Tagged: review

Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography review

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  • October 25, 2007

Charles Schulz‘s life is already turning into a legend, in large part because he did the one thing a man can rarely control: he died perfectly, at the precise right time and place. Late in the night before his final Peanuts strip would appear in newspapers, on February 12, 2000, Schulz slipped into immortality.
 
On the other hand, he was close to immortal already; Peanuts was one of the biggest comic strips in this history of the medium, one of the largest licensing empires in the world, and one of the most beloved set of characters in the USA. And, since Schulz famously wrote every word and drew every line of the 17,897 strips from 1950 through 2000, it was purely his own achievement. Snoopy sheets would never have been big business if kids hadn’t already loved Snoopy, and they never would have loved Snoopy without Schulz. It’s difficult to overestimate what Schulz meant to cartooning over the past fifty years: he reshaped the newspaper strip in his image, brought a new tone and style to public discourse, and was hugely influential far beyond the bounds of the newspaper page.
 
And now, seven years after Schulz died, comes the first full-scale biography of the man who changed the face of newspaper comics forever. (more…)

House of Clay: Review

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  • October 24, 2007

Naomi Nowak is a cartoonist resident in Sweden, of Hungarian-Polish ancestry, and presumably works in English, since this book doesn’t credit a translator. She is thus more cosmopolitan than most of us ever dream of being. This is her second graphic novel, after Unholy Kinship (which I haven’t seen).

My first impression is that Nowak must be influenced by P. Craig Russell and by manga – there are a lot of flowing layouts following ideas rather than action, and the delicacy of the figures and the flamboyance of some of the drawing is very reminiscent of Russell. But, given that she’s European, those may or may not be trustworthy comparisons. I can’t be sure what Nowak’s real influences are, but — looking at House of Clay — I do see what looks like a lot of manga and Russell in its DNA.

House of Clay has an atmosphere of unreality about it; Nowak’s style keeps the story from ever feeling completely real — it’s more like a fever dream or a retold legend. This is the story of one young woman, but it’s also a more primal story, an archetype, of all young women everywhere. (more…)

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Postcards edited by Jason Rodriguez

Everyone has a story – at least one. Every human life could be told in some way, to illustrate a point, or evoke an emotion, or just entertain an audience. Postcards attempts to tell some of those stories, or to create stories based on tiny pieces of real people’s lives, almost randomly – to invent stories out of the smallest of seeds.

Jason Rodriguez, author of the Harvey-nominated Elk’s Run, gathered up a bunch of vintage postcards, sent them to various artist-writer teams he knew, and asked for comics about the people who sent the postcards. In theory, it’s a great idea. (Of course, everything is wonderful in theory.) In practice, this particular collection of postcard-inspired stories are nearly all sad, depressing tales, and the relentless one-note gloom keeps any of the stories from really standing out. It’s not clear whether Rodriguez’s instructions were responsible for this, of if the choice of creators led to the unremitting bleakness, or if it was just bad luck. Rodriguez’s prefaratory notes to each story do make him seem like a micro-manager, though, with explanations that he gave this postcard to this person expecting X, and that he was sure another artist would be just right for another postcard because of Y.

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Graphic Novel Review: Del Rey Manga Round-Up, Part One

shugo1-8375909Let me be honest: I don’t know all that much about manga. I’ve read a few series (going back to Area 88 and Kamui, twenty years ago during the first attempt to bring manga to the US), but I’ve never really gone really deeply into the field. Well, I’m hoping to remedy that now. I’ve got a big pile of first volumes of various manga series, and I’ll be doing weekly reviews of about four of them at a time. (I’m aiming for Fridays; let’s see if I can hold to that schedule.)

We’ll start off with some books from Del Rey (all originally published by Kodasha in Japan), mostly aimed at young teenagers. (At least, all but one of these is marked “Teen: 13+,” but, from the content, I suspect the real Japanese readership, and possibly the American readership as well, is tweens to young teens.) This week’s batch also are primarily aimed at girls — I think.

First up is Shugo Chara!, which translates roughly to “Guardian Characters.” It’s by two women who work under the name Peach-Pit, and it’s about a fourth grader who discovers three eggs in her bed one morning.

