Articles by andrew-wheeler
Fri Apr 11, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Two Yen, Joe!
Kieli # 1 and Spiral #3 under the microscope
This week’s manga delivery brought two more books from mighty Yen Press, and they are…
Kieli, Vol. 1
Story by Yukako Kabei; Art by Shiori Teshirogi
Yen Press, 2008, $10.99
Some books, like this one, just have too much backstory for their own good, but let me roll up my sleeves and see if I can get it all clear: sometime in the future, mankind expanded to at least one other world, the planet Kieli is set on. (According to at least one character in this book, though, God decided not to travel, and so this unnamed world is godless.)
Anyway, about 80 years ago, there was a big war on this planet over fossil fuels – the two sides aren’t named, by the way – which seems to have gone global and gotten particularly nasty. Towards the end of the war, one side (or maybe both) created nearly indestructible warriors, called “the undying” from dead soldiers. The Undying had their hearts replaced with stones, and so stopped aging, could take ridiculous amounts of damage, and healed nearly any hurt in time.
After the war – we don’t know who won, or any real information about the politics or government of this world – the Undying were hunted down, mostly by “the Church,” and are now considered a legend.
Fri Apr 4, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Osamu Tezuka's 'Dororo'
A creepy samurai tale from the master of manga
Dororo, Vol. 1
by Osamu Tezuka
Vertical, 2008, $13.95
Vertical continues to reprint some of Tezuka’s most interesting and idiosyncratic manga with this first volume of his 1967-68 serial Dororo – the other two volumes will follow a little later this year.
Dororo is, I guess, Tezuka’s take on a samurai manga – it’s set in pre-modern Japan and the main character runs around cutting people with a sword.
But let me back up a bit. Dororo opens with Lord Daigo, the typical nasty, ambitious nobleman so beloved in genre fiction around the world. He spends the night in the “Hall of Hell” – a shrine or pavilion filled with statues of forty-eight evil gods. Daigo wants to rule all of Japan, and wants to make a deal with the demons, so he offers up his about-to-be-born son. For the power he wants, he asks each of the evil gods to take one thing from that child…
Thu Apr 3, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: Four Books for Pre-Adults
Graphic Novels for kids from all over
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.
Wed Apr 2, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'That Salty Air' by Tim Sievert
Debut graphic novel of the sea, the sea
That Salty Air
Tim Sievert
Top Shelf, 2008, $10.00
For a book about the sea, That Salty Air feels awfully Minnesotan. (Or maybe I’m just reacting to the underlying Norwegian-ness of both Minnesota and Sievert’s story – but there is something hard and dour and northern about That Salty Air.)
Maryann and Hugh are a young couple who live in a lonely cabin by the sea, and whose main source of income seems to be fishing. One day, the postman delivers two letters from the local doctor – it’s immediately clear that Maryann’s letter has told her that she’s pregnant, but we get a couple of montages of sea life (red in tooth and claw, for some immediate symbolism) before Hugh gets his letter.
From it, he learns that his mother has drowned, and he immediately turns against the sea, blaming it for her death. Really, he curses the sea and throws a rock, beaning an important squid far below (which action will be important later). Hugh curses his life, runs off to town to get drunk, and generally behaves badly through the middle of the book, while Maryann sits at home, trying to keep things together.
She also hasn’t gotten a chance to tell Hugh she’s pregnant yet, since he flew off the handle so quickly and so completely. He eventually does come back, and they reconcile, with each other and with the sea…more or less.
That Salty Air is an exceptionally symbolic story, very obviously so. Sievert is clearly young and energetic, and I expect he’ll be someone to reckon with once he settles down a bit. This particular book has a lot of strong points – the particulars of characterization, the evocation of a particular landscape, the inky blacks and assured panel-to-panel transitions – but its story made this reader roll his eyes more than once. It’s a bit much to swallow.
But, on the other hand, it’s only ten bucks for over a hundred pages of comics by a real talent. It’s hard to beat that. And I expect Sievert’s next book will add some subtlety to the already impressive strengths of That Salty Air. He’s definitely a talent to watch.
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. He’s 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 their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Andrew Wheeler directly at acwheele (at) optonline (dot) net.
