Articles by andrew-wheeler
Wed May 6, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1910
Moore & O'Neill's metafictional romp plunges into the 20th century
: “1910”By Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
Top Shelf, April 2009, $7.95
The usual rule in comics is that nothing with two or more colons in its title – not to mention two or more separate numbering schemes – is nothing but rubbishy hackwork, and should be avoided. In this, as in so much else, Alan Moore is the Great Exception, as his newest miniseries comes with a jaw-breaker of a title that sounds like a piece of summer crossover from a stranger and much more literary world than our own.
This volume begins the third major “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” story – last year’s Black Dossier doesn’t quite count, for complicated Moorian reasons – and it continues with the survivors of the team from the first two stories (Mina Harker and a rejuvenated Alan Quatermain posing as his own son), augmented by several more fictional characters (Orlando, Raffles, Carnacki) to continue their work preserving England from obscure horrors, reporting in to the secret group headed by Mycroft Holmes.
There will be two more volumes in this story – each set in, and titled after, a different and widely spaced year in the last century – so 1910 is mostly set-up. Moore re-introduces the League and sets them to squabbling, since superteams must always fight among themselves. The battling is less ominous this time around: none of the team are as immediately dangerous as Mr. Hyde, nor as sneakily obnoxious as the invisible Mr.Griffin. (So we get Raffles’s sniffing attempts to maintain his requisite stiff upper lip in circumstances he never expected and Orlando engaging in high-quality mincing whenever the slightest opportunity arises, along with Mina’s usual Serious Girl act and very little from the increasingly colorless Alan.)
Continue reading Review: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1910 ›
Fri May 1, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: A Drifting Life
Yoshihiro Tatsumi's massive memoir of the early days of gekiga
A Drifting Life
By Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Drawn & Quarterly, April 2009, $29.99
It’s hard, sometimes impossible, to avoid a tunnel-visioned view of the world – not to have one’s mental map of things resemble that famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover, with familiar things reassuringly large and the rest of the world a small, distant blur. And so everything we learn gets filtered through that initial world-view, with each fact setting itself into place like a brick and used as shorthand for huge swaths of that surrounding blur, and a few isolated facts pass for “knowledge” of something far away.
For most of us, the history of manga goes like this: Tezuka sprung, fully-formed, sometime after the war. There were other creators, but hardly anybody can remember any of them. Eventually, the shonen-shojo gulf appeared, in the ‘70s, and real manga history started, with series that we can usually remember and some that we’ve actually read. Maybe we believe that because so very little of the first generation of manga has ever been translated into English, and maybe that’s because most of those stories are utterly ephemeral and best forgotten even by the Japanese. Or maybe not – but how would we know what was good, what the artistic movements, the creators, the publishing lines and magazines were fifty years ago in a country on the other side of the world, in a language where we can’t even tell where words end?
That’s where A Drifting Life comes in. It’s another one of those bricks: isolated, yes. Specific rather than comprehensive, absolutely. Biased, certainly. But it’s the story of those years, of the early days of manga from 1945 through 1960, from a creator who was there, and telling a semi-fictionalized story of a culture, an industry and a time we knew nothing about before.
Drawn & Quarterly has published three books of Tatsumi’s work before this, three collections of his short stories from the 1969-1972 period: The Push Man and Other Stories, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and Good-Bye. A Drifting Life comes from somewhat later in his career, though how much later isn’t clear. It’s been said that Tatsumi worked on this for more than a decade, and the epilogue – set in 1995 – has the feeling of bringing the story up to the “present day.” So, from that evidence, I surmise that Tatsumi worked on A Drifting Life from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, with serious uncertainty about both ends of that assumption. But it does look like he came to write this memoir long after the events he’s writing about, and probably at least a decade after he created the other stories we’ve seen from him.
Wed Apr 29, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: Showcase Presents Ambush Bug by Giffen, Fleming, Oksner, and others
A big fat book of stories making fun of the pre-Crisis DC Universe
Showcase Presents: Ambush Bug Vol. 1
Plot & Pencils by Keith Giffen, Script by Robert Loren Fleming, Inks by Bob Oksner (for most of the stories)
DC Comics, March 2009, $16.99
We all have to look back at the comics of our youth once in a while. It’s not always a pleasant experience, particularly when we’re reminded of what no-taste cretins we once were. But, once in a while, it’s possible to look back and discover that our taste wasn’t that bad, that something we remember as funny was actually clever and inventive as well. Even then, though, we might have to wade in pretty far before we get to the good stuff.
