Articles by andrew-wheeler
Fri Oct 30, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: 'Red Snow' by Susumu Katsumata
Gekiga stories of Japanese rural life a hundred years ago
Red Snow
By Susumu Katsumata
Drawn & Quarterly, October
2009, $24.95
From a Western perspective, it would be understandable to assume “gekiga” meant “short, depressing Japanese comics stories,” even if that’s not the most accurate definition. (Gekiga can also be long depressing Japanese comics stories, of course.) And, since the current exemplar of gekiga for those of us in the English-speaking world is Yoshihiro Tatsumi, there’s a sense that those short, depressing stories need to be set in the modern world, that gekiga is a literature of urban ennui and the dislocations of modern capitalism.
But gekiga is wider than that; Katsumata is another one of its masters, and his collection Red Snow is filled entirely with stories of a rural, pre-war Japan – but one as filled with bitter unhappiness and struggle as any badly-thrown-up Tokyo apartment building of the ‘60s. His rural landscapes have nothing of nostalgia about them; these are insular, stifling, dull little farming communities, full of equally dull and small-minded people, out in the middle of nowhere.
A few of these stories have supernatural elements, but the only creatures that appear are kappa – mischievous water spirits that fill the role of leprechauns or pixies in Japanese folklore, and were thought of as being equally as common and prosaic. The fantasy in Red Snow isn’t numinous or uplifting – it’s just yet another annoyance in a small village full of them, just one more damn thing to have to deal with. Kappa are no worse than the rich guy in town who thinks he has the right to seduce any woman around – who’s also called “kappa.”
Continue reading Manga Friday: 'Red Snow' by Susumu Katsumata ›
Thu Oct 22, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Stitches' by David Small -- a comics memoir of an amazingly bad childhood
Stitches: A Memoir
David Small
W.W. Norton, September 2009,
$24.95
You can’t write a memoir these days unless you had a bad childhood – call it the Law of Oprah. You have to have some horrible secrets, either your own or those of your parents/keepers/guardians, that you can reveal, tearfully, to an enthralled TV audience when called upon. You may not make it to that TV-show couch, since the competition for a bad-enough childhood is fierce, but that’s the aim. Memoirs of anything positive are utterly passé – even a book like Eat Pray Love needs to start with heartbreak before it can get to happiness.
Then there’s the unrelated but equally unsettling requirement that only non-fictional graphic novels can be taken really seriously by the outside world. From Maus to Persepolis, from Fun Home to Palestine, it’s only respectable if it’s real. As far as our mothers and cousins and next-door neighbors know, “graphic novels” means expensive comic-book stories about either superheroes or the author’s tormented relationship with his family.
Stitches is perfectly positioned at the intersection of those two publishing trends: it’s the true story of author David Small’s appalling childhood, told as comics pages with cinematic “camera motions” that will appeal to readers not used to reading comics. Even the art style Small uses in Stitches adds to the seriousness; Small has a sketchy, loose line of variable width here, strong to define the figures and lighter and looser for backgrounds, and washes in various tones of grey. In fact, the whole book is grey – even the black line looks like just another shade of the murk.
Mon Oct 19, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Comical Lives: A Paired Review of 'Little Nothings 2' and 'Giraffes in My Hair'
Autobiographical comics from Lewis Trondheim and Bruce Paley & Carol Swain
The impulse to anecdote is ubiquitous in mankind; we all
want to tell our own stories. Since those stories happened to us, we naturally think that they’re fascinating…and
sometime are surprised when the rest of the world doesn’t agree with us. Comics
creators have been spilling out their lives onto their pages for a few decades
now – since the undergrounds, if not before that – and the autobiographical comic
is now its own cliché. But there’s still room to do interesting things with autobiographical
materials – at least, I hope
there is, since it seems that we’re destined to be deluged with books of true
stories…
Little Nothings, Vol. 2: The Prisoner Syndrome
Lewis Trondheim
NBM/ComicsLit, March 2009,
$14.95
Trondheim mostly makes fictional comics – Dungeon and Kaput and Zosky and Mister O and many more – but he also has kept a comics blog in French, mostly focused on the small moments of his life. Three collections from the blog have been published in his native France; the first two have been translated so far for the English-speaking world. (I reviewed the first one here back in March of last year.)