Wed Apr 2, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Three Shadows' by Cyril Pedrosa
An award-winning tale of family from France
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.
Fri Mar 28, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: A Random Walk
Books with nothing in common!
This week finds me in near Old-Mother-Hubbard mode, with just a few random old things. But let’s run through them, just because they’re here, and maybe the Manga Gods will smile on us for next week…
Priest, Vol. 1
Min-Woo Hyung
Tokyopop, 2003, $9.99
From the evidence – the creator’s name, and the fact that this reads left-to-right – I deduce that this series is manwha rather than manga, and comes from Korea. (If I’m wrong, someone will let me know.)
In a time and place that’s supposed to be the late 19th century American West – but contains guns from at least fifty years later – the half-doomed ex-priest Ivan Isaacs battles the undead servants of the fallen Archangel Temozarela, with the fate of the whole world at stake.
(Yes, Temozarela. He must be in one of the footnotes to the Bible, since he’s not one of the “Big Three” Archangels. Question for discussion: Is what Eastern comics creators have done to Christianity in their stories equal to, less than, or greater than what Westerners have done to Buddhism and Shintoism? And does the Western infestation of ninjas have any part in this discussion?)
Oh, and our priest hero does this, in this first volume at least, on a train. Badass only begins to cover it. Ivan sold half of his soul to Belial for the power to battle Temozarela’s forces – there might be some political war in hell going on in the background, but that’s not explained in this volume.
What Ivan does is 1) to pump several metric tons of silver bullets into marauding hordes of zombie-like creatures, though, sadly, usually not until they’ve already killed most of the other people in the vicinity and 2) to bemoan his fate and to proclaim loudly that he is still alive and so Belial hasn’t captured him yet.
The odd thing about Priest is that, with its scratchy, blocky art style, overarching gloom, and marauding undead, it feels and looks very much like an independent comic of the mid-'90s; Hyung’s style only looks manga now and then, generally with his female characters. Sure, the big sound effects in Korean characters are a tip-off, but otherwise this looks a lot like a book Slave Labor would have at least thought about publishing in 1996.
Thu Mar 27, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: Terry Brooks' 'Dark Wraith of Shannara'
Terry Brooks' epic fantasy series comes to comics
Dark Wraith of Shannara
By Terry Brooks, Illustrated by Edwin David, Adapted by Robert Place Napton
Del Rey, 2008, $13.95
I am morally sure that the following conversation took place somewhere, among some people, before this book came into existence:
“It’s not fair! All of those other fantasy writers are getting comics based on their books!”
“Yeah! Why Salvatore and Hamilton but not Brooks?”
“What do they have that he hasn’t got? He’s at least as popular as Feist!”
I have no idea who said it, or who they said it to, but, somehow, the influence of the Dabel Brothers has led to ever more epic fantasy writers getting the urge (or maybe just the contract) to create graphic novels based on their work.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that; American comics have been a closed guys-in-tights shop for a generation now, and anything that opens that up is nice. But it is a bit weird, personally, when the two sides of my world collide quite so violently.
Dark Wraith of Shannara, unlike most of the recent epic fantasy comics out there, doesn’t adapt anything; it’s a brand-new story set in Terry Brooks’s very famous (and very bestselling) world of Shannara. For continuity geeks – and aren’t we all that, about something? – this takes place soon after the end of the novel The Wishsong of Shannara
Continue reading Review: Terry Brooks' 'Dark Wraith of Shannara' ›
Tue Mar 25, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Little Nothings: The Curse of the Umbrella'
Lewis Trondheim's diary comic, now in English
Little Nothings: The Curse of the Umbrella
Lewis Trondheim
NBM/ComicsLit, 2007, $14.95
Trondheim is one of the major comics creators of France, responsible for the Dungeon
Little Nothings is a daily diary comic, much like James Kochalka’s American Elf
So each page of Little Nothings apparently represents one day, though none of the strips are dated, so it’s not always clear if days are missing (or sequences changed for whatever reason). And a couple of the strips seem to be multiple pages for one day -- or maybe it’s just that he’s thinking and cartooning about the same thing for several days straight.
(None of that matters terribly much, though; it’s just that I’m obsessive. I think about these things far too much; it’s a sickness, I know.)
