Articles by andrew-wheeler
Tue Feb 17, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Crogan's Vengeance' by Chris Schweizer
Beginning a centuries-spanning adventure series
Crogan's Vengeance
By Chris Schweizer
Oni Press, October 2008, $14.95
The Crogan family – I’m reliably informed by this book’s end-papers – has a long and storied history of adventure, with private eyes, minutemen, ninjas, biplane pilots, old West gunfighters and French Foreign Legionnaires lurking around every bend of the family tree. (Though, apparently, no women have ever been spawned by the fecund Crogans, nor, possibly, deemed necessary to birth all of these generations. Perhaps that’s what drove all of these desperately lonely men to adventure.) This particular book, first in what could easily be a long series, focuses on “Catfoot” Crogan, patriarch of the clan (or at least the earliest figure on the endpapers – I wouldn’t lay odds against Schweizer turning up a Sir Lionheart Crogan, crusader, at some future point), a pirate at the turn of the seventeenth century.
But we don’t begin directly with Catfoot; instead we get a frame story of a modern doctor telling the story to his young son – which is slightly infantilizing for a book rated “Teen: Age 13+.” Even more damning to those over thirteen, it’s a story with a lesson. So there’s immediately a disconnect: Catfoot’s story is both (according to the publisher) restricted to readers over thirteen, and suitable for a boy of about eight (as depicted in the story). The frame story is short, and charming, so it doesn’t do any damage…except among teenage boys, a major audience for a story about pirates, since they will never admit to liking charm. I can see why Schweizer has the frame story – it’s his set-up for the whole series, all of which can be family histories told to this preternaturally history-savvy grade-schooler – but it flattens and domesticizes his story in a way I don’t think he wants.
Continue reading Review: 'Crogan's Vengeance' by Chris Schweizer ›
Wed Feb 11, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Labor Days' by Philip Gelatt and Rick Lacy
A yob's-eye-view of conspiracy theory
Labor Days, Volume 1
By Philip Gelatt and Rick Lacy
Oni Press, September 2008, $11.95
Some kinds of double standards will never die. Take a brutish young American male – dull, unattractive, drunken, and stuck in a dead-end odd-jobs business – and he’s both boring and contemptible. But turn him into a London boy, with the same face and job, demeanor and intellect, and suddenly he’s a hero. This hero.
He’s Benton “Bags” Bagswell, the man who put the “never” in ne’er-do-well. And these two New York-based creators knew that if they made him a Londoner, made him a British boy, then he’d be loveable rather than the lumpish prole the identical New Yorker would be.
Bags opens the story on a morning after the night before – his girlfriend has just dumped him for terminal being-Bags reasons, and a package has been left on his front step, for him to take care of professionally. (On the first page, we see Bags’s flyer, which says “I’m your next handyman for hire! Benton Bagswell’s the name. Are your chores bores? No job is too mundane for me!” Now, I haven’t hired a handyman in some time, but I thought they generally list things they’re reasonably good at, such as carpentry or plumbing or C# coding or knitting, rather than proclaiming that they’d do anything at all, as long as there’s a quid in it for them. One wonders if this approach works for Bags, and, if so, why? It reads very close to the kind of code used for drug transactions and other nefarious activities.)
Continue reading Review: 'Labor Days' by Philip Gelatt and Rick Lacy ›
Mon Feb 9, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: '08' by Michael Crowley and Dan Goldman
The comics version of the presidential elections
08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail
By Michael Crowley and Dan Goldman
Three Rivers Press, January 2009, $17.95
Typically, there are two kinds of non-fiction books about big events – first are the quick-and-dirty ones that come out almost immediately, pulled together from news reports or written on the fly or just knocked out by a writer with lightning fingers. The other is the “think piece” – longer, more measured, with time for distance and clarity. They each have their strengths: the quick books can crystallize a mood, and remind us of what we felt at the time, while the slower books tend to be the ones that last. It happens with all kinds of nonfictional topics, from biographies (the quickies come out after the personage has done something major, such as died) to political scandals to social movements.
But the area that attracts more quick books than any other is high-level politics – since the energy available to be expended on political arguments, thoughts, and post-mortems is effectively infinite; the winners are always happy to relive their victories and the losers are desperate to know how to win the next time. So every four years there’s a wave of books about the US presidential race: it starts slow, about a year out, with potted campaign biographies and thinly disguised position papers and various attempts to influence the debate. Once the race gets going in earnest, the Swift Boats start running – quick-and-dirty books (usually as dirty as possible) aimed at real or perceived weaknesses, plus new or updated versions of the first kind of books. And then there’s another rush after the election is done, praising or damning the winner, and explaining how everything will be utterly different, unless it’s going to be completely the same. At the same time, reporters bash their campaign columns into shape and shove them out the door as books, or quickly explain for posterity how they knew all of the important things all along. Finally, the slower, more thoughtful books – things like What It Takes and The Selling of the President – come along a year or so later…just as the machine starts to gear up for the next time around.
