blue Pills]]] is the story of a man named Fred, his girlfriend, and her son. (And the main character of this book mentions that he working on a graphic novel about their lives.) So keep that in the back of your head — some proportion of this book is true, though we don’t know how much.

Fred, the narrator of Blue Pills, is a Swiss cartoonist, still in his mid-20s, who’s lived in Geneva his whole life. He remembers Cati vividly from a pool-party late in his teens, but never really knew her well. When he moves into the apartment building where she lives, though, he comes to see more and more of her and her young son (called “the little one” or “L’il Wolf,” but not named). Before long, Fred and Cati are drifting into a relationship, and Cati has to sit Fred down and tell him something difficult — both she and her son are HIV-positive.

(The “Blue Pills” of the title refer to their drug regimen to stay symptom-free, though they’re never called that in the body of the book. The fact that most Americans will immediately think of Viagra when blue pills are mentioned is unfortunate, but neither Peeters nor Houghton Mifflin seems to have taken a moment to worry about it.)

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Review: Four Books for Pre-Adults

I had a pile of books more-or-less for kids, and thought: why not review them all together? And so I will:

[[[Flight Explorer, Vol. 1]]]
Edited by Kazu Kibuishi
Villard, 2008, $10.00

The popular [[[Flight]]] series, officially for adults but containing a lot of all-ages stories, has spun off a younger sibling. The cast of cartoonists is pretty much the same, and the editor is still Kibuishi, but this book is shorter, cheaper, smaller, and contains many more characters seemingly designed to headline a series of stories.

The stories are all fairly short – there are ten of them in a book just over a hundred pages – long enough to introduce what mostly seem to be series characters and given them a situation to deal with. The cover-featured “[[[Missile Mouse]]],” by Jake Parker gets the most adventurous, and will probably be the most appealing to the boy audience. (There’s nothing obviously aimed at the girl comics-reading audience – or maybe I mean nothing trying to poach some of the manga audience – though there are several strips with female protagonists, like Ben Hatke’s “[[[Zita the Spacegirl]]].”

The art is still mostly clean-lines enclosing solid colors – an animator’s palette – though the book gets more painterly towards the end, in the pieces by Ben Hatke, Rad Sechrist, Bannister, and Matthew Armstrong. It’s all quite professional and fun – all in all, a great book to hand to an 8-12 year old interested in comics.

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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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Review: ‘The Last Days of Krypton’ by Kevin J. Anderson

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Everyone knows the basic story of [[[Superman]]]. Baby Kal-El, last survivor of the planet Krypton, rocketed to Earth by his parents Lara and Jor-El, found by a nice couple in Kansas, raised to be Clark Kent AKA Superman. But what about the story of Krypton before Kal’s birth? What about the lives of his biological parents?

In this hardcover novel published by Harper Entertainment, Kevin J. Anderson ([[[Captain Nemo]]], [[[Hopscotch]]], [[[Star Wars: Darksaber]]]) gives us a story of the ill-fated planet and its people, who are so tranquil and advanced in science that they have stopped dreaming and questioning reality. One man, Jor-El, still dares to dream — but finds his technology constantly censored by the Science Council and by Commissioner Zod. Eventually, Jor-El meets someone much like him, an artist named Lara Lor-Van who never hesitates to speak her mind, and the two fall in love. When disasters begin to occur, Jor-El and Zod may have to join forces to save their planet from destruction. But is Zod really concerned about the benefit of Krypton or is he plotting his own take-over?

In the foreword to this novel, comic writer Marv Wolfman (New Teen Titans, The Crisis On Infinite Earths) stated that Kevin J. Anderson’s goal was to create a story that took elements from all of the various and contradictory interpretations of the planet Krypton, its society and just why it was destroyed. (Did the sun go supernova, was it destroyed by a shifting orbit or was it a victim of a war involving terrible weapons?) The result would then be a tale that would allow everyone to at least find one or two familiar elements and would be entertaining for people who knew very little about the Superman mythos.

Unfortunately, that is not quite what we get. But more on that later. First, I should mention there are many good scenes here and there, as well as some touching moments. Of particular note is Anderson’s version of the first meeting between Jor-El and Lara Lor-Van. It involves danger and nice characterization and the date that it leads into shows just why these two fall for each other. Too often these days, we are shown a couple who are in love but who don’t really show this in their actions, requiring the writer/director to spell things out by having their characters awkwardly say things such as “I’m blinded by your love.” (Are you listening, George Lucas?!)

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Review: ‘Young Liars’ #1

I covered a handful of new series debuting this week in my Weekly Haul column earlier this week, but one new series slipped past. Thanks to the kind folks at DC then for sending over the first issue of David Lapham’s Young Liars, one of the more puzzling series to come around lately.

It’s not that Young Liars reinvents the wheel. It’s actually very similar to another new Vertigo series, The Vinyl Underground, in that both follow spunky young hedonists. The narrator is Danny, a Texas kid who moved up to New York to be a rockstar and failed miserably. But the central character is Sadie, an heiress who took a bullet to the head and lived, although the wound removed every inhibition she had.

The first issue is mostly set in a club, with Sadie alternating between dancing and beating the holy living snot out of people as Danny fills us in on the backstory. The gist is that Sadie’s dad and some unsavory characters are all tracking her down, and unpleasantness is about to meet this small group of friends.

While I was pretty disappointed with [[[The Vinyl Underground]]], [[[Young Liars]]] has at least piqued my interest. More than anything, I’m curious where Lapham is headed, but that’s based more on his past work than on the content of this issue. It’s more of a collection of fun pieces than a cohesive story so far, and it pales next to Lapham’s excellent Silverfish graphic novel from last year.

File this one under too soon to tell.

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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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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Laika

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This graphic novel is pretty good just on its own terms, but it’s an excellent object lesson. If you know of anyone who thinks that comics are essentially limited in scope to brightly-clad folks punching each other with great vigor, this will help to expand their horizons. It’s the story of Laika, a Russian dog who was the first living creature from Earth deliberately sent outside the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s an impressively-researched story braiding a fictional back-story for Laika (and several other characters I believe are also fictionalized) with the story of the “Chief Designer” of the early Russian space program, Sergei Korolev. And all that is told in comics, and, I suspect, primarily aimed at the grade 6-12 audience.

I’m not familiar with Adadzis’s work, but the note on him in [[[Laika]]] calls him an editorial consultant who “creates words and pictures for a living and loves both equally.” According to his website, muck of his work has been for children, especially recently, though he did something called Millennium Fever (with Duncan Fegredo) for Vertigo in 1995 and [[[Children of the Voyager]]] (with Paul Johnson) for Marvel in 1993.

Laika is a dense book; we start off with a flashback to Korolev’s release from the gulag in 1939, stop briefly at the first successful Sputnik launch in 1957, and then dive back into a long account of the life of a dog. (Who, as we all can guess, eventually becomes Laika.) This graphic novel is about two hundred pages long, and each page has about ten small panels, in shifting grids with occasional snippets of white space. And there’s quite a lot of dialogue along the way, in what I’m tempted to call the Russian manner. It’s not a quick read by any means, and the panels can get quite cramped at times. It’s never difficult to read, but there is an awful lot here. Those who judge books by how much time they take to read should enjoy Laika.

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