Continue reading Review: 'Little Nothings: The Curse of the Umbrella' ›
Mon Mar 24, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
'Doom Patrol: Planet Love' Review
Return to the reality-bending days of Grant Morrison
And so we come to the end. It’s taken DC Comics sixteen years to collect all of Grant Morrison’s classic run on Doom Patrol
There was bombast in the air, then, on all sides. Superheroes were long past their days of stopping bank robberies and foiling minor criminals. The era of cosmic threats all the time had been inspired by Secret Wars II
You have to remember that background when you read Morrison’s Doom Patrol, just as you have to remember the stolid seriousness of ‘80s superheroism when you read his Animal Man
Fri Mar 21, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Fairy Tail
A new series by Hiro 'Rave Master' Mashima
I suppose I should start off by saying that Rave Master
But that story ended, and now Mashima is back with…
Fairy Tail, Vols. 1 & 2
By Hiro Mashima
Del Rey Manga, 2008, $10.95 each
The first two volumes of his new series in English – published simultaneously on March 25th by the good folks at Del Rey Manga.
Fairy Tail breaks completely with Rave Master, because its young, untried, magically-powered person fighting evil is a young woman. How ‘bout them apples, huh?
All kidding about the genre markers of shonen manga aside, Fairy Tale is somewhat generic, but still distinctive. It’s set in one of those not-quite-medieval worlds, with magic, walled cities, and mostly low technology – though there’s an exception for trains, as so often is the case. It seems to be ruled by some sort of aristocracy, since there are people with power called “Duke,” but that’s not entirely clear.
Similarly, it’s hard to tell how the working world is organized, but the magical people have a structure of guilds (helpfully explained, with diagrams, in the second book), and, of course, there’s then Tokyo University-level competition to get into the “better” guilds. Presumably, most of the other occupations are regimented in a similar way, but Fairy Tail is not a book that spends much time among the peasants.
Fri Mar 14, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: With the Light
Beginning a series about an autistic boy
This time, we’re focusing entirely on one series, and specifically the two volumes of it published in English so far.
"Is Wheeler slacking off?" ask the punters.
No, he is not – each of these books is well over 500 pages, so I’m actually reviewing more manga, by weight, than usual this week.
With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child, Vols. 1 & 2
By Keiko Tobe
Yen Press, 2007-2008, $14.99 each
Every so often, those of us who love comics get a great object lesson with which to confront our friends who are not so open-minded: something that’s not only excellent as a comic, but challenges people’s preconceptions of what comics can do.
Maus
And now there’s With the Light, as well. I’m not saying that it’s as good as those other books – it’s well-crafted, and good at what it sets out to do, but isn’t quite on that level – but it’s another great example of comics story-telling applied to new material.
With the Light is a work of fiction, but it’s based closely on true stories. (And it also shows what a really full comics-publishing ecology, such as the one in Japan, can be capable of.) It tells the story of Hikaru Azuma, an autistic boy in an average Japanese city, from his birth, in the voice of his mother Sachiko.
Sachiko soon begins to worry that her son isn’t normal – he hates being held, he cries a lot, and, at his eighteen-month-year check-up, a nurse declares that he’s deaf because he doesn’t respond to her. The real diagnosis follows quickly, but it doesn’t help all that much – Sachiko is under a lot of pressure from her workaholic husband Masato and his interfering mother to be a perfect mom. And the measure of a perfect mother is how her child behaves – so a badly behaving child proves that she’s a failure. “They say children grow up as they were raised,” the mother-in-law screams at Sachiko in a full-page panel, “It’s all your fault!”
Tue Mar 11, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: Andi Watson's 'Glister'
The first three volumes of an all-ages GN
Andi Watson
Image, 2007, $5.99 each
Andi Watson has had a career more typical of a prose writer than a comics creator: he’s worked on a number of projects, pretty much all of them his own original ideas, nearly all of them with defined endings, for different publishers, and kept the copyright. Some of those projects span more than one volume, but, still, his stuff ends up on a shelf as if they were novels, and he’s hasn’t shown any sign of really wanting to be the next great Avengers
Watson’s recent books have generally been aimed at adults without being restricted to them; a book like Little Star
Actually, if anything, Glister excludes adults: it's a series about the continuing adventures of a preteen girl (Glister Butterworth), and its central audience is presumably girls of Glister’s age. Each of the three volumes so far are independent stories of about 64 pages each -- the first is a bit shorter, but it also has a Skeleton Key back-up to fill out the pages.
