Articles by andrew-wheeler
Fri Dec 19, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
YA Friday: 'Chiggers' and 'Thoreau at Walden'
Two acclaimed recent books for younger readers
Manga are temporarily in short supply around here, so the usual “Manga Friday” slot is being taken by a close cousin. (Think of this as just another wacky hijink, Patty Duke Show-style.) Instead of manga, I have two books for younger readers that came out earlier in 2008, one very clearly for girls, and the other more gender-neutral.
Chiggers
By Hope Larson
Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Ginee Seo Books, June 2008, $17.99 (hardcover) and $9.99 (paperback)
Chiggers is set at a summer camp, and the major characters are all tween girls. (If I’ve figured it out correctly, they’re all in eighth grade.) The viewpoint character is Abby – she’s the first one to arrive in her cabin, this year, and ends up a little out of step with her cabin-mates. (Larson doesn’t tell the reader this – she doesn’t have any narration – but we see Abby nonplussed several times by her very-slightly-more-worldly friends.
Abby’s first bunkmate leaves very quickly, due to chiggers. (Look ‘em up, if you don’t know. And be glad you don’t live in the same places they do.) And she gets a new bunkmate: Shasta, who all the other girls quickly decide they don’t like. Shasta’s a little full of herself – she’s on medication, can’t do a lot of camp activities, got hit by lightning, is one-eighth Cherokee, has an older Internet boyfriend – but Abby genuinely likes Shasta.
Chiggers is low-key; there are no major events. (Even by the overly-dramatic standards of a twelve-year-old girl.) Abby and Shasta meet, become friend, squabble, make up. Abby also meets a boy who thinks she looks like a half-elf – and I’m afraid I can remember a time in my own life when I would have thought that was a nice thing to say to someone. (Luckily, Abby takes it the right way.)
Continue reading YA Friday: 'Chiggers' and 'Thoreau at Walden' ›
Thu Dec 18, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Ex Machina 7' and 'Fables 11'
New volumes in two long-running DC original series
DC has long been the home of a certain kind of story – at least moderately hip, and equally popular, usually with some elements derived from the superhero mainstream but with its own high-concept premise ripped from the Zeitgeist. First there was Sandman, then Preacher and Transmetropolitan and so on – but, these days, since Y: The Last Man ended, the two thoroughbreds left in that particular stable are Fables and Ex Machina. As it happens, both of those series had new collections this fall…
Ex Machina, Vol. 7: Ex Cathedra
By Brian K. Vaughan, Tony Harris & Jim Clark
DC Comics/Wildstorm, October 2008, $12.99
Ex Machina has been piling up the cheap trade paperbacks, keeping its storylines to four or five issues and pumping out the reprints as quickly as possible. And so this seventh volume collects issues #30-34, the last of which hit stores as a floppy only in February. (I reviewed the sixth volume back in April, for those who want some background.)
Ex Machina, as you might know by now, is a science-fiction story about Mitchell Hundred, the Mayor of New York City, in a slightly alternate world. Hundred has some kind of alien (or other-dimensional) gizmo embedded in his face, which allows him to understand and command machines – since this is a comic book, he used that at first to dress up in a funny costume (as “The Great Machine”) and fight crime. Since this is a smart comic book, he then ran for mayor, and won after he stopped the second 9/11 plane from hitting the World Trade Center.
Ex Cathedra is a four-part story set in December of 2003; it’s still not quite the midpoint of Hundred’s first term. The series has bounced back and forth in time between Hundred’s mayoral and superhero days; in these issues we do get a few scenes in 2000-2001 for spice, but it’s mostly about a visit to the Vatican.
Tue Dec 16, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories, Vol. 2'
Ivan Brunetti returns, on a course directly away from the mainstream
An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories, Vol. 2
Edited by Ivan Brunetti
Yale University Press, October 2008, $28.00
Two years ago, we saw one of the biggest signs yet that comics had “made it” and were being taken seriously by the academic/literary community: the publication of a big, magisterial teaching anthology of comics, edited by Ivan Brunetti and published by the utterly respectable Yale University Press. That book was An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories, and even its unwieldy title seemed to underline just how serious and important it was – the Anthology was the kind of comics collection that could be assigned as reading in English 214: Readings in Contemporary Literature, or some other similarly dull university course.