For the “Little Nothings” blog, Trondheim works in watercolor, mostly in single pages – each one the record of a single event, or a short conversation. The emphasis is on observation – each strip is a crystallized instant, and clearly the blog as a whole is not intended to seriously chronicle Trondheim’s life. As with the Dungeon books, all of the people are drawn anthropomorphically – Trondheim and his family are various kinds of bird, and most of the others look like different kinds of mammals – rats and dogs and cats. (In the usual unsettling way of anthropomorphic comics, Trondheim’s family also has a pair of real cats, Orly and Roissy, and other actual animals show up from time to time.)
Either Trondheim travels an awful lot or travel is more conducive to diary comics than his regular life, since a clear majority of the comics here are about trips – to the Angouleme comics festival (a year when he was the Guest of Honor), several other comics events, and vacation in Greece, Guadeloupe, and Corsica. That does keep Prisoner Syndrome from being a succession of Trondheim-sitting-at-his-desk pages – there are a number of those, of course, since that’s where a cartoonist spends most of his time – and ties nicely into the title. In one of the early strips in this book, Trondheim learns about “Prisoner Syndrome,” in which people who spend all of their time in the same place gradually get more and more tired from doing less and less – and so he decides to go to more comics festivals, to keep himself healthy.
There are no grand gestures in Prisoner Syndrome, no deep thoughts or big moments – the series is called Little Nothings for a reason. But there are many thoughtful little moments, of the kind that make up all of our lives, and Trondheim is an artful and nuanced portrayer of his own internal life. It’s a lovely book of the small things that go together to make up an everyday life.
Continue reading Comical Lives: A Paired Review of 'Little Nothings 2' and 'Giraffes in My Hair' ›
Fri Oct 2, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Supernatural Teens
Reviewing Wicked Lovely: Desert Tales: Sanctuary, Yokai Doctor, and Amefurashi
Where would comics be without the stories of young people with amazing powers? Oh, sure, you could cobble together a world canon of stories with no supernatural stuff at all, but it would have to be a masterpiece of the gerrymanderer’s art. And why would you want to – when you can have all of the moody, or conflicted, or ridiculously innocent teenagers with amazing abilities you ever thought of? Like the main characters of these three books, for example…
Wicked Lovely: Desert Tales, Volume 1: Sanctuary
Written by Melissa Marr; Art by
Xian Nu Studio
Tokyopop/HarperCollins, May 2009,
$12.99
Wicked Lovely is the name of a novel by Marr, and it also seems to be the umbrella title for her novels about teens and faeries (and teen faeries, and faerie teens) in the modern world. The novels seem to be about a girl named Aislinn – no self-respecting teen-novel heroine ever has a name like Doris or Mabel – and her travails in high school and the Faerie Courts. But this manga volume – it says on its back cover that it’s “manga,” if you don’t believe me, and never mind that it reads left-to-right and was written by an American – is set somewhere in the western desert, where once-mortal Rika lives quietly, trying to avoid both humans and the local faeries.
Rika was discovered and turned – not exactly “seduced and abandoned,” since she wasn’t able to give him what he wanted – many years ago by the Summer King, Keenan, who turns up early in this book to give an excuse for some backstory and to fail to get her to swear fealty to him. She refuses, of course – she’s solitary now, and happy that way. What does it matter if most of the solitary fay are nasty enough to make “mischievous” a very weak term to describe them?
