Articles by andrew-wheeler
Fri Nov 7, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: High School Hijinks
Magical dogs, vampires, and sword-fighters in the hallowed halls
I warned you that we’d be back to high school before we knew it, but did you listen to me? (OK, maybe you did. I don’t really know, to be honest.) It’s that time again: to cavort with sword-swinging, vampire-snogging, dog-spirit-cavorting high school students! To see lots of stylized tears, food-gobbling binges, and unexpected nudity! To dive completely into fantasy worlds in between soul-crushing exams of our own! (The last may only apply to actual Japanese high school students.)
Inukami!, Vol. 1
Art by Mari Matsuzawa; Story by Mamizu Arisawa
Tor/Seven Seas, November 2008, $9.99
Take one boy, the surly, horny, self-important scion of a family that has been training Inukami dog-spirits, and using them to protect the world from evil spirits, for a long, long time. Add a spunky young Inukami, almost completely innocent about the outside world but utterly unwilling to follow that boy’s orders in anything. Mix together with gratuitous near-nudity and plenty of unresolved sexual tension (but surprisingly few panty shots). Warm to room temperature, and serve on a shelf with dozens of very similar works.
He’s Keita. She’s Yoko. Together they…well, they don’t really fight crime, and they don’t even do much battling of demons. What they mostly do is squabble with each other. Keita demands that she obey him, totally and completely, and Yoko refuses. Actually, she doesn’t so much refuse as utterly ignore his every order, and push him around herself, with judicious uses of her power to teleport other items around. (Such as Keita’s clothes away from him, as happens several times.) She also gets him to wait on her hand and foot, even though he’s sure it’s supposed to be the other way around.
Wed Nov 5, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Conan: The Hand of Nergal' by Truman and Giorello
Sword-swinging action in the hearty Howard habit
There have now been eight generations of teenage boys to thrill to the exploits of Conan, one for each decade since he first appeared in Weird Tales in 1932. The oldest cohort is likely mostly dead; the youngest one will mostly wander away once they get drivers’ licenses or beer-purveying fake IDs. But Conan endures – some of those fans do stick around, and there are always new ones. And, even though Robert E. Howard – remember him? The guy who created Conan and wrote the stories about him that were actually good? – has been dead for more than seventy years, Conan stories keep appearing.
Why, I have one right here:
Conan, Vol. 6: The Hand of Nergal
By Timothy Truman and Tomas Giorello
Dark Horse, October 2008, $24.95
Dark Horse, when they got the Conan comics license some years ago, rebooted the series, to follow Howard’s hero starting with his earliest adventures and to adapt or include Howard’s original stories along the way. (The intentions of the long-running previous series, from Marvel, had been intermittently the same, but twenty-three years leaves room for a whole lot of “more or less,” and they’d gotten pretty far in Conan’s life. I’m not sure why there’s no love for the older Conan, King of Aquilonia – especially since Howard’s very first Conan story was about that part of his life – but, in comics, the preference has always been for the young, half-naked barbarian.) The Hand of Nergal reprints issues 47 through 50 of the Dark Horse series – along with one of those most bizarre manifestations of the modern comics scene, the “#0” issue published much later than #1 – and sees Conan still quite young.
Hand of Nergal is based on a two-page, two-part untitled fragment – the title is from Lin Carter, when he “adapted” it into one of his own third-rate Conan stories – that’s currently available in The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian. I’ve just glanced at it myself – it’s two bits of atmosphere, with no plot: Conan finds an unconscious hot babe on a battlefield, and gloms her with his sweaty paws, while, meanwhile, a city named Yaralet is vaguely uneasy about nothing that gets described.
Continue reading Review: 'Conan: The Hand of Nergal' by Truman and Giorello ›
Mon Nov 3, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Berlin: City of Smoke' by Jason Lutes
Continuing the story of 1929
Berlin, Book Two: City of Smoke
By Jason Lutes
Drawn & Quarterly, September 2008, $19.95
More than ten years ago, Jason Lutes began serializing his long graphic novel Berlin in a comic of the same name. Making long-form comics is long, hard work – more like an ultramarathon than any other art form – and this year finally sees the publication of the second part of that story. Even now, the end is still probably four or five years away –although we can certainly know what will happen in Berlin, and guess what will happen to these people, as 1929 slides into ‘30 into ‘31.