Inside the Anthology, Brunetti staked out a position for comics much closer to the Art History department than to English, leading off with intensely formalist works and only settling down to things like “Graphic Fiction” and “True Stories” deep into the book. (A lot of the first Anthology – and a lot of this second book as well – must be called “Cartoons” as a default; they’re clearly sequential art, but they’re closer to poems or painting series than they are to any kind of written prose. Not that this is a bad thing; I’m sure Brunetti would argue that those works show the unique abilities of the comics form.) Most impressively, Brunetti produced a book that wasn’t obvious – it wasn’t the book anyone would have expected, or a book anyone else would have compiled. (Not that the obvious anthology of great comics wouldn’t have had a use, and possible been more useful for teaching than Brunetti’s book ended up being.)
But that was two years ago, and now Brunetti, and Yale, are back with a second volume, An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories, Vol. 2, to give it its entire ungainly due. (The “An” at the beginning particularly bounces oddly off the “Vol. 2” at the end.) It doesn’t so much take up where the first Anthology left off as replicate the pattern (and, almost exactly, the contributors list) of the first book; it could as easily be a second attempt at the same idea as an extension. It doesn’t stake out any different territory than the first Anthology did; it focuses on mostly the same creators, and the same type of comics, and is organized in a similar, vaguely thematic, free-form fashion.
Continue reading Review: 'An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories, Vol. 2' ›
Fri Dec 12, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Games & Doctors & Sex
Once again, three books that don't really go together
It’s getting harder and harder to find books for this column that go together in any meaningful way. And how do I deal with that problem? Why, by utterly ignoring the problem and throwing together whatever books happen to be lying around. Here, I’ll show you how that works…
Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning, Vol. 5
Story by Kyo Shirodaira; Art by Eita Mizuno
Yen Press, October 2008, $10.99
For the long version of the backstory of this series, see my earlier reviews of Vol. 4, Vol. 3, and Vol. 2.
The short version: there are “Blade Children” – teenagers who were abducted and had a rib removed (and probably had other things done to them, starting with psychological conditioning), and who form some kind of secret society. And there’s a teenage boy who is almost always called “Little Brother” – by people who are not, in any way, related to him, and because his now-vanished older brother was a genius, special and wonderful and better than his little brother ever could be in every way imaginable – who keeps getting caught up in their convoluted schemes, which generally involve logical puzzles, death traps, and lots of posturing about who is smarter than whom.
At this point, it’s becoming clear that the Blade Children have serious divisions in their ranks, since one group of BCs is sending an assassin against the local Japanese BCs that we’ve been watching torment – and be defeated by – Little Brother repeatedly over the last few books. (Of course, as is typical in modern manga for teenagers, everyone who matters in the entire world is a teenager.)
Thu Dec 11, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'ACME Novelty Library, No. 19' by Chris Ware
Rusty Brown's life goes on, as happily as you'd expect
ACME Novelty Library, No. 19
By Chris Ware
Drawn & Quarterly, October 2008, $15.95
First of all, it’s just struck me how odd it is that the cartoonist universally referred to as “Chris Ware” is only credited as “F.C. Ware” – and that in tiny indicia and similar eye-straining matter – in his own stories and publications. One might almost posit a crippling social phobia or overwhelming shyness on the cartoonist’s part, a personality much like his usual viewpoint characters. (But then one remembers never to assume an artist is anything like his creations; it’s rarely useful.)
The last annual issue of ACME Novelty Library – number eighteen, for those who have difficulty counting backwards – collected the “Building Stories” sequence, mostly from The New York Times Magazine’s “Funny Papers” sections, but this volume returns to “Rusty Brown,” the long story that ran through most of issues sixteen and seventeen and does not seem to be done yet. These pages, a typically arch and distanced note by Ware informs us, “originally appeared in somewhat different form in the pages of The Chicago Reader between 2002-2004, and thus should not be interpreted as an artistic response to recent criticisms and/or reviews of this periodical.”
This time the focus isn’t on the title character, but on his father Woody – first, through a dramatization of a science-fiction story by Woody (luridly, but honestly, titled “The Seeing Eye Dogs of Mars”) and then through a sequence of events in Woody’s life as a young man in the ‘50s, fresh out of school and working as an obituary writer on a newspaper. Those events do lead to the writing of “Seeing Eye,” and, near the end, back to the frame story of Rusty’s youth in the 1970s.