But they’re just there for spice; this is a series for teenage girls, which means Rika has to see a cute boy – Jace, who paints, like she does – and save him from those nasty fay, who try to kill him for no good reason. He’s sweet and innocent enough to stare wide-eyed at her abilities – those nasty wild fay don’t give up, or there wouldn’t be a plot here other than “elf girl and artist boy meet cute and gaze into each other’s eyes,” – and the book is low-key enough that they’re just mildly kissing by the end. (Which seems awfully tame for a fairie who’s hundreds of years old.)
Wicked Lovely: Desert Tales: Sanctuary has too many colons in its title and a thin plot, but I have to expect that it’s just the kind of thing teen girls will want: a bit of angst, a wish to be alone that doesn’t actually lead to loneliness, and a cute boy that the girl gets to protect and pursue. I’m just twenty years too old and the wrong gender to appreciate it properly.Wed Sep 30, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Fathers and Sons: reviews of Danica Novgorodoff's 'Refresh, Refresh' and 'The Big Kahn' by Neil Kleid and Nicolas Cinquegrani
I should start by quoting something weighty – the most obvious would be that old Tolstoy saw about happy and unhappy families – but let’s take that as written, shall we? Comics have given short shrift to families for the past seventy years – at least, the American comic-book industry has, though strip comics grew fat and bloated on the hijinks of aggressively “relatable” families for that long and longer.
Even the undergrounds – typically about countercultural types, who occasionally complain about their parents but try to avoid them as much as possible – and the modern alt-comics movement (Alienated Loners R us!) avoided family dynamics. Sure, there are exceptions, from Will Eisner to art spiegelman, but the average American comics protagonist is an orphan – or wishes he was.
Maybe that’s starting to change, or maybe I just have a couple of anomalies on my hand. Either way, today, I have two books where that isn’t the case – not to say that these dads might not be dead, absent, or problematic, but they’re definitely part of the story. And their sons care who, and what – and where – their fathers are.
Refresh, Refresh
A graphic novel by Danica
Novgorodoff, adapted from a screenplay by James Ponsoldt based on the story by
Benjamin Percy
First Second, October 2009,
$17.99
What do men do? For many in the comics reviewing world, that’s an easy question: men punch each other in the face. But they don’t have Refresh, Refresh in mind when they say that. This graphic novel is set in a small Oregon town, just a couple of years ago, where most of the adult men are off fighting with the Marines in Iraq. And their sons – mostly Cody and Josh and Gordon, three highschool-aged boys who are at the core of this particular story – talk about joining up when they’re old enough, or working in the local factory, or maybe even getting out.
But Refresh, Refresh is based on a literary short story, and if there’s one thing we all know, it’s that there’s no getting out of a story like that – it’s all doom and gloom until the moment-of-clarity ending. So this town is stifling and without any options, the boys drifting – from backyard boxing to underage drinking in bars to racing around on motorbikes and sleds – as they rebel without any fathers to drag them into line. (The narration – presumably taken from the original Percy story; I don’t want to blame Novgorodoff for any of it – is particularly heavy-handed in that area, such as this sequence from p.83: “We didn’t fully understand the reason our fathers were fighting. We only understood that they had to fight. ‘It’s all part of the game,’ my grandfather said. ‘It’s just the way it is.’ We could only cross our fingers and wish on stars and hit refresh, refresh, hoping they would return to us.”)
What they hit “refresh, refresh” on is their e-mail in-boxes; that scene recurs several times in the story. Oddly, though, it’s the only incursion of modern technology into a story that could otherwise be Vietnam-era. They don’t follow their fathers’ platoon on CNN.com or an Armed Forces website; don’t call each other on cellphones; don’t think about or track or seem to notice the war on TV or the Internet; even their laptops seem to be screwed down to tables, for all the moving they do.