Okay, I have to back up already. Amu, our heroine, is explicitly in fourth grade — we’re told that several times — though the structure of the school, and the maturity of the characters, would seem to put them more naturally in middle school. (Trust me; I’m the father of a fourth grader.) And, from an American perspective, it’s really bizarre that a story about fourth graders would be marketed to teens – or even tweens, as I suspect is actually the case here. In the US, kids generally only want to read about other kids their own age (maybe) or, preferably, a few years older. Fourth and fifth graders read stories about middle schoolers, middle schoolers read Sweet Valley High and the like, and high school students either stop reading for pleasure entirely or read stories about people in their twenties. Maybe, like so much else, that’s different in Japan – there is the well-known love of the small and cute there

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Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here And Now #1: Review

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  • October 17, 2007

Cory Doctorow is either very arrogant or very smart.

Anyone who knows Cory would dispute the first bit, but consider: he gives away all of his writing to readers for free. If you want to read his website at boingboing, by all means; if you want to download his novels, go to Cory’s website and do so, he encourages it and wants you to spread the word. And he expects that he will make money doing this, that his stuff is so good that people will send him money in one way or another. So he either is very arrogant about the quality of his work– or he knows something about the workings of the world that you don’t. Which makes him, if not very smart, then certainly a born science fiction writer. And since he does make money doing this, he’s certainly not dumb.

IDW has begun to adapt his shorter fiction pieces into comic book form, starting with 2004’s "Anda’s Game". You can read the story (for free, of course) here, so the question is: does it work in comics? It certainly does. Esteve Polls’s art reminds me of the work of various Filipino horror comics artists of the 70’s, and Dara Naraghi does a solid condensation and adaptation of Cory’s story. Give this book a shot– the stories are done in one issue, and it’s worth the time.

Disclaimer: I help package books for IDW, and in fact, I’m already late delivering the art for the Munden’s Bar trade paperback…

Naruto the Movie: Ninja Clash in the Land of Snow – review

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  • October 17, 2007

If you haven’t heard of Naruto yet, you’ve either been living in a cave or obsessively avoid all contact with manga; it’s the single bestselling series of comics in the US today, regularly placing multiple volumes on bestseller lists. (The animated version is also a decent-sized TV hit, especially among teenage boys.) In case you have been managing to avoid Naruto so far, Viz is making it really difficult to continue: they’re releasing the new volumes of the series three at a time every month this fall, and also threw in a direct-to-video movie, Naruto the Movie: Ninja Clash in the Land of Snow, to boot.

It’s the movie we’ll be looking at today. I watched it twice over this past weekend, once alone and once in the company of my older son (my resident Naruto expert). The production values are clearly better than the animated show, which I’ve only seen intermittently – even the colors seem brighter and more vibrant. It may be direct-to-video in the US, but it’s a top-notch animated movie, with CGI effects blending very nicely with mostly hand-drawn 2D animation. It’s not quite up to the level of the very best theatrical animation, but the characters are fluid, the backgrounds are stunning, and the action is gripping and well choreographed. (more…)

Michael Davis: The Fanboy Guide to Girls • Part 2

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  • October 12, 2007

527_4_0022-6169816Welcome to the first Fanboy Guide To Girls Dating Review And Quiz! Judging from the comments and dirty looks I’ve been getting since last week’s column I see that there is a need for this type of high quality help for many of our Fanboy Nation!

Fanboy Nation trademark and copyright Michael Davis. You never know when something will catch on!

So, young Fanboy, you have your sights set on a young lady. She’s cute and you are trying to work up the nerve ask her out. Great! So here is a step-by-step guide to get her to say YES and begin your loving relationship…with a girl!

Step 1: Say hello to the lady in question and after she says hello to you… leave! That’s right, just give a taste of your coolness and walk away. Chicks dig a man of mystery!

Step 2: A day or so later walk up to her again, look her in the eyes and say,  “I would like to have lunch with you.” Don’t forget to smile – unless you have gold teeth like those idiot rappers. When she says yes, you tell her where to meet you and walk away. If she says no, you calmly look at her and say “Oh I’m sorry I wasn’t talking to you.”

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Graphic Novel Review: Akira Club

You can tell how popular any particular media event or personage is by how many ancillary products emerge. Something really popular will metastasize into toothbrushes, sports cars, sleepwear, foodstuffs, architecture, and so on – the specifics depend on what the original piece was, and who the audience is, but the number of those products is a good guide to the popularity of its original.