Do I need to tell you that young Woody Brown is painfully shy, ridiculously introverted, barely in control of his emotions, socially inept, clueless when it comes to the most basic patterns of living in a society, and completely unable to make any of his thoughts or feelings clear in any form of communication under any circumstances? Or did you already assume that when I mentioned that he was the main character in a Chris Ware comic?
Continue reading Review: 'ACME Novelty Library, No. 19' by Chris Ware ›
Mon Dec 8, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Speak of the Devil' by Gilbert Hernandez
Another noir movie from inside Hernandez's fictional world
Speak of the Devil
By Gilbert Hernandez
Dark Horse, November 2008, $19.95
Most of Gilbert Hernandez’s comics have been set in the same world, featuring a huge cast of characters with many obvious and obscure links, reaching from the small Latin American town of Palomar to Southern California and covering the second half of the twentieth century right up to now. Even the few of his comics that aren’t obviously in that world often turn out to have links to the “Palomar” cast.
Last year, Hernandez put out the graphic novel Chance in Hell. That story didn’t itself take place in his usual world – but it was a comics version of a movie from that world, a movie that featured his character Fritz in a minor role. Hernandez is continuing that conceit; Speak of the Devil is another metafictional comic, the story of a movie that only exists within another world of fiction, and one that featured Fritz in a larger part. (Fritz had a short but eventful Hollywood career, so we might well get another half-dozen “movies” with her as an “actress.”)
Like Chance in Hell, Speak of the Devil is a noirish drama with a timeless feel – there are a few details like cellphones that place it in the modern day, but the atmosphere and touches like a beatnik tertiary character make it feel like a movie from the late ‘60s or early ‘70s – that is, if we take Hernandez’s bait and think of Speak of the Devil as a movie to begin with. Devil does have the feel of a movie sometimes; Hernandez often allows his panels to stretch all the way across the page for a widescreen effect before diving into an array of smaller panels to indicate quicker events.
Continue reading Review: 'Speak of the Devil' by Gilbert Hernandez ›
Fri Dec 5, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Three, Two, One!
Three books that count down
This week, in a desperate attempt to disguise the fact that he doesn’t have any coherent way to tie the reviewed books together, Andrew Wheeler will adopt a “countdown” format to write about three brand-new Manga volumes.
Adding to the difficulty level: he will also write about himself in the third person, for no good reason.
Kaze no Hana, Vol. 3
By Ushio Mizta and Akiyoshi Ohta
Yen Press, December 2008, $10.99
This is the end of “Book One” of Kaze no Hana, in which not nearly enough is wrapped up and hardly any indication is given that the series will continue on to a “Book Two” sometime, somewhere. (For those who are lost: reviews of Volume One and Volume Two.)
To recap briefly: Momoka Futami is yet another typical cute Japanese teenage girl, who just wants to live a normal life. But she’s actually part of a family that has spent the past few hundred years defending the world against the minions of an evil god that was trapped under a mountain, using eight “spiritual swords.” There’s also an opposed group that wants to free the evil god – they don’t seem to consider him evil, actually – and they use “sacred swords,” which are totally different in a way that’s never been clear.
Kaze no Hana has a fairly large cast of people with vestigial (at best) noses, and it’s difficult to tell them apart much of the time. This book also has a lot of talking and emoting rather than fighting monsters, though one character does turn out, unexpectedly, to be a werewolf. There’s also a huge plot problem that gets resolved exceptionally quickly, leading this reader to wonder if perhaps the original serialization of this story was hurried to a conclusion quicker than the creators had planned.
Tue Dec 2, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'The Best American Comics: 2008' edited by Lynda Barry
The third in the annual series collects great stories from (mostly) last year
The Best American Comics: 2008
Series editors: Jessica Abel and Matt Madden; edited by Lynda Barry
Houghton Mifflin, October 2008, $22.00
The “Best American” series has been around for decades, starting with the acclaimed annual collection of short stories and expanding in recent years to such newer emanations as Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Spiritual Writing, …Travel Writing and, of course, Comics. This is the third year for this particular Best American series, and it sees the cast of editors completely change over.