Continue reading Review: '08' by Michael Crowley and Dan Goldman ›
Fri Feb 6, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: The Outer Limits
Three very different, very good standalone manga
My reading has been rejuvenated over the past couple of weeks by infusions from the Eisner Overmind – I’m a judge this year, and so I’m reading ahead in preparation for the big judging weekend coming up at the end of March – in particular by these three recent, and unique, manga volumes. All are complete stories in themselves, which seems rare for manga, and they range pretty far – from each other, and from the well-trodden paths of shonen and shojo.
Disappearance Diary
By Hideo Azuma
Fanfare/Ponent Mon, October 2008, $22.99
Azuma has worked in manga since 1969, and is known as the father of “Lolicon.” He created many long, popular series for the Japanese market – Futari To Gonin and Fujouri Nikki, for example – over several decades. But this is something different.
In 1989, Azuma ran away from his home and work, and lived as a homeless man for months. He did it again in 1992. And then in 1998, he was forced into rehab to recover from his alcoholism. Disappearance Diary is the story of those three times in his own life – a memoir comic of some very dark moments.
Fri Jan 30, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'The Big Skinny' by Carol Lay
The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude
By Carol Lay
Villard, January 2009, $18.00
In the wake of Perseopolis and similar works, graphic novels have become ever more popular for acquisition editors at the major trade publishing houses. But, just as the direct market twists products in the direction of its own obsessions – spandex, punches, and chivalry twisted through at least two axes, these days – those mainstream publishers have their own market trends and forces, and they’re looking for particular things themselves. To be blunt, all of the big-publisher GNs seem to be memoirs of one sort or another. Some of them are “here’s my life in numbing detail” books, like David Heatley’s My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down, and some are small stories of particular moments and times, like Lucy Knisley’s French Milk – but they all are personal stories of one kind or another.
Carol Lay, surprisingly, hasn’t written a book-length illustrated work before; she’s had several collections published – mostly of her weekly WayLay strip – but The Big Skinny is the first time she created a graphic work purely for book publication. And, since it’s from Villard, one piece of the huge Random House book conglomerate, you’d be pretty safe betting that it’s a memoir of some kind. And it is. But The Big Skinny isn’t just a memoir – it’s some more unusual for comics, though it fits into a pretty common prose format.
Wed Jan 28, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Ghost World: Special Edition' by Daniel Clowes with Terry Zwigoff
Ghost World: the Special Edition
Graphic novel by Daniel Clowes; Screenplay by Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff
Fantagraphics, October 2008, $39.99
Ten years after the first collection of Ghost World and seven after the movie version of the same story (and, not coincidentally, the screenplay book), Dan Clowes’s most famous and best-known story has gotten the big fat hardcover treatment – and I’m sure that the fact that his story of suburban ennui and aimlessness follows dozens of stories of spandex-clad punching bags into basically the same format and sales channel is an irony not lost on Clowes. (Though I should point out that this big fancy hardcover is not nearly as expensive and laded with gewgaws as most of those “absolute” and “essential” and “ultimate” books – all those books that name themselves, and lavish on themselves production designs, reminiscent of high end sex toys; shiny and sleek and oversized and, all too clichéd often, in jet-black. Clowes’s book has reasonable proportions, and a price quite reasonable for an art book of its size.)
This “Special Edition” collects the graphic novel Ghost World, by Clowes, and the screenplay, by Clowes and Terry Zwigoff. It also adds in a forty-eight-page section of miscellany – box art from odd ancillary products, covers from old Eightball issues when Ghost World was being serialized, foreign covers, miscellaneous art related to the movie, and a few sketches and pages of original art. Up front is a new introduction by Clowes, and a two-page story that may, or may not, show a glimpse of Enid and Rebecca’s lives now. Those are pleasant, but the real core of Ghost World is the story, and this book gives both versions of it equal weight.