Ambush Bug started off as a random villain in a minor issue of a minor DC comic in late 1982 – DC Comics Presents #52, at that time the Superman team-up book – written by Paul Kupperberg, though the Bug was created by penciller Keith Giffen. He was there purely as an additional complication, as the A story in that issue saw a rampaging Negative Woman (from the then-new incarnation of the Doom Patrol) trashing Metropolis while Supes and her teammates tried to stop her. (And that issue is very of its time, with acres and acres of tedious explanatory dialogue like “The name’s Joshua Clay – Tempest to you, Superman. The lady calls herself Arani, or Celsius, take your pick! Put us together an’ you get the Doom Patrol” and similar decaying-Silver-Age tediousness.)
The Bug came back to DC Comics Presents slightly wackier, but still vaguely villainous, seven issues later, with Giffen taking over plotting as well and getting Paul Levitz to write an ostensible Superman-Legion of Super-Heroes team-up. It turned into a chase-the-wacky-villain around plot, something like a minor ‘50s Joker story. Kupperberg grabbed the Bug another six months later and made him wackier still for an issue of Supergirl.
And then Giffen took the Bug back for good, putting him in three short stories for Action Comics, where the core Bug team – Giffen on plots and pencils, Robert Loren Fleming providing script, and Bob Oksner on inks – came together. Giffen’s panels shoved into each other, eliminating gutters most of the time, and his Munoz-influenced period, all big noses, tight close-ups and odd angles, began – all of which gave the Bug’s stories a dark, cluttered, deeply nonheroic look. Oksner chipped in by dropped pots on ink on every page to fill Giffen’s blacks. And Fleming brought a light touch to the prose that made the stories funny and not just amusing.
Continue reading Review: Showcase Presents Ambush Bug by Giffen, Fleming, Oksner, and others ›
Fri Apr 24, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Growin' Up
When they say "sit down," these kids stood up.
The theme is more random than ever this week, because – let’s be honest – it would be difficult to find four manga series that aren’t about teenagers. But these three books offer exceptionally varied takes on the eternal problems of adolescence, and that’s good enough for me!
Wolverine: Prodigal Son, Vol. 1
Story by Antony Johnson; Art by Wilson Tortosa
Del Rey Manga, April 2009, $12.99
Yes, that the X-Men Wolverine; the one whose big movie opens a week from today. But here he’s ripped out of the Marvel Universe and dropped into a manga-fied version of his life, where he’s a sullen teenager attending an all-martial-arts all-the-time high school somewhere in darkest Canada. And he’s not yet the best at what he does, though what he does, as ever, is not pretty. (Or nice, if you subscribe to Eastern Orthodox Wolverineism.) He’s also a lot whinier than you’d expect from Wolverine, with a host of insecurity issues.
That’s what makes it manga-style I suppose: the school setting, the bizarre hair, the complicated school projects-cum-training-sessions, the teenage protagonist who thinks no one likes him. The extended fight scenes and ninjas, though, were in Wolverine stories almost from the beginning, so any manga influence is buried under Claremont and Miller and Wein.
So Wolverine is tormented and misunderstood, having mysteriously appeared at this school with no knowledge of his past, and he coasts through his all-hitting school work by being really really good at martial arts. He’s got an almost-love affair going with Tamara, the daughter of the school’s head, and he’s in regular conflict with some other, more stereotyped members of the class.
But then the boss of the school takes him to New York as a treat, and things get really bad. The aforementioned ninjas show up, and…well, the back half of this volume is pretty much wall-to-wall fight scenes, with short breaks for emoting and monologing. There will be more, of course – there’s never a “volume one” without a two – and the last few pages have some higher-up villains cackling and wringing their hands as a preview of what’s in for Logan in that volume.
Prodigal Son is a serviceable mash-up of X-Men and shonen, but it’s also entirely disposable and has no real reason to exist besides pure brand extension. I guess it’s really for kids who might like to read stories about Marvel Mutants, but will only read comics if they’re drawn manga-style.
Thu Apr 23, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: Three dispatches from the Philippines
Snapshots from another world of comics
These three books don’t represent the comics community of the Philippines: I know almost nothing about that community and I’m sure of that. Extrapolating from these three stories – from the three comics stories I happen to have – is futile and silly and I’m going to try not to do it. Drawing any conclusions about the larger Philippine comics market would be like reading Iron Fist, Scott Pilgrim, and Fun Home and from them alone creating a unified theory of North American comics.