The way the “Best American” books seem to work – as much as they are explained to us mere mortals – each series has a “series editor,” who takes on the tough work of reading or looking at everything eligible in the given year, and culling down that list to something manageable for the marquee-name “editor” to select the final contents from. (For example, for the most recent annual editions, the series editor of Short Stories is Heidi Pitlor and the editor is Salman Rushdie. Similarly, Adam Gopnik edits Essays this year, Anthony Bourdain Travel and George Pelecanos Mystery Stories.) For the first two years of Comics’s existence, the series editor was Anne Elizabeth Moore, who was somewhat controversial for reasons that always remained murky to me. She’s been replaced this year by the team of Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, for no stated reason – though it does seem unusual for that to happen so soon.
The big-name editor this time out is Lynda Barry, following Chris Ware last year and Harvey Pekar in 2006. And, again, the editor profoundly affects the content of the book. Pekar leaned towards long, autobiographical stories, often with a political slant. Ware continued the trend towards autobiography and memoir – it would be hard to avoid that tide in comics, this decade – but he also brought in the expected formalist streak. And now Barry changes the mix again, with more comic strips (Matt Groening’s Life in Hell, Derf’s The City, Kaz’s Underworld, and Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For) and many excerpts from longer works (Nick Bertozzi’s The Salon, Cathy Malkasian’s Percy Gloom, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, and Seth’s George Sprott).
Continue reading Review: 'The Best American Comics: 2008' edited by Lynda Barry ›
Sat Nov 29, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Abe Sapien: The Drowning' and 'B.P.R.D.: 1946'
The two newest spinoff stories from Mike Mignola's Hellboy
It’s always a bit sad when someone quits a job, especially a well-loved and -trusted colleague who did a huge amount of the work. Sure, you’ll all take him out to lunch on his last day (or as close to it as you can manage), but that’s for his benefit. The next Monday, you all have to go back to work, and try to make up for what he used to do as well as you can.
Hellboy has been gone from the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Development for a while, now – since 2001, though the stories take place in various eras and times – and they’re still trying to make up for the loss. In an office, that would just entail some cursing, some longer hours, and a lot of questions about how to fill out the TPS forms. But for the B.P.R.D., there’s the little matter of saving the world without a nearly indestructible red guy with a sledgehammer for a right hand leading the way.
Since Hellboy left the B.P.R.D., Dark Horse has published an increasingly proliferating array of stories set in the same world: an ongoing sequence of B.P.R.D. miniseries, and then short series about Lobster Johnson and Abe Sapien.
This year has already seen the Lobster Johnson trade paperback, and eighth volumes of both Hellboy and B.P.R.D. (which I reviewed together back in June), and now there are two more Hellboy-universe books to keep us busy.
Abe Sapien: The Drowning
Story by Mike Mignola; Art by Jason Shawn Alexander
Dark Horse, September 2008, $17.95
Abe has been at the center of several B.P.R.D. stories before, but this was the first time he got his name in the title – it’s a flashback story, set in 1981, when Hellboy was on an extended leave from the B.P.R.D. but supernatural mysteries still needed investigating.
B.P.R.D. head Trevor Bruttenholm had recently discovered that a British supernatural agent had used a rare and powerful Lipu Dagger to kill the evil Dutch warlock Epke Vrooman in 1884, near the Atlantic coast of France. Vrooman’s remains and the dagger are at the bottom of the sea, in a shipwreck. But surely an amphibious man wouldn’t have any trouble in diving down and retrieving the dagger?
Continue reading Review: 'Abe Sapien: The Drowning' and 'B.P.R.D.: 1946' ›
Fri Nov 28, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga (Black) Friday: Three Books of Revenge, Death, and War
Cheer up! Things could always be worse!
I’m writing this late on Thursday evening, full of turkey and stuffing and good will toward my fellow man. And I’ve been thinking that I don’t have any theme to unify them – I almost had three books starting with “G” and then almost had three volume twos -- but a theme just jumped out and poked me. Today is Black Friday, and these three books all fit that theme: they’re all pretty black. (Yes, I know that’s not what “Black Friday” means, but humor me.)
Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo, Vol. 1
Manga by Mahiro Maeda; Scenario by Yura Ariwara; Planning by Mahiro Maeda and GONZO
Del Rey, November 2008, $10.95
Gankutsuou is the least dark, at least at this point, but it clearly is going to get darker and bleaker. For one thing, it’s explicitly a retelling of Dumas’s novel The Count of Monte Cristo (“Gankutsuou” means “The King of the Cave,” and was the title of the first Japanese translation of Monte Cristo), which is not a tale of sweetness and light. And, second, our young hero Albert is the son of one of the men who schemed to put Edmond Dantes – surely you remember Edmond Dantes? – away for good, and, even worse, he’s the son of Mercedes, who was supposed to be Dantes’s wife.
