Articles by andrew-wheeler
Wed May 21, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
'Dungeon Monstres, Vol. 1: The Crying Giant' Review
Another piece of the rapidly expanding 'Dungeon' empire
The “Dungeon” series has gotten so full of stories, so complicated, that there’s a diagram on the back of this book to explain how all of the sub-series relate to each other.
Up top are the three main sequences – The Early Years (the creation), Zenith (the height), and Twilight (the downfall), as it says here – and below that are explanations of the other three clusters: Parade, Bonus, and Monstres. All are set in a giant castle in a standard fantasy world – the castle was set up by “the Keeper” as a habitat for various monsters, who could kill and devour the inevitable wandering adventurers. (So it’s a hack-n-slash D&D campaign turned on its head; the monsters win every time.)
Dungeon Monstres, Vol. 1: The Crying Giant
By Johann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Mazan, and Jean-Cristophe Menu
NBM, June 2008, $12.95
This particular subseries focuses on, as the back cover says, “great adventures of secondary characters.” So Monstres is the Cable & Deadpool of the “Dungeon” world, I guess…
The other different thing about Monstres is that the stories are illustrated by guest artists, not by series creators Johann [that’s how he’s credited on this book; though I’ve never seen the “h” in his name before] Sfar and Lewis Trondheim. In this case, the first story, “John-John the Terror,” has art by Mazan while the title story is illustrated by Jean-Cristophe Menu, head of the alternative comics publisher L’Association.
Continue reading 'Dungeon Monstres, Vol. 1: The Crying Giant' Review ›
Mon May 19, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch'
Another Neil Gaiman story gets the comics treatment from Dark Horse
Neil Gaiman has been too busy lately to write much for comics unless it's an event -- like 1602
The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch
By Neil Gaiman, Michael Zulli, and Todd Klein
Dark Horse Books, May 2008, $13.95
Now, for most writers, "The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch" would be by far their longest title ever, but Gaiman is not most writers. He's also responsible for "Being An Experiment Upon Strictly Scientific Lines Assisted By Unwins LTD, Wine Merchants (Uckfield)" " Forbidden Brides Of The Faceless Slaves In The Nameless House Of The Night Of Dread Desire," " I Cthulhu: Or What's A Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing In A Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47º 9' S, Longitude 126º 43' W)?," and " Pages From A Journal Found In A Shoebox Left In A Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, And Louisville, Kentucky." So "Miss Finch" may just be one of Gaiman's more punchy and terse titles.
According to the Neil Gaiman Visual Bibliography -- and why should we mistrust it? -- "Miss Finch" is one of Gaiman's more obscure stories, showing up in the program book for the convention Tropicon XVII and a magazine called Tales of the Unanticipated
Continue reading Review: 'The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch' ›
Fri May 16, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Toto & Tokugawa
Two books that have absolutely nothing in common
Manga Friday returns after a brief hiatus -- I was on a secret mission in Darkest Florida, and unable to read manga and coherently think about them for several days -- with a look at two very, very different books. We'll start with the easier one to explain.
Toto!: The Wonderful Adventure, Vol. 1
By Yuko Osada
Del Rey Manga, May 2008, $10.95
Toto! is an adventure story about Kakashi, a boy who desperately wants to get off the small island he was born on and get out into the wide world to have adventures. (Not to do anything in particular, just to "have adventures." Manga boy-heroes are often oddly nonspecific. Kakashi's father, similarly, was famous as "an explorer.") While somewhere there is probably a humorous manga series about a guy who keeps trying and failing to leave his hometown -- come to think of it, I'd like to read something like that myself -- Toto! falls into the more usual pattern, and Kakashi stows away on a blimp almost as soon as the story begins.
(Toto! is set in the indeterminate future, not an alternate history, depsite the presence of airships. It is an iron rule of alternate-history stories that every possible world but our own is completely covered in zeppelins, and I guess the same may hold true for odd, indefinite futures.)
But just getting onto the zeppelin is not nearly enough; it has been hijacked by the Man Chicken gang, who forced all of the passengers and crew to dive into the sea as they stole the airship for a quick getaway to their secret hideout.