Continue reading Review: 'Ghost World: Special Edition' by Daniel Clowes with Terry Zwigoff ›
Mon Jan 26, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Cartoon Marriage' by Liza Donnelly and Michael Maslin
Cartoon Marriage: Adventures in Love and Matrimony by The New Yorker's Cartooning Couple
By Liza Donnelly and Michael Maslin
Random House, January 2009, $24.00
Donnelly and Maslin are both professional cartoonists – both regularly appearing in The New Yorker – and have been married for twenty years. Cartoon Marriage is their paired look at modern relationships, consisting of two hundred reprinted New Yorker cartoons – divided roughly right down the middle – and some new comics-format pages to explain and introduce each section.
(The two of them have collaborated on two previous books – Call Me When You Reach Nirvana and Husbands and Wives – the latter of which sounds very similar in scope and theme to this new one. But both of those are well over a decade old, so presumably they have a lot more marriage to reflect on now – as well as more cartoons to choose from.)
Continue reading Review: 'Cartoon Marriage' by Liza Donnelly and Michael Maslin ›
Wed Jan 21, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'The Martian Confederacy' and 'Jobnik!'
These two books have very little in common on the surface, but, beneath that…they deeply have little in common. But they’re both fairly new, not all that well-known, and self-published by their respective female creators (with an asterisk in the first case, which I’ll get to) – so that’s good enough for me.
The Martian Confederacy: Rednecks on the Red Planet, Vol. 1
Story by Jason McNamara; Art by Paige Braddock
Girl Swirl, July 2008, $15.00
The Martian Confederacy cannot be adequately described by the phrase “The Dukes of Hazard on Mars,” but it’s a good first stab. Our two heroes here aren’t brothers – one of them, Spinner, is actually an anthropomorphic bear, though the other, Boone, is the expected tough-but-tender he-man type. And the closest thing to a Daisy Duke is Boone’s roommate, the android woman Lou – come to think of it, maybe she fits better in the “other Duke brother” slot.
Well, anyway, this is a story of beaten-down good ‘ol boys and girls battling the corrupt leadership – as personified by “the Alcalde” (whose name I can’t find, if it’s ever given), who calls himself “the legislative, judicial, and executive arm of Martian law” and also mentions that he’s the only lawman on the planet, though he scrounges up some additional muscle late in the book when he needs them. (Even assuming that his official position does give him power, he’s amazingly arbitrary and capricious in his “law enforcement” – the kind of cop who doesn’t survive long in a society where anyone other than him has a gun. I’m deeply surprised that he hasn’t woken up dead a dozen times before this story begins.)
Mars is owned outright by a small number of really nasty corporations, who keep the entire population – how large a population is not quite clear – in essentially indentured servitude, as the rich tourists come from Earth during the high season once a year. (Implying that the writer McNamara either doesn’t know much or doesn’t care much about orbits.) It’s 3535, after the usual humorous loss-of-all-data and resulting reborn society with quirky touches like “shatners” for money. And there are lots of anthropomorphics, who may or may not be an underclass even within the downtrodden Martian population. (They have their own bars and the Alcalde hates them – but plenty of groups have their own bars, and the Alcalde hates everyone.) And even odder things, like the woman Sally, who has heads and arms growing out of each end of her torso and split personalities to match. (Try not to think too much about her plumbing issues – that way lies madness.)
Continue reading Review: 'The Martian Confederacy' and 'Jobnik!' ›
Fri Jan 16, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: The Dregs
Manga Friday took a little holiday for the last couple of weeks, and it may take more holidays in the weeks to come. Looking back on my recent columns, I’ve said an awful lot of “and here’s the next volume in a series I’ve reviewed four times” and “this week’s books have nothing in common” – and neither of those are quite what I’d hoped. I think I’m reviewing too many of the same manga, too often, so I expect to cut back on Manga Friday substantially in 2009, unless I start seeing more different things.
I expect to keep reviewing stuff here on Fridays, but there may be somewhat less of the specifically Japanese/Korean stuff for a while. (Or possibly not – whenever I try to predict something like this, I’m usually wrong.) But I’ll save the name “Manga Friday” for when I’m looking at books that would be called manga by that legal construct, the “reasonable man.”
So, for this week, I have three books, arranged in ascending order of volume number:
The Manzai Comics
Story by Atsuko Asano; Art by Hizuru Imai
Aurora, January 2009, $10.95
This opens with an odd hint of yaoi, as large, athletic, energetic, popular student Takashi Akimoto begs small, weak, timid (generic manga hero Type 1) Ayumu Seta to “please go out with me” and “do it with me.” Takashi actually wants to form a manzai comedy team with Ayumu, but he’s either too dim or too focused on himself to actually say that for several pages.