Gankutsuou updates Monte Cristo to the kind of unlikely aristocratic interplanetary future that we don’t see much of any more; it never made a whole lot of sense as a setting, but I must admit that I missed it, and so I’m happy to see it come back here. Monte Cristo is a story that must be told in an aristocratic society – the Count himself only makes sense in such a world – and so it works; it’s a big, gaudy world, with extremes of wealth and poverty – just like the world Dumas wrote about.
This first volume is mostly set-up; we start with Albert and his friend Franz in the midst of a Grand Tour of sorts – of the major planets of our solar system, apparently. They’re just coming to Luna for its fabled Carnival, where the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo meets, befriends, and helps Albert. (Albert, in that all-too-typical manga style, is an overly innocent, puppy-dog-ish young man with boundless enthusiasm and utter lack of guile. I’m afraid he’s in for it, and equally afraid that Gankutsuou’s creators have been utterly innocent of the knowledge of real young aristocrats to think that type is even possible.)
Continue reading Manga (Black) Friday: Three Books of Revenge, Death, and War ›
Mon Nov 24, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Bourbon Island 1730' by Appollo & Lewis Trondheim
Pirates, slaves, and a hunt for the dodo - on an island off Madagascar
Bourbon Island 1730
By Appollo and Lewis Trondheim; Art by Lewis Trondheim
First Second, October 2008, $17.95
Bourbon Island is a small but real place – it’s called Réunion these days, but it’s there, hanging near the east coast of Madagascar – and several of the characters in this graphic novel either carry the names of real people or are very similar to real people. But Bourbon Island 1730 is a work of fiction – it’s primarily about people who never were real and about events that never happened.
It’s a looser and less tightly defined story than the reader expects at first: it begins with young Raphael Pommery, the assistant to ornithologist Dr. Despentes, traveling with his boss to Bourbon, hoping to find one last dodo. But Raphael is more interested in stories of pirates than in birds, living or possibly extinct. Raphael looks like our protagonist – young and more than a little romantic, just ripe for learning about the real world.
But Raphael doesn’t stay at the center of this story: in fact, no one that we see is really the protagonist. Bourbon Island instead centers on a character who never appears: the pirate Buzzard, the last great captain of a now-vanished age, imprisoned and facing a death sentence in Bourbon’s governor’s jail. Many of the settlers on Bourbon are reformed pirates, men who took an amnesty and laid down their arms – and it’s quite possible that a few or a lot of them may take up arms to free Buzzard.
Continue reading Review: 'Bourbon Island 1730' by Appollo & Lewis Trondheim ›
Fri Nov 21, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Shojo (Slight Return)
Three #2s as girly as they make 'em
Once again I’m left with a stack of books that are sequels to other books – that’s what comics is about, isn’t it? stories that never end? – and so I shoved three of them together due to some vague shojo similarities. And they are…
Nephilim, Vol. 2
By Anna Hanamaki
Aurora, July 2008, $10.95
The first volume of Nephilim – which I reviewed back in August – looked a lot like an adventure story, with daring escapes, swordfights, chase scenes, and two battling empires. But it had within it the hints of the emotion-drenched shojo romance it was destined to eventually be. By the end of that book, the dashing nobleman Guy had saved the Nephilim Abel (one of a nearly-genocided race of people who all change sex at night, which must make pregnancies interesting) and they’d seemingly shared a “we both love each other” moment before they were rudely separated.
But it’s now a year later, and Abel is searching for Guy, while swanning over the one moment when he said he wanted to be her husband. (She’s a shojo heroine, so she spends a lot of time in a romantic reverie and hardly any time noticing the world in front of her.) The background is still of a world vaguely at war, between two large powerful countries, with the poor Nephilim (what of them are left) stuck in the middle. But that’s really just for added drama: the focus here has shifted decisively to “but does he luuuuuuuve me?!” territory.
Abel does catch back up with Guy, as we knew she would. She eventually learns he has a Tragic Secret (related to a Weakness He Is Too Much Of An Honorable Man To Tell, and which Threatens His Life when he Performs Great Deeds), and, even worse, that he has what looks like another romantic entanglement. (Interestingly – since he seemingly originally was interested in Abel during the day, when she was a boy – the woman he’s canoodling with now has a short, severe haircut and an tough, commanding attitude that some might even call “manly.”)