Refresh, Refresh is a very traditional story about young men in small towns; I could probably quote half-a-dozen Bruce Springsteen songs on roughly the same topic, and with pretty much the same moral and tone. (And that’s without diving into the world of the realist short story, where kitchen-sink dramas almost require young men with promise to be squandered.) Novgorodoff tells this version with a bit too much self-conscious artistry – too many deer looking up at airplanes, too many of those explaining-the-theme narration boxes – but she keeps the focus tight and specific, on these three boys and their world, their choices and possibilities. A story like this is nearly always about badchoices, though, so it would be best to come to Refresh, Refresh with a MFA-teacher’s fatalism, and not expect anything so comic-booky as a happy ending for the boys who punch each other in the face.
Mon Sep 28, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Two Bleak Futures: David Ratte's 'Toxic Planet' and 'Ball Peen Hammer' by Adam Rapp and George O'Connor
Everything is going to hell. Everything is always going to hell, and always has been, of course, but it’s going to hell even more now than it ever has been, and quicker, too. And so we get ever more stories about those hells – like these two very different books that I have to talk about today. They even both have people with gas masks on the cover!
David Ratte
Yen Press, August 2009, $12.99
Sometime in the future, the world is so crowded and polluted that everyone wears gas masks all of the time, and the natural world is essentially forgotten. Toxic Planet is a satire – and a broad, obvious one at that – so there’s no point to asking what kind of food these people eat; it’s not designed to show how this world actually works, but to make obvious points about our own world.
Our hero is a factory worker named Sam; his blonde wife and aged grandmother are never named, but that’s OK; they’re all such broad characters that real names are superfluous anyway. Other characters include an unnamed owner of the plant and his young son, the President of the United Global States, who is an odd combination of Bush and Sarkozy, and the union rep Tran, who gets to be the voice of reason (reason here being very much a relative concept). Later on, Sam’s long-lost parents – they’re ecologists, which is about as popular and mainstream in this society as a combination of Muslim, Communist, and child molester would be in darkest Alabama – return from the countryside (yes, the world is completely polluted everywhere, and yet there’s still an unspoiled “countryside,” but don’t ask), with his younger sister Orchidea, and they get to be the even more obvious voices of reason.
Toxic Planet is funny here and there, and dull and axe-grinding equally as often. And it’s really much, much too long for the message – yes, we all agree that polluting the entire planet, declaring war on defenseless countries, and similar things are Really Bad, but we don’t need to keep seeing heavy-handed double-reverse sermons on the subject over and over for more than a hundred pages. Ratte’s world isn’t clever or interesting; he just wants to make it dirty and unpleasant, and he succeeds. The one interesting part of watching the axes grind are the times when Ratte’s French ideas of what’s obvious and true – so much so that he doesn’t have to say them, just have his characters parroting whatever he considers the opposite – aren’t at all clear to a North American audience, and so the reader can’t quite tell what he’s so worked up about.
Ratte’s art almost makes up for that, even laboring under the constraints his writing has given it – no faces, only gas masks, and characters who have to be differentiated mostly by hairstyle and typical clothing – with an appealing lightness and energy. But Toxic Planet is the kind of book that can make a reader want to drive a SUV to McDonald’s for lunch and then go prospect for oil in a wilderness, just out of spite.
Wed Sep 23, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Asterios Polyp' by David Mazzucchelli
Yes, the same book everyone else has already reviewed
Asterios Polyp
David Mazzucchelli
Pantheon, July 2009, $29.95
Comics are an essentially mongrel art, bred out of the scraps of two prior art-forms in the great kennel of popular culture. That’s no bad thing, despite what the mandarins might say – mongrels typically have the strengths of both parents, without the fussiness and decadent weakness characteristic of arts that only breed incestuously. Of course comics then are called bastards, which is both a slander and absolute truth. The slander only stings if one thinks being a bastard is a bad thing.