Wed May 14, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard'
Many episodes, but not quite a story
Eddie 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
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.
Continue reading Review: 'The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard' ›
Tue May 13, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Too Cool To Be Forgotten' by Alex Robinson
Hypnotized back to 1985
We've all occasionally wanted to go back in time -- to fix something we screwed up the first time, to relive some particular time in our lives, or just to do something differently. But would we be able to do better the second time around? Alex Robinson's new graphic novel -- coming up in July from Top Shelf -- asks exactly those questions.
Too Cool To Be Forgotten
By Alex Robinson
Top Shelf, July 2008, $14,95
In 2010, Andy Wicks is coming up on his fortieth birthday -- he's married with two daughters and working as a computer technician. And, to finally stop smoking, he agrees to his wife's suggestion to get himself hypnotized.
He closes his eyes, listens to the doctor...and wakes up in his 15-year-old body, back in 1985. He soon decides that some kind of hypnotic construct -- though he never internalizes that thought, or really acts as if it's true -- and that the whole scenario is designed to make him decide not to have his first cigarette, and thus stop smoking back up in his own time.
Now, I am a former science fiction editor, so I probably think about this stuff more than most people, but Andy never seems to really think through his situation, or quite decide how old he is. He never really thinks of himself as a 15-year-old; his self-image stays solidly middle-aged. But he also doesn't think through the consequences of that -- he thinks of other high-school students, who are exactly the same age he is, as "kids."
Continue reading Review: 'Too Cool To Be Forgotten' by Alex Robinson ›
Mon May 12, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Ghost Stories' by Jeff Lemire
All Canadians do is farm and play hockey. Discuss.
Lemire is in the middle of an impressive thematically-related trilogy of stories about a rural bit of Ontario, Canada – the first book was Tales from the Farm
Ghost Stories: Essex County, Vol. 2
By Jeff Lemire
Top Shelf, September 2007, $14.95
Lou Lebeuf is an old, alcoholic, deaf man, living alone on the farm that was his younger brother’s and their father’s before him. He’s also either going senile or just doesn’t care about his current life – and who would? there’s not much to it – so he ignores his new home-care nurse and instead wanders through the memories of his younger days. At first he remembers growing up on that farm, playing hockey with his younger, bigger brother Vince, but he soon moves into the main plot of Ghost Stories.
Lou came up to Toronto to play semi-pro hockey for the Grizzlies around 1950, and Vince followed him up in 1951 -- Lou was a solid, smart player, but Vince was a giant bull of a man, dominating the ice once he got angry enough. But, unfortunately for both of them, accompanying Vince on that trip in 1951 was his fiancee, Beth Morgan. Lou was strongly attracted to Beth, and, once -- the night after the Grizzlies made the playoffs that March -- Lou and Beth had quick, secret sex on a rooftop.
Mon May 5, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Sex and Sensibility' edited by Liza Donelly
Ten women cartoonists, 200 cartoons, one subject
What do women want? Sigmund Freud thought he knew, but we all know about him. After a few decades of feminism, it’s become clearer that the best way to find out what women want is… to ask them.
Sex and Sensibility
Edited By Liza Donelly
Hachette/Twelve, April 2008, $22.99
Donelly is a noted single-panel cartoonist and the author of Funny Ladies
Donelly collected nine of her colleagues – mostly single-panel magazine cartoonists, with a couple of editorial cartoonists for spice – and asked them to contribute cartoons on women, men, sex, relationships – that whole area. Two hundred cartoons later, Sex and Sensibility emerged. It's divided into several thematic sections -- Sex, Sensibility, Women, Lunacy, and Modern Love -- and each cartoonist provided an essay about herself and her work, which are sprinkled throughout.
Continue reading Review: 'Sex and Sensibility' edited by Liza Donelly ›
Sat May 3, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Blue Pills' by Frederik Peeters
Love and HIV in Switzerland
Blue 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.)