(Apparently – I have no personal knowledge of this, but several references agree – the dominant form of comedy in Japan is manzai, two-person acts, rather than sketch comedy or stand-up or improv. Think Abbot & Costello or Crosby & Hope.)
Ayumu is not just an ordinary shy boy – well, he’s a manga hero, so you know there’s got to be some horribly dramatic thing in his past – he considers himself responsible for the car-crash death of his father and older sister because he was clinically depressed (and completely untreated as well). So he has the standard “I just want to be normal” complex of the dweeby manga hero in spades.
Wed Jan 14, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Alan's War' by Emmanuel Guibert
Alan's War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope
By Emmanuel Guibert
First Second, November 2008, $24.00
French cartoonist Guibert met Alan Cope in 1994 on a small island off the coast of France, where Cope was living in retirement and Guibert was visiting on vacation. The older man gave the young man directions, and a friendship bloomed. Soon, Cope was telling Guibert the stories of his service in the US Army during WW II. The two expected to turn those stories into comics – and it’s not clear how much of this book had Cope’s direct input and corrections – but Cope died in 1999, partway through the project, and the final book bears only Guibert’s name.
But Alan’s War is very much Alan Cope’s story, in his own voice – it’s extensively narrated in Cope’s voice, with pages and pages of text that appear to be directly from Guibert’s notes and conversations.
Cope was born in 1925 in Southern California, and grew up in Pasadena when that was still a quiet area of orange groves. (Guibert says in his introduction that he has another set of notes and stories from Alan, about his childhood, and that he expects to turn those into a companion graphic novel some time in the future.) In February of 1943, Cope turned 18, and was immediately drafted – there was, of course, a war on at the time.
Alan’s War is divided into three sections, each originally published as a separate book in France. The first covers Cope’s time in uniform on American soil – he went over by train immediately to Fort Knox, but then stayed there for more than a year and a half, first learning to be part of a tank crew, then going to radio school, and eventually becoming a radio instructor. He was clearly good at all of these things – though we are getting the story from him directly, if that matters – but the upshot was that he stayed stateside for some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. There are plenty of entertaining stories in the first section, but they’re not essentially wartime stories; they could have happened to any conscript soldier at any time, since they’re all stories of training and friends on the base and going into town.
Mon Jan 12, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'The Alcoholic' by Ames and Haspiel
The Alcoholic
By Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel
DC Comics, October 2008, $19.99
The main character of The Alcoholic is one Jonathan A., a writer who looks very much like writer Jonathan Ames and whose life has been exceptionally similar to Ames’s. Those who have read Ames before know that this is nothing new: he is his own best subject, either transformed fictionally in novels like I Pass Like Night and Wake Up, Sir! or poured out in his rawly hilarious nonfiction in What’s Not To Love? Jonathan A. is and is not Jonathan Ames; The Alcoholic isn’t a memoir but a novel (a graphic novel – very graphic in places), and so we must treat A. as a fictional character.
(I think I’ll refer to him as A. from here on; it adds an oddly Kafkaesque air – or, and perhaps more appropriately, a sense of anonymity and confession.)
The Alcoholic is A.’s life story – or at least as much of his life as concerns alcohol and sex – from 1979 through late 2001, high school through early middle age. It opens in August 2001, as A. is waking up in a station wagon in Asbury Park, with an old, very short woman trying to seduce him after a long night of drinking.
Continue reading Review: 'The Alcoholic' by Ames and Haspiel ›
Wed Jan 7, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Bottomless Belly Button' by Dash Shaw
Bottomless Belly Button
By Dash Shaw
Fantagraphics, June 2008, $29.99
Wrapped up inside Bottomless Belly Button is the realistically-depicted story of a family – aged parents, three grown children, and few others – coming all together for one last time as the parents divorce after forty years of marriage. But Dash Shaw is in no hurry to tell that story; he wraps the three sections of this graphic novel in metaphor and metafiction, graphically depicting the Looney family and their world in various forms – as water, as sand, as maps, as diagrams and lists. Shaw takes the time and space to tell his story slowly, to circle around it from all sides, and to focus on each member of the Looney family in turn.
David Looney is the patriarch: his word has always been law. We see the least of him in Bottomless Belly Button, but he’s clearly diminished from the authoritarian, demanding man we see in flashbacks – he’s no longer in charge. The divorce probably isn’t his idea.
Dennis Looney, the older son – the good son. Married, with a baby. Somewhere in his mid ‘30s. Dennis can’t accept the divorce – in the Looney’s view of the world, families always stick together, because families are the core building blocks of the world. Something must be wrong – something he can fix. So he gets angry inappropriately, takes long runs on the beach to think through things, roams restlessly through the house, looking for clues and reasons for something he can’t accept.