Fri Mar 7, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: I've Got a Yen
Three of them, in fact...
This week I have three books from the fine folks at Yen Press. All of them are the second volume in their respective series, and I’ve only read the first book of one of them…which means it’s time for me to be confused yet again.
(Don’t worry – I’m well used to it by now.)
Black God, Vol. 2
Story by Dall-Young Lim; Art by Sung-Wao Park
Yen Press, 2008, $10.99
This is yet another series about a young man (Keita) bonded to a gorgeous supernatural girl (Kuro) who doesn’t have much knowledge of the modern world – apparently, he lost his arm in the first book, and she saved his life and bonded permanently with him to get his arm back. (She’s a “mototsumitama,” for those making notes at home. What does that mean? I dunno…)
In a startling reversal, Keita is not a nerdy high school student, but a mid-20s jerk of a videogame designer/programmer. (On the big two-page title spread of the very first story in this book, he’s strangling Kuro awake in the morning because she ruined his life – “ruined” apparently in the sense of “saved him from dying and gave him a connection to vast supernatural hoodoo.”) I think Keita is supposed to be at least mildly attractive to the reader, but I found him a complete ass.
In this book, some of the details of the human-mototsumitama relationship are explained, as Kuro meets another mototsumitama woman, who is bonded to an old man. (Keita’s boyhood friend, the equally cute Akane, also has something to do with the overall plot, but exactly what isn’t clear yet.) And what happens when two super-powered folks meet in a comic book, kids? That’s right – a big fight scene!
The art is clean and detailed, easy to follow for Americans while still being clearly in a manga style. The story is nothing terribly new – psychic battles, girls in their underwear, emotional turmoil – but it moves decently and the dialogue is pretty good. If Keita were anything like an acceptable human being, this could be a solid adventure story.
Fri Feb 29, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: The Luck of the Draw
Four reviews with little in common but a birthplace
The stack of manga to be reviewed has been getting shorter, down to the point where trying to put together a theme is difficult. So, this week, it’ll have to be random reviews. It’s all from Japan, and… that’s probably all it has in common.
Andromeda Stories, Vol. 3
Keiko Takemiya; story by Ryu Mitsuse
Vertical, 2008, $11.95
The epic conclusion of the SF manga series from the early ‘80s ends with a scene familiar from many derivative tales of the Planet Stories
However, being as this is a manga for girls from the early '80s, most of this book has to be taken up with the relationship between Jimsa and his long-lost twin "brother," Affle. The two share a psychic connection – they feel each other's pain and their not terribly well defined psychic powers work much better when they're in close proximity – and they also are strangely drawn to each other.
(Need I mention that the "brother" is not what he seems? This will be important for that very familiar ending.)
Other relationships are equally as central, such as those involving “the Elder,” who was an important advisor to the rules of Cosmoralia but turns out to be More Than He Appears. He was Jimsa’s mentor, but turns his attentions to Affle in this book, as part of his general megalomaniacal plans to utterly destroy the Enemy. Since this is a shojo manga, it’s much more about emotional scenes and relationships than about actually fighting against killer robots.
(And the Enemy’s function is to put whole populations into a kind of cold sleep – entirely willingly – so that they can live in a virtual world of peace and plenty. This, as is common in pulp SF, is seen as horrible and effete, a fate worse than death – so slaughtering the millions or billions the Enemy now warehouses and cares for is the only possibly option. It would have been nice to have seen a little thought given to that background, and a recognition that it might not be all that bad just because it’s different.)
I’m not the audience for Andromeda Stories: I’m too old, of the wrong gender, and I’ve read far too much science fiction. But, if you’re not me, you might like this.
Wed Feb 27, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: Bryan Talbot's 'Alice in Sunderland'
Bryan Talbot mixes Lewis Carroll and local history
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
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.
Continue reading Review: Bryan Talbot's 'Alice in Sunderland' ›