Asterios Polyp, for example, is a bastard, and the graphic novel that bears his name is – and this is only one of the things it is, but we’ll start there – the story of how he finally, much too late in his life, learns how not to be quite so much of a bastard as he was before. We see Asterios in appropriately classical form: both before and after his downfall, as if he’s both at once. More importantly, though, Asterios Polyp is the story of comics themselves, as it dramatizes the interplay of the elements that come together to make up comics. Asterios is a renowned teaching architect: serious, linear, dogmatic, didactic, Apollonian, a maker of dichotomies. And he comes up against the Dionysian side of the world again and again, symbolically ramming his axe-shaped head into the places where the world doesn’t fit his categories, willing it into the forms he’s decided are right for it.
Continue reading Review: 'Asterios Polyp' by David Mazzucchelli ›
Mon Sep 21, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: George Sprott: 1894-1975 by Seth
One life, as Canadian as they come
George Sprott: 1894-1975
Seth
Drawn & Quarterly, May
2009, $24.95
Comics very, very rarely tell stories about old, fat, boring men, which most people probably don’t think is a problem. But no art form can ever become mature if it ignores large swaths of the world, and it’s indisputable that our world is filled with men who are old, or fat, or boring, or (even worse) all three at once. Maybe none of us would ever want comics to be only about the Sprotts among us, but the fact that there’s now room for comics about them is a good sign.
George Sprott: 1894-1975 is an expanded version of a story that originally appeared from late 2006 through March of 2007 in single-page installments in the New York Times Magazine’s “Funny Pages” section. (Which, by the way, seems to have quietly ended with Gene Luen Yang’s story “Prime Baby” a few months back.) In the Times serialization, each installment of Sprott was a single large page, essentially a chapter of the longer work. Those pages appear here, in the same sequence and not apparently changed, but they’re surrounded by new work – both Seth’s usually impeccable (if chilly, and in his typical blue tones) book design, with illustrations and decorations, and some new comics stories to expand that original story. Primary among the new work is a sequence of eight stories – each one three pages long, and each taking place on one particular day, in a different decade over Sprott’s long life, arranged from 1906 through 1971 as the book goes on. There’s also an impressive six-page fold-out, near the end of the book, that looks to depict Sprott’s scattered thoughts as he died. On top of those, there are short introductory and ending pieces: the first is thematically interesting, if mostly wheel-spinning, while the new two-page “Sign Off” from the fictional TV station that Sprott worked for is another slab of very provincial Canadian bacon added to a plate already swimming in maple flavoring and Timbits.
Fri Sep 4, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Young and Special -- 'X-Men: Misfits', 'Cat Paradise', 'Ninja Girls'
All young comics protagonists are special, even if they don’t know it yet. In manga in particular, they’re likely to protest loudly that they’re just “a normal kid” and to squirm at the thought of being separable from the vast thundering herd of undifferentiated humanity in the slightest way. But it doesn’t matter what they say; we see that they’re all uniquely wonderful -- maybe special snowflakes, maybe purple children. Maybe wizards! Maybe mutants! Maybe the feudal lord! Maybe the rightful ruler of the entire world, and the dashing fated love of that gorgeous other character, and, and, and EVERYTHING!
This week, I have three books like that, with young people who are deeply, utterly special.
X-Men: Misfits, Vol. 1
Story by Raina Telgemeier and
Dave Roman; art by Anzu
Del Rey Manga, August 2009,
$12.99
Telgemeier and Roman take the standard X-Men set-up – which is already, in its full Claremontian flowering, completely full of adolescent longing, fear, and obsession – and twist it about 90 degrees into the world of shojo. The characters come from all over the X-men universe, with a plot germ from mid-Claremont Era: Kitty Pryde, young and conflicted about her powers, is given a scholarship to Professor Xavier’s Academy for Gifted Youngsters in Westchester.
And she finds herself the only female student there. (Even the female professors are absent for most of this volume, to intensify the reverse-harem feeling.) The other X-Men characters are all familiar names, though they’re arbitrarily divided into teachers (Colossus, Magneto, Storm, Marvel Girl, Beast) and oh-so-pretty boys (Iceman, Angel, Forge, Havok, Cyclops, and so on). There’s the usual clique of privileged kids, who are allowed to do what they want and essentially run the school, and of course they are the prettiest boys and of course they are called The Hellfire Club. (And of course Magneto is their mentor; Telgemeier and Roman are hitting all of the X-Men/shojo parallels they can as hard as they can.)