So all I really want to say up front is this: these may be some of the best Philippine comics. But I seriously doubt that they’re all of the best. There’s probably even some projects even better than these. It’s a big world out there. (I also want to thank Charles Tan, who sent me a big box of Philippine comics and SF late last year, and without whom I wouldn’t have heard of any of these books.)Elmer (issues #1-4)
By Gerry Alanguilan
Komikero Publishing; May and Oct 2006, Nov 2007, Nov 2008; 50 Philippine pesos ea.
There’s something about the comics form that attracts really unlikely premises – flying men, teenagers who want to do their homework, retellings of operas without music, and whatever Alice in Sunderland is. Elmer is another in that proud and odd lineage: it’s a serious contemporary story set in a world where chickens suddenly became intelligent in 1979.
Yes, chickens. The protagonist is a young chicken named Jake, who comes back from his dead-end life in Manila to the rural farm where he grew up, because his father, Elmer, has had a stroke and isn’t expected to last long. He rejoins his sister May (a nurse) and brother Francis (a movie star) there, and stays there after his father’s death. Except for the chicken thing, the plot set-up is very like an indy movie, some Philippine Garden State.
Continue reading Review: Three dispatches from the Philippines ›
Mon Apr 20, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: I Saw You... edited by Julia Wertz
Missed connections found again through comics
I Saw You…: Comics Inspired by Real-Life Missed Connections
Edited by Julia Wertz
Random House/Three Rivers Press; February 2009; $12.95
Everyone’s looking for something: money, fame, recognition, wonder, love. For most of those things, you’re on your own. But, for the last one, there’s always the personal ads. Blatantly advertising for love can feel very needy and desperate, though – but what if the love is already there (or, at least, you hope it is) and just needs to be coaxed out? That’s the place for the missed connection – I saw you, you winked at me, the subway doors closed, and so on and on. A missed connection, if you’re inclined to think that way, if someone you should have really met and clicked with, but didn’t, quite, because of external circumstances.
Julia Wertz, the cartoonist of the webcomic The Fart Party, is one of many people obsessed with missed connections, either checking incessantly to see if someone “missed” them, or just amazed at what some people think a “connection” is. She found herself checking Craigslist several times a day, and then decided to make a minicomic out of missed connection ads. She got many more submissions than she’d expected, and that minicomic anthology eventually blossomed into this book – a collection of comics by nearly a hundred contributors, all illustrating actual missed connections ad, imagining their own missed connections, or just inspired by the idea.
Continue reading Review: I Saw You... edited by Julia Wertz ›
Fri Apr 17, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Schoolgirls in Trouble
Four books about teenagers in really short skirts
Well, I’m back, he said.
(A shiny dime to the first person to identify that line.)
“Manga Friday” has been on hiatus for a while, but it roars back into the arena, all mixed-metaphorical engines racing, with four new books set in that most hallowed of all Japanese story settings: the all-girls high school. Oh, sure – one of these books is set in a school that just recently let a small number of boys in, and another features a school that probably has some boys – but all of these books know that it’s the girls, with their little sailor outfits and ridiculously short skirts, that draws in the readers. (Apparently both boys and girls, as far as I can tell.) So, without further ado…
Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei: The Power of Negative Thinking, Vol. 1
By Koji Kumeta
Del Rey Manga, February 2009, $10.99
We begin with a parody, to ease ourselves into the goofy insanity of the real thing. Nozomu Itoshiki is an influential teacher at an all-girls school (told you!) – unfortunately, he’s not exactly influential in a good way, since he’s deeply suicidal. The requisite super-positive girl, Kafuka Fura, finds him hanging (the by-a-noose kind of hanging) in a cherry-blossom grove, and breaks his rope by grabbing onto his legs. That leads to the first iteration of Itoshiki’s catchprase – “What if I had died?!” – which is an incredibly awesome thing to say to someone who just saved your life, and which Itoshiki gets to say several times in the course of this book.
But, since he isn’t dead, Itoshiki has to go to school, where he spreads depression and sadness to his students – or he would, if they weren’t all each completely nuts in their own ways. Besides the super-positive girl, there’s one who never wants to leave her room (a Hikikomori – it’s common enough in Japan to have its own name), a stalker, one girl who always comes to school with new bruises and injuries, the requisite super-sexy girl who’s just returned from living overseas, a compulsive trash-texter, and so on.
Tue Apr 14, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: The Arcade of Cruelty
Joseph Patrick Larkin's pseudo-posthumous parade of preposterosities
Arcade of Cruelty
By Joseph Patrick Larkin
Also-Ran, 2008, $18
Joseph Patrick Larkin is a self-obsessed, creepy, sexist shut-in with voyeuristic tendencies. And those are his good points.