Fri Nov 14, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Four and Four and Four
In which I review three fourth volumes of things I've covered thrice before
Sometimes I even confuse myself, and I think I’ve just done it with that sub-head. These three books are all the fourth volumes of their series, all things I reviewed before, and all from Yen Press (because they and Del Rey are the most consistent at sending me books for review – hint, hint, other manga publishers).
Alice on Deadlines, Vol. 4
By Shiro Ihara
Yen Press, November 2008, $10.99
I’ve reviewed all three of the previous books in this series: one, two, three. And I’ve enjoyed them each slightly less than the one before, as the series wandered away from its lecherous-angel-of-death-wreaks-havok-on-the-life-of-a’”normal”-teenage-girl premise into more generic monster-fighting, evil-corporation, and true-love lands.
Lapan is that angel of death I mentioned – shingami, to be more Japanese about it – and Alice is the nubile young woman whose body he is currently inhabiting, and cladding in unlikely underwear almost as often as he’d like. Alice was bounced out to a skeleton in the first volume, but she’s off in the spirit realm as this book opens – spending a season dead, more or less – and returns later on. There are a number of other characters, including, in this book, several members of the Tsurukame family, which owns and runs the corporation that sends out the shingami. They, confusingly, also seem to be part of the natural order of things, so perhaps the Tsurukames are subcontracting from whatever gods are behind everything.
Wed Nov 12, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Vol. 3: Wolves at the Gate' by various
Remember when you didn't have to "save the cheerleader," and she'd "save the world" by herself?
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Vol. 3: Wolves at the Gate
Written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard; Illustrated by Georges Jeanty
Dark Horse, October 2008, $15.95
I have to admit something right up front, by quoting myself:
Not only have I never read any Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics, I've never seen the TV show – or the movie it spawned from, or the Angel spin-off show. Nor have I played any Buffy card games, fondled the increasing number of muppet-y creatures, written BtVS fan-fiction, or attended Buffy-centric conventions.
So I came to Wolves at the Gate a complete innocent. Sure, I have a vague sense of who Buffy and the rest of the Scooby gang are – see? I even know the term “Scooby gang” – but not much more than that. I was surprised to see the guy named Xander has only one eye, for example, and I imagine most of the people reading this have had entire conversations about whatever episode it was when he lost the other one.
I didn’t think that would be a big problem, but one of the first things I realized after opening Wolves at the Gate was that it wasn’t aimed at people like me. When the plot synopsis on the inside front cover says things like “these Slayers must prepare for an impending war with humans and a mysterious new Big Bad, Twilight” and “Also, Dawn: still large-ish,” it’s clear that this series is to let those who are already fans revel in their knowledge and have some more stories about characters they already love.
And that’s cool for them, it’s just that, y’know, I have to figure out how to review this thing. (My apologies: the aggressively colloquial, post-Mamet cross-talk is infectious.)
Mon Nov 10, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'The Venice Chronicles' by Enrico Casarosa
A sketchbook diary of a trip to La Serenissima
The Venice Chronicles
By Enrico Casarosa
Atelier Fio/AdHouse, November 2008, $19.95
Sometimes it seems like people live in completely different worlds. For example, I live in an America where a guy named Andy can marry a girl named Chris, have a series of decent jobs in book publishing, and go on occasional vacations to theme parks.
But there’s also a world made up of people named Enrico – who have cool movie-industry jobs, like doing storyboards for Pixar – that marry equally cool-named people like Marit – a modern dancer – and go on long vacations to Venice with her parents, zoom across Italy to meet his parents, and have dinner with Hugo Pratt’s daughter along the way.
I’m thinking it’s the names: Enrico just goes with Marit in a way “Dave” or “Bob” doesn’t. If I’d been named Siegfried or Joao, my life might have been as interesting as Enrico Casarosa’s.
And, speaking of Casarosa’s life, we finally come to his new book, The Venice Chronicles. It’s a diary, in watercolor over pencils, of that trip to Venice (and other points in northern Italy) – which I think was in the summer of 2007. It has the look of a sketchbook, but most of the pages were drawn after the trip – though there are sketches and watercolors drawn at the time mixed in as well.
Continue reading Review: 'The Venice Chronicles' by Enrico Casarosa ›