Kitty is torn between the fast heartless boys and the outcasts – in particular between Pyro (who becomes her boyfriend) and Iceman (who is unfailingly cold to her, natch). Does she make a big choice at the end of this book? Does she learn what really matters in life? Is the Pope Catholic?
X-Men: Misfits is a solid reverse-harem shojo story, but I can’t help but believe that it’s true audience is men and women of around my age – comics readers of long-standing who know enough of the X-Men mythology (and I barely do) to appreciate the changes that are being made to it. Anzu’s art is exactly what you’d expect for this kind of story, though she does differentiate a large cast (of mainly pretty, pretty boys – all the same kind of prettiness, too) clearly and easily, which is not simple.
Mon Aug 31, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Syncopated' edited by Brendan Burford
It calls itself "An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays"
Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays
Edited by Brendan Burford
Villard, May 2009, $16.95
For most of the past fifty years, American comics had been running through an ever-tightening spiral of acceptable topics – somewhat mitigated by occasional art-comics eruptions – as superheroes and (ever less and less) other areas thought acceptable for children dominated ever more and more each year. And one little-remarked side effect of that spiral was that nonfiction comics, stories that actually were true, became so marginalized that they practically didn’t exist. Everything was fiction – even the memoirish comics of the undergrounds were transmuted into fiction – and the truth was nowhere to be found on the comics page.
That’s changed in the past decade or so, as a generation of new or newly energized creators have grappled with their own lives and histories, bringing forth a host of primarily memoir-based comics, from Perseopolis to Fun Home to Cancer Vixen. And that flood has brought attention to cartoonists who write about true stories that aren’t their own, like Joe Sacco. Slowly, nonfiction is creeping onto the comics shelf – it may be mostly memoirs now, but I hope that we’ll see ever more biographies (like Rick Geary’s J. Edgar Hoover) and histories (like Larry Gonick’s work) and even diet books (like Carol Lay’s The Big Skinny) and less likely things. Maybe, if I can be optimistic for once, in twenty years there will be comics (or graphic novels, or whatever you want to call a couple of hundred of drawn pages in a coherent narrative) in every bookstore category, filling the shelves with real stories as well as made-up ones.
If that does happen – and I hope that it is possible – Brendan Burford’s Syncopated will become a signpost on the way to that new world. Syncopated has sixteen original stories by sixteen distinctive voices (Burford among them), on various nonfiction topics. It splits fairly neatly in half between memoirs and personal reminiscences on one side (seven pieces, by my count) and works of history and current events outside of the artist (also seven pieces), with two portfolios of drawings, by Tricia Van de Burgh and Victor Marchand Kerlow, to finish up.
Continue reading Review: 'Syncopated' edited by Brendan Burford ›
Fri Aug 28, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter' by Darwyn Cooke
Hard-boiled noir from 1962 via 2009
Richard Stark's Parker, Book One: The Hunter
Darwyn Cooke
IDW, July 2009, $24.99
Richard Stark’s Parker novels come out of a particular period in literary history: the heyday of the disposable paperback for men. Paperbacks had appeared in their modern form just before WWII, and servicemen got used to carrying small paperbound books in whatever pockets they could jam a book into. The boom continued through the postwar years, with a flood of short thrillers, detective stories, and soft-core porn – all to stave off boredom for a man waiting for dinner time on a business trip in some hick town, or hanging out at the PX on his army base, or riding the streetcar home at night.