I only know this because I’ve just read his self-published book The Arcade of Cruelty – but, let me back up immediately, because “self-published” will give you a certain image, and this book doesn’t fit that at all. It’s immaculately well-designed, looking for all the world like the catalog of some very, very unlikely traveling museum exhibit. It has a real ISBN, the unlikely and wildly inaccurate category of “Queer Studies/Occult” on the back, and a little log on the front proclaiming it the new selection of “Joseph’s Book Club” (with a circular logo that looks not at all unlike that of a different book club, one run by a TV host hose name begins with O). In the middle of all that, on the otherwise classy cover, is that serviceable drawing by Larkin of a zombie tearing out someone’s (his?) throat.
Larkin’s art is all at about that level: he’s not a great artist by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s reasonably good at crude depictions of appalling things – and, besides, the writing is carrying most of the weight here, anyway.
Wed Apr 8, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: Three by Jeffrey Brown
Three books from one cartoonist in one year
Jeffrey Brown
Little Things
By Jeffrey Brown
Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, April 2008, $14.00
This one is subtitled “A Memoir in Slices,” and, yes, it’s yet another in the tsunami of memoir-comics from major not-usually-comics publishers. (I guess they’re all hoping for another Persepolis or Maus, and not looking to far from the apple tree, either.) Brown has a two-page comics introduction, in which he explains the book to someone on the phone – which comes down to “Anyway, they’re a bunch of autobiographical short stories and they’re funny sometimes.”
Mon Apr 6, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: Dean Koontz's Frankenstein: Prodigal Son
Murderous bio-engineered monsters in New Orleans
Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Prodigal Son, Volume One
Adaptation by Chuck Dixon; Illustrated by Brett Booth
Dell Rey, February 2009, $22.95
There comes a time in every best-selling writer’s life when he realizes that he’d like to make money even faster than he can write books. OK, maybe that realization comes to all of us – but the best-selling writer can actually do something about it. At that point, assuming that scruples aren’t a problem – and how on earth did he become a best-selling writer and keep his scruples, anyway? – the options are two: let someone else write a book under your name, or license something you’ve already written to another medium, and let Joe Hired-Hand do the heavy lifting in that format.
Or, if you’re Dean Koontz, you could do both.
Some years ago, he got Kevin J. Anderson to co-write a novel called Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Prodigal Son, and then a couple of sequels. (There was also a TV deal at the time, though, sadly, it eventually fell through.) And now long-time comics writer Chuck Dixon has adapted that novel, which was at least half-written by Anderson in the first place, into a comics series…which, of course, still has “Dean Koontz” as the largest thing on the cover.
(I’m beginning to think that popular writers’ names have a nearly homeopathic power – no matter how much they’re diluted, the audience will keep clamoring for more.)
Continue reading Review: Dean Koontz's Frankenstein: Prodigal Son ›
Mon Mar 9, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: A Pair of Jokers
That new Azzarello/Bermejo OGN and a collection of villain stories
The Joker has always been Batman’s most iconic and popular villain. We can argue why this is so, but it’s been true since at least the ‘70s, and shows no sign of changing any time in the near future. And so, with a major movie coming out last year with a high-profile Joker (though no one knew just how high-profile it would eventually be, after Heath Ledger’s surprise death and a billion dollars at the box office), DC signed up some more Joker-centric projects. Who could blame them?
Joker
Written by Brian Azzarello; Pencils and Covers by Lee Bermejo
DC Comics, November 2008, $19.99
This one was billed as the closest thing to a direct tie-in with that Dark Knight movie, and this Joker could function as a sequel – the Joker gets out of Arkham as the story begins. It’s pretty blatant, actually, with the Joker looking as close to Heath Ledger as a jumpy lawyer would allow, scarred cheeks (not an element of any previous Joker incarnations I can recall), and a brief Riddler cameo seemingly planned as a Johnny Depp casting call. (On the other hand, Two-Face is still alive in this story and Batman hardly appears at all – just at the end, when Azzarello was nearing the end of his page limit and nothing else would bring the story to any kind of conclusion.)
Joker is not precisely Joker’s story, though: it’s yet another worms-eye view of a superhero universe, the story of small-time hood Jonny Frost (and why, after seventy years of pulp comics, are we still stuck with dumb names like that?), who wants to be bigger than he has any right to be. So he volunteers to pick up the Joker when he gets out of Arkham, and he becomes the Joker’s right-hand man, sort-of. Then there’s a lot of violence – mostly against Two-Face’s gang – to show us how twisted and sociopathic and sneaky the Joker is.
Fri Mar 6, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Graphic Classics: Oscar Wilde'
The only thing worse than having comics made from your stories is not having comics made from your stories.