Berlin is a dense, complicated story with a large cast of characters, told in a naturalistic, cinematic way, without identifying captions or explanatory notes. That keeps from slowing down the reading experience, and the characters are always recognizable – but it does make it hard to review the book, when I realize that “the Jewish orphan girl” was probably named twice in the entire two hundred pages. (And with two different names at that.)
Berlin takes place in the last days of the post-Great War Weimar Republic, and its implicit theme is the battle between fascism and communism. (Given the time and the place, one need not even pause a moment to guess which side Lutes comes down on. This is unfortunate, though – and more so the more a reader knows about history – since we all know the fascists will win, and that things aren’t going to get better for a long time. And even if the Communists flee to the Soviet Union, they won’t escape the Nazis that way – much less escape oppression, war, and mass death.) The characters are mostly at the lower end of middle-class, if not outright poor, with some secondary characters higher up the income ladder, and they also tend to be outcasts and bohemians of one sort or another: musicians, reporters, artists, lesbians, Jews, tramps, black Americans. Again, one notes that these are all people who will not fare well under Nazi rule.
Continue reading Review: 'Berlin: City of Smoke' by Jason Lutes ›
Fri Oct 31, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Bat-Manga!
Batman comics from '60s Japan
Just one book this week, but what a book! How could I mention anything else in the same breath as…
Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan
Compiled, edited and Designed by Chip Kidd
Photography by Geoff Spear
From the Collection of Saul Ferris
Translated by Anne Ishii
Pantheon, October 2008, $29.95 paperback/$60 hardcover
Bat-Manga! is an amazing, bizarre object, the book equivalent of hearing the result of a very long, cross-cultural game of Telephone. You see, the Japanese magazine Shonen King licensed the rights to create new, original Japanese Batman comics in 1966, when the then-new TV show was broadcast in Japan. Those comics ran for about a year, but were never reprinted in Japan, and have never been published in the US in any form before now.
It’s a book with much to admire, wonder at, and complain about. Well, let me get the first of those out of the way first:
Chip Kidd is a fine designer, but I have to admit that it annoys me that he gets top billing on a book made up entirely of someone else’s comics. What’s worse is that the creator of those comics – Jiro Kuwata, who wrote and drew all of the works reprinted in this book, based very, very loosely on concepts and characters from the American Batman comics of the time – isn’t credited officially at all. His name comes up in the introduction, and there is an interview with him in the front matter, but the official credits for Bat-Manga! – reproduced above – don’t mention him at all. We’ve really hit the triumph of design over substance when a book designer, photographer, and collector are billed above – instead of, to be blunt – the person who actually created the stories.
So: Bat-Manga! doesn’t say that it’s a book by Jiro Kuwata, but it is. Those other folks just helped bring it to an American audience.
Wed Oct 29, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'The Night of Your Life' by Jessie Reklaw
Comics from the dreams of strangers
The Night of Your Life
By Jessie Reklaw
Dark Horse, September 2008, $15.95
For the last thirteen years, Jessie Reklaw has been turning dreams – mostly those of strangers – into comics, on his website and in a growing number of alternative weeklies nationwide. (Not to derail my own train of thought, but are there any non-alternative weeklies, to which those “alternative weeklies” are the actual alternative?)
Each comic is a four panel grid, two over two: distilling a dream to its essential elements and telling however much of a story there is to tell. The stories are all bizarre and strange – they’re all dreams, after all – but, boiled down to four panels, they also have a lot of similarities. There’s a reason people call it “dream logic;” that’s the way the human mind organizes itself, so the same kind of transitions and imagery come up in many different people’s dreams.
The Night of Your Life collects about two hundred and forty of those “Slow Wave” strips, in black and white. The strips are printed one to the page – large enough to be clear and readable, but only slightly larger than on the web, so they don’t look blown up in the book. The strips are divided into ten parts, each part named for the first line of text in the first cartoon in that part…but the strips don’t otherwise seem to be organized. It’s clearly not by theme or imagery, and the strips aren’t dated, so there’s no way to tell if they’re in chronological order.
Continue reading Review: 'The Night of Your Life' by Jessie Reklaw ›
Mon Oct 27, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Aya of Yop City' by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie
More tales of life in the '70s on the Ivory Coast
Aya of Yop City
By Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie
Drawn & Quarterly, September 2008, $19.95
Aya was one of the surprise pleasures of last year, a slice-of-life story about three young women and their families and friends in the neighborhood of Yopougon in late ‘70s Ivory Coast. The title character was actually the least involved in the plot, adding to