The Hunter was published in 1962, at the height of that boom – a good decade before the ‘70s taught publishers that women were even more dependable consumers of paperbacks, and the long shift to romances and their ilk began. At first glance, Stark’s hero is right out of the mold of the great hardboiled Mikes (Hammer & Shayne) – tough, violent, single-minded, implacable. But Parker was less emotional than the usual hardboiled hero – cold where they were hot, calculating where they were impetuous. Parker could kill when he had to – and he did it quite a bit – but he never killed for fun, or just because he could. As the Parker novels went on he avoided killing as much as he could, simply because deaths attract more attention than he wanted.
Hardboiled heroes came from both sides of the law – Mike Shayne and Mike Hammer were detectives, but there were plenty of law-breakers before Parker, from writers like David Goodis and Jim Thompson. They usually weren’t series characters, though: Parker’s amoralism went beyond his own actions to his world, and his stories told how a master criminal could get away with it – if he was smart and tough enough.
Continue reading Review: 'Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter' by Darwyn Cooke ›
Mon Aug 24, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: B.P.R.D., Vol. 10: The Warning by Mignola, Arcudi, and Davis
Armageddon looms
B.P.R.D. Vol. 10: The Warning
Written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi; Art by Guy
Davis
Dark Horse Comics, May 2009, $17.95
The Warning is the tenth volume collecting the adventures of the Hellboy-less Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, and the first in what the creators are calling the “Scorched Earth Trilogy.” The afterword by co-writer John Arcudi claims that events will get bigger and more dangerous from here – though he does note that this volume includes, among other thing, “[name withheld] gets kidnapped, … entire fleet of helicopters gets wiped out, and gigantic robots trample [name withheld] into rubble.” And previous volumes of this series (and, of course, of the related Hellboy) have been no slouch in the near-Armageddon sweepstakes – particularly The Black Flame. That’s a lot of promise, but Mignola’s fictional world does always teeter on the verge of utter supernatural chaos, in his very Lovecraftian way. It would be wise to take Arcudi at his word.
The Warning begins with the team going in two directions at once, urgently following up recent events – Abe Sapien leads an assault squad out into the snowy mountains to try to find and retrieve the Wendigo-possessed former leader of their team, and the others have a séance to contact the mysterious ‘30s costumed hero Lobster Johnson, whom they think will have information about the robed man taunting and manipulating firestarter Liz Sherman in her mind. But neither one of those leads works out as the B.P.R.D. hopes, and, before long, they’re face-to-face with another high-powered menace and seeing another city being assaulted by giant robots.
And yet, remember that note from Arcudi. The plot of The Warning turns out to be just a warm-up; the antagonists here are not the true enemies of the B.P.R.D. Near the end, that mysterious man claims that he isn’t their real antagonist, either. The B.P.R.D. is fumbling in the dark in The Warning, unsure of what the real menace is, let alone how to stop it. But they go on, because that’s what they do.
The Warning is a great installment of a top-rank adventure series, filled with wonder and terror, eyeball kicks and quiet character moments. It’s a magnificent brick in a more magnificent wall, but it’s no place to start. If you haven’t read B.P.R.D. before, go back to the beginning with Hollow Earth – or, even better, go back to the beginning of Hellboy with Seed of Destruction. But, if you enjoy adventure stories with characters who don’t wear skin-tight outfits, you should have discovered Mignola’s world by now.
Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He¹s been reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.
Publishers who would like to submit books for review should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Andrew Wheeler directly at acwheele (at) optonline (dot) net.Wed Aug 19, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: Famous Players by Rick Geary
The second book in the Treasury of XXth Century Murder
Famous Players: The Mysterious Death of William Desmond Taylor
By Rick Geary
NBM, August 2009, $15.95
No one does murder like Rick Geary. For more than a decade he’s been regularly creating slim books in this loose series, each depicting a separate, horribly violent crime of passion in his inimitable crisp and detailed style, each with enough Geary detachment and subdued whimsy to keep the blood from being too much. This is the tenth – not including an earlier, larger-format Treasury of Victorian Murder, Vol. 1, which had shorter stories and served as a dry run for the later books – and Geary is still at it. As usual, he’s digging into once-scandalous events from about a century ago; the series was explicitly “Victorian” until last year’s Lindbergh Child, and this book examines a murder case in the early days of Hollywood.