Fri May 2, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Yoshihiro Tatsumi says 'Good-Bye'
More stories from Japan's forgotten master of manga
This week, I’m giving over all of Manga Friday to the manga I was most looking forward to this year – a collection of dark, psychological stories from the creator who invented gekiga but who has been almost forgotten at home.
Good-Bye
By Yoshihiro Tatsumi; Translated by Yuji Oniki; Edited by Adrian Tomine
Drawn & Quarterly, June 2008, $19.95
This is the third in Drawn & Quarterly’s series of books reprinting Tatsumi’s groundbreaking gekiga stories of forty years ago; this book reprints and translates stories from 1971-72, as The Push Man and Other Stories
Continue reading Manga Friday: Yoshihiro Tatsumi says 'Good-Bye' ›
Sat Apr 26, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow'
James Sturm and Rich Tommaso tell the story of a great baseball player
Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow
By James Sturm & Rich Tommaso
Jump at the Sun/Hyperion, 2007, $16.99
This is a profoundly worthy book -- produced under the asupices of The Center for Cartoon Studies, by two respected, serious modern cartoonists, published by the premier imprint for African-American children's books, and about possibly the greatest pitcher in the history of baseball. Luckily, it's not as dry and dull as that might make it sound.
It's not really a biography of the great pitcher Satchel Paige, though it looks like one -- it follows the life and very abbreviated Negro Leagues baseball career of an Alabama man named Emmet. (His last name isn't revealed.) Emmet faced Paige in one of his first at-bats for the Memphis Red Sox, but broke his leg in stealing home -- he made the run, but lost his career. Emmet's life intersects Paige's again, much later, but he also follows Paige's career, and compares it to his wn life along the way.
Satchel Paige opens with Emmet's fateful at-bat against Paige, and then moves on from there, with a few vignettes of Emmet's life from the late twenties to the early forties. Emmet's a sharecropper, a poor man in a poor part of the world, and moderately oppressed by the local white landowners. (His son is beaten once, and we see the aftermath of one lynching, but Emmet himself kowtows enough to keep himself and his family safe. Perhaps the correct word for his condition is "terrorized.") The book makes it clear that those white landowners own everything -- at one point Emmet thinks "walkin' out your door is trespassing if they choose to call it that."
Continue reading Review: 'Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow' ›
Fri Apr 25, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Shoulder-a-Coffin!
The first book in a very odd series
This week, Manga Friday applies its lazer-like eye to one and only one book – luckily, this one is weird and confusing enough for any five regular volumes…
Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro, Vol. 1
By Satoko Kiyuduki
Yen Press, May 2008, $10.99
Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro is one of the few manga series I’ve seen with extensive color: about a half-dozen times in the first half of this book, a story begins with at least two pages in full color. That slows down as the book goes on, so I suspect this is done in Japan to launch “big” new series with a splash.
(I should also note that this probably hasn't quite hit stores yet -- the publication date is officially "May," which means it's probably on trucks whizzing across North America right now. And "May" covers quite a bit of time, too.)
And, for those of us who have managed to train our eyes to read manga “backwards,” and have gotten moderately adept at that, Kuro throws us another curveball: it’s in 4-koma (four panel) style, so each page reads straight down the right-hand column and then straight down the left-hand column…unless one of the top tiers has a panel stretching across the page, in which case I have to read all the panels several different ways before I’m sure how it’s meant to go. Your mileage may vary, but do expect at least a few pages for your eyeballs to reboot on the new operating system.
And then, once I’d figured out how to physically read Kuro, I still had to work out what was going on. And that wasn’t easy, either. Kuro is the girl on the cover – she’s dressed up like a boy, and talks like a boy -- so says the explanation; this may be clearer in Japanese -- and thus people tend to assume she’s male. She’s also carrying a coffin, and refuses to explain exactly why. (It’s more likely to be for her than for whatever she’s looking for, though -- that much is clear.)