Akira Club, thus, shows that Otomo Katsuhiro’s epic comics story [[[Akira]]] is at least moderately popular, at home in Japan and here in the USA. Akira was turned into a movie and had the usual small flood of licensed goods, and it was also thought worthy of a book to document all of the odds and ends – both the bits of art from the original serialization that didn’t make it into the collections, and some records of those many ancillary products.

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MICHAEL DAVIS: The Fanboy Guide to Girls • Part 1

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  • October 5, 2007

m-davis-9259250Wow, the site looks great! I really like those drawing of the columnists that…oh, they’re not there. Well I’m sure if there was an issue, the artist (who knocked himself out taking time out of his VERY busy schedule to draw them, sorry I mean the award winning artist who wrote the curriculum for the Museum of Modern Art’s art school) would have been told before he looked at the site and saw they were not there.

I’m sure of that.

Sorry. As Peter David would say, I digress. This column is about girls!

Girls, Girls, Girls!

When it comes to girls we comic book, movie, TV, video game and toy fans have been labeled geeks, nerds, losers, and fanboys – to name a choice few. In most popular culture fair we are often portrayed as the hapless idiot who has no idea how to talk to girls.

Sadly, this is true.

We are those geeks, nerds, losers, and fanboys that people think we are. Well, I’m not, I picked up girls like they were lint and I was a dust buster. You know why? Because I’m FUNNY! Look, you may not think I’m funny, but I am funny! How do I know that I’m funny? Because I’m paid to be funny!

I have written funny TV shows, funny comics, and funny columns. So if someone writes YOU a check for being thin even if strangers come up to you on the street and scream “Have you called Jenny yet?” then you are thin.

And even if nobody wrote me a check, I would still be funny!  Not in a Brokeback way, but in a ha ha kind of way.

See? That was funny!

Not as funny as not telling the artist who broke his back working with horrible photos to help develop a new look for a website and not telling him that there was an issue (the same artist who has a building named after him at a magnet school of the arts) no, not, that funny. But it was funny!

A sense of humor is sooo important with chicks! The problem with some of us (read: YOU) is that what you think is funny requires background information for it to be funny.

Consider this, that girl you are talking to (trying to talk to) may not get that Halo 3 joke you just told her. That blank stare you are getting is a good indication that she does not get the joke or get you.  It’s possible that the young lady doesn’t have Halo 3. It’s possible (sit down this may floor you) it’s possible they may have never heard of Halo 3.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Some Greasy Kids Stuff

 

 

dinos-6479331Today I’ve got three books that either are for kids or look like they should be, so, if any of you are allergic to greasy kids stuff, just move on to the next post.

[[[Dinosaurs Across America]]] is the new book by Phil Yeh, who has spent the last two decades promoting literacy and art across the world in various ways, including lots of comics. In fact, this book was originally a black-and-white comic that was sold at various Yeh events. It’s a quick look at all fifty states in the US, with a concentration on quick facts and learning all of the capitals. One of Yeh’s recurring characters, Patrick Rabbit, has been suckered, and a group of dinosaurs (also recurring Yeh characters) set him straight on the real facts. There’s no real story here, but it’s a great book for kids interested in state capitals or geography in general. (Or even for kids who aren’t interested in that, but need to learn some of it.)

 

korgi-2421365

 

[[[Korgi]]], Book 1 is the first in what’s planned to be a series of all-ages wordless comics stories. It’s by Christian Slade, and seems to be his first major comics work. It’s cute and fun and adventurous by turns, though the wordlessness doesn’t always help with a fantasy story like this. (The dogs, such as Korgi, are obvious Special somehow, but it’s hard to convey the specifics of something like that without words.) This is perhaps pitched a bit older than Andy Runton’s [[[Owly]]] books – also wordless comics stories from Top Shelf for all ages – simply because there’s more action and suspense in Korgi. (There’s certainly nothing here I’d worry about giving to my six-year-old.) Slade uses a lot of scribbly lines for shading and tones, and – especially after reading James Sturm’s America recently – that looks a bit amateur to me. Slade is very good at it, but it does leave an impression of lots and lots of little lines all over the page; it would be interesting to see him use other ways of showing tone and shading, and concentrate on drawing just a few, bolder, stronger lines. Or maybe not; he gets some great effects with his many lines, creating clouds and rocks and monsters that come to vivid life on the page.

(more…)

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