After a few pages of scene-setting – and no one does scene-setting better than Geary, one of the very few cartoonists who routinely incorporates maps and schematics into his comics pages, and makes them fit perfectly – Geary focuses his story on 1922, when the star director of the highbrow but very successful Famous Players studio was William Desmond Taylor, a man of middle years who – as it turned out – was not really named William Desmond Taylor, and who had a complicated hidden past. That all came out after the morning of February 2nd, when his cook/valet found him dead on the floor of his apartment. Police science was not advanced at that point, and the power of the studios was, so the crime scene was tampered with by various people – both random sightseers, hangers-on, and reporters as well as possibly culpable parties such as Famous Players’ “troubleshooter” and two of Taylor’s colleagues, whom Geary shows moving, concealing, and removing evidence. (What that evidence was – and whether it had anything to do with Taylor’s death – is of course impossible to know now.)
Mon Aug 17, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Stuffed!' By Glenn Eichler & Nick Bertozzi
A strained comedy of inheritances - personal and social
Stuffed!
By Glenn Eichler & Nick Bertozzi
First Second, September 2009, $17.99
Eichler writes for Stephen Colbert’s show, which is why Stuffed! has a prominent Colbert quote on the cover – and, perhaps, why it was published at all. It’s a graphic novel that wants to be satirical, particularly about the modern touchiness surrounding race, but it bogs itself down in bland talk without ever quite pushing its satire to become really funny or really dangerous.
Tim Johnston is a mid-level bureaucrat at an HMO, one of the faceless thousands responsible for denying healthcare whenever possible. But one day he gets a call he doesn’t expect: his estranged father is dying. Soon, Tim has to deal with his father’s death – and his inheritance from the old man. Johnston senior had a small storefront – The Museum of the Rare and Curious – in which he displayed various odd items to the very few people who ever bothered to come look at it. Most of that “museum” is easily disposed of, since it’s nearly all junk. But then there’s “The Savage,” which Tim refers to as a “statue” of an African tribesman – about a hundred years old and dressed in a leopard-print loincloth in best Republic serial fashion.
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Fri Jul 24, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: The Photographer by Guibert, Lefèvre, & Lemercier
Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders
The Photographer
By Didier Lefèvre, Emmanuel
Guibert, and Frederic Lemercier
First Second, May 2009, $29.95
Lefèvre was a French photojournalist – he died, unexpectedly and too young, in 2007 – and this book is an unusual combination of drawn comics and fumetti, telling the true story of part of his life. In 1986, Lefèvre took the first of several trips into Afghanistan with the group Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF, aka Doctors Without Borders), to report on the work of the MSF during the Soviet occupation, particularly on one particular mission to set up a field hospital in Zaragandara in the Yaftal valley up in the mountains of the north.
Nearly twenty years later, after hearing stories of that trip many times, Lefèvre’s friend Emmanuel Guibert, a well-known cartoonist and graphic novelist, turned that trip into comics form, using Lefèvre’s words and photos. As this book credits itself, it’s “A story lived, photographed, and told by Didier Lefèvre, written and drawn by Emmanuel Guibert, laid out and colored by Frederic Lemercier, and translated from the French by Alexis Siegel.” (I think that means that Lemercier did the panel breakdowns from Guibert’s script – for those who obsess about comics workflow – but that’s not completely clear.)
So every page of The Photographer is a comics page, with captions, panels, borders and word balloons. But many of those pictures are not Guibert’s drawings, but Lefèvre’s photos – used as panels (wordless; the captions and balloons never overlie the photography) or in strips of film to convey time passing or just the atmosphere of a scene. It’s a style that quickly fades into the background, but it gives The Photographer the power of a documentary – we see these people’s real faces, and the real landscape they inhabit, as well as Guibert’s versions of them.
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