Wed Apr 23, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: Chris Ware's 'ACME Novelty Library, Vol. 18'
Continuing the serialization of "Building Stories"
ACME Novelty Library, Vol. 18
By Chris Ware
Drawn & Quarterly, 2007, $18.95
My friend and former colleague James Nicoll once said “Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.” For me, Chris Ware fills the same function – Ware’s work is almost terminally depressing, but executed with such craft and skill that it’s impossible to look away.
This edition of ACME Novelty Library continues Ware’s current graphic novel, “Building Stories” – at least, that’s what this has been called before; there’s no page with that or any other title in this book – with a series of interconnected short stories about an unnamed woman who lives on the top floor of that apartment building. (Parts of this volume also appeared in The New York Times Magazine in 2007 as part of their cruelly-misnamed “Funny Papers” feature – Ware might have been the most bleak thing in that comics space so far, but all of it has been serious, most of it has been dour and none of it has been funny.)
Continue reading Review: Chris Ware's 'ACME Novelty Library, Vol. 18' ›
Tue Apr 22, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Fantasy Classics' edited by Tom Pomplun
Comics adaptations of Shelley, Lovecraft, Dunsany, and more
Fantasy Classics: Graphic Classics Vol. 15
Edited by Tom Pomplun
Eureka Productions, 2008, $11.95
The “Graphic Classics” series most of the time sticks to a single author per volume, but not always – they’ve had Horror Classics, Adventure Classics, and Gothic Classics already, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more along those lines. (There’s no one chomping at the bit for a full volume of Sax Rohmer or Anne Radcliffe, for example, and it’s also a way to do more Poe or Lovecraft without doing a full-fledged “volume two.”)
Fantasy Classics has two long adaptations – of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
The book leads off with a single-page adaptation of Lord Dunsany’s “After the Fire” by Rachel Masilamani; it’s fine for what it is, but basically a vignette.
Continue reading Review: 'Fantasy Classics' edited by Tom Pomplun ›
Mon Apr 21, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'J. Edgar Hoover' by Rick Geary
A "graphic biography" of the FBI head
J. Edgar Hoover: A Graphic Biography
By Rick Geary
Hill & Wang/Serious Comics, 2008, $16.95
Rick Geary has spent the last decade quietly turning himself into America’s most prolific and accomplished historical cartoonist, primarily with his long sequence of “A Treasury of Victorian Murder.” (If I were Larry Gonick, I’d be very careful crossing the street, knowing someone so accomplished, so talented, so close in the alphabet, and so well-versed in murder methods was out there.) But with J. Edgar Hoover Geary branches out slightly – he’s still within the world of crime and criminals, but he’s on the side of the “good guys” (more or less) and telling one life story instead of focusing on a particular crime.
Hoover was an exceptionally divisive figure throughout most of his life: loved by the law ‘n order crowd and loathed by those he spied on (which was nearly everyone to the left of Spiro Agnew). These days, though, I’d guess Hoover is mostly thought of as a quaint figure – the supposedly cross-dressing boogey man of someone else’s youth.
Fri Apr 18, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Plight of the Themeless
Random books for a random week
Here’s the manga I read this week (no, seriously, that’s the only thing they have in common) –
Kaze no Hana, Vol. 1
By Ushio Mizta and Akitoski Ohta
Yen Press, 2008, $10.99
Momoka Futami is just your normal teenaged manga heroine – an amnesiac orphan who’s coming to live with her unknown family four years after the mysterious death of her parents. Oh, and she learns that she’s the rightful wielder of one of eight ancient magical swords that are need to keep back various monsters that regularly pop into existence in this town.
Kaze no Hana has a lot of characters, and they’re all related to each other somehow, and most of them have magical swords, and…it just turned into a Russian novel in my head, with the added problem that I couldn’t even keep some of them straight visually. (This is mostly my problem; they don’t look identical, but they’re different in manga ways rather than Western ways, which means I can’t tell people apart unless they’re in the same panel and I can compare them directly.)
So, um, Kaze no Hana is complex and interesting, but it made my head hurt, OK? And I really don’t need that from a comic about the secret family of people that kill monsters – I can get secret families killing monsters in a dozen places without any headaches.
Your mileage may vary…