Graphic Classics, Vol. 16: Oscar Wilde
Edited by Tom Pomplun
Eureka Productions, February 2009, $11.95
Graphic Classics has been adapting the work of famous dead authors – from H.P. Lovecraft to Rafael Sabatini – for at least five years, mostly focusing on the more popular (rather than literarily classy) writers. And that’s a good thing, since no one wants to see Graphic Classics: Henry James. (“The Face in the Carpet” is not nearly as exciting as the Lovecraft-style title might indicate.)
So this is the sixteenth volume in the series, which are all in the same vein: about 144 pages of comics adaptations of said dead writer’s work, usually with a few long adaptations and some shorter ones sprinkled in for spice. The creators involved are a mix of semi-familiar names and newer folks on their way up – this kind of project, obviously, doesn’t tend to attract top talent. (And is almost certainly better without the kind of compromises “top talent” requires.) Editor Tom Pomplun usually adapts at least one of the stories himself – and why shouldn’t he? It’s his series – and the adaptations sometimes tend to the talky, perhaps in an attempt to be slightly more educational.
(The series as a whole tries to walk the line between “good for you” and “good fun,” and individual stories fall on one side or the other of that divide, but I’ve found that the books as a whole generally are fun, if wordy. I’ve previously reviewed Bram Stoker, Mark Twain, and Fantasy Classics.)
Tue Mar 3, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: Three Petits Livres
Three short translated books from Drawn & Quarterly
Comics come in all sizes. Some are big books, massive “ultimate” or “essential” or “indispensable” or “your friends will say you have a small penis if you don’t buy this” editions, with fancy foil and trim to make the stories of people punching each other seem that much more serious.
But there are also little books: ones that tell their own stories in a small compass, that don’t rely on bombast or hype. Ones that might actually be good.
Like these three books, the most recent entries in the fine Montreal publisher Drawn & Quarterly’s “Petits Livres” series – fine comics by fine creators in a small, affordable format.
Nicolas
By Pascal Girard
Drawn & Quarterly, February 2009, $9.95
In a series of short vignettes, Girard circles around the death of his brother, Nicolas, of lactic acidosis at the age of five – when Girard himself was only a few years older. Girard grows through childhood into a young man as this short book goes on, but he never forgets his brother – he never “moves on,” and it never stops being painful.
Thu Feb 26, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'In the Flesh' by Koren Shadmi
Ten comics stories of twisted love
In the Flesh
By Koren Shadmi
Villard, February 2009, $14.95
You probably haven’t heard of Shadmi before this book – he’s an Israeli, now resident in New York, and this is his first collection. Some of these stories did appear before…in French, in various anthologies, which I doubt any of us are familiar with.
But he’s clearly a mature artist; these nine stories are of a piece, both in their drawing and their writing, and they paint a consistent picture of the world. It’s not a pleasant picture, though: Shadmi’s world is ruled by tormented desire and inchoate longings, populated by characters who live in quiet despair only when they’ve settled down a bit from the loud kind. In fact, In the Flesh reads very much like a comics adaptation of the short stories of some young writer with a strong voice – it’s not so much “art comics” as it is a direct translation into comics of a particular kind of art short fiction.
Mon Feb 23, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Chronicles of Some Made' by Felix Tannenbaum
Two stories of robots, love, and death
Chronicles of Some Made
By Felix Tannenbaum
Passenger Pigeon Publishing, October 2008, $10.25
Tannenbaum received a 2008 Xeric Award for the two stories collected here – in fact, the way of the Xeric, these two stories are collected because they won the award. The Xeric is specifically and entirely to help self-publishers get their work out; to help get more new, different, interesting comics projects to see the light of day and get into readers’ hands. Because of that aid, Chronicles of Some Made is now available via Amazon, and it will be in comics shops in the spring.
There are two stories here: “The Dent,” about seventy pages long in four chapters, and the shorter (just under twenty pages) earlier story “Why Doesn’t My Robot Love Me?: A Cautionary Fable.” Both are stories of robots, but Tannenbaum’s robots are very un-Asimovian: they are deeply emotional and as impetuous and driven by desire as any human. (They’re very much, to use Charles Stross’s term, emotional machines.)
“The Dent” is the story of three robots at war. The story begins as they travel together towards a point where battle rages. They know where they’re going, but not why – though they do know that they’re not supposed to question their orders. Seeing the devastation for several hills away, they’re all silently sure that following their programming will lead to their destruction. And yet, when two of them try to break all three of them free from that programming, the results are not good.
Continue reading Review: 'Chronicles of Some Made' by Felix Tannenbaum ›