Continue reading Review: 'Bottomless Belly Button' by Dash Shaw ›
Mon Jan 5, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'French Milk' by Lucy Knisley
French Milk
By Lucy Knisley
Touchstone, October 2008, $15.00
The first thing to know – and to keep in your head – is that Lucy Knisley is twenty-two years old. That’s fantastically young to be planning and executing a nearly two-hundred-page-long drawn book, and the mere fact that she did it is impressive. And so if I say that French Milk is a bit thin, a bit obvious, and clearly created by a very young woman – that’s only to be expected, and not a major criticism.
French Milk is a sketchbook diary, something like Craig Thompson’s Carnet de Voyage or Enrico Casarosa’s The Venice Chronicles. Knisley flew to Paris with her mother just after Christmas of 2006 – she was turning twenty-two, and her mother was turning fifty, which added up to a good enough excuse – and the two of them lived there in an apartment for just about a month. French Milk is the story of that month, and of a few days before and afterward – several pages are devoted to each day, with photos and drawings and narrative.
Fri Dec 26, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Sex Yet Again
Cartoony rumpy-pumpy for your delectation
Where I live – darkest New Jersey – it’s been cold and snowy and cold (did I mention the cold?) for the past week, causing us all to huddle closer for warmth. Add to that the season of closeness and love towards all…and the minds of some of us turn towards more earthy pursuits, such as those examined in the three books this week.
Object of Desire
By Tomoko Noguchi
Luv Luv/Aurora, December 2008, $10.95
Object of Desire comes from the redikomi side – it’s a collection of manga stories by a woman for an audience of women, and all about young women (they seem to be highschoolers, from internal evidence) in their first, or very early affairs of love and sex. There are six stories here, each somewhere from twenty-four to forty-something pages – so they’re of roughly equal weight, unlike the similar manga collections that have one long story and one or two much shorter ones.
(The publisher’s description obscures this, focusing only on the title story – perhaps the old truism in prose publishing that a novel always outsells a book of short fiction is also true of manga?)
“Object of Desire” is narrated by an attractive young woman – so attractive, in fact, that young men routinely date her once or twice and lie outrageously just to have sex with her. (There’s a pretty casual hook-up culture going on here, obviously.) She doesn’t mind, exactly – sex is nice – but she does wish there was some way to find a “nice guy.” But then a boy with a different, blunter approach comes along, and a relationship – unconventional, perhaps, but certainly longer-lasting blossoms.
Tue Dec 23, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Notes Over Yonder' and 'Tiger!Tiger!Tiger!'
Two recent graphic novels by Scott Morse
Scott Morse – and I say this with a laugh as well as wonderment – has had an awfully long, varied, and successful comics career for a guy who is essentially unknown to the vast majority of the comics-shop crowd. He’s done a long series of fantasy graphic novels (Soulwind), a number of books for kids or for all ages (like the Magic Pickle series), and a pile of other things, on top of being a story artist and designer at Pixar. Why, in just the last two months he published these two, quite different, graphic novels:
Notes Over Yonder
By Scott Morse
Red Window/AdHouse, November 2008, $12.95
This is a small-format book, about 4” x 6”, with a single painting – each loose and just a bit sketchy, like a storyboard that hasn’t been overworked – on each of its sixty-four pages. It’s also close to wordless, with a few written messages. And it flows subtly back and forth, evoking the rhythms of a jazzy torch song or a quiet blues melody.
There’s a man in a city and another man on a small island – each has a cat (maybe even the same cat), and each has recently lost his woman, in very different ways. Each man also plays the guitar – and, come to think of it, that might be the same guitar as well. (I wouldn’t be at all surprised.) One of the men finds a way to go on, and one of them finds a different way – but their stories aren’t told separately (as the subtitle, ‘A Story in Two Parts,’ might seem to imply), but intertwined. We start with one man and move on to the other before returning.
Again, this is all wordless, so Morse doesn’t tell us where any of this is. His bright white lines and energetic caricatures draw us into the story, and we fill in those details ourselves. If Notes Over Yonder reads just a bit like the storyboards for a short animated film – probably one set entirely to a single instrumental song, mostly quiet and mournful – that’s only to be expect from a creator who thinks in moving pictures all day long. It’s a fine little story, and the art is particularly impressive.
Continue reading Review: 'Notes Over Yonder' and 'Tiger!Tiger!Tiger!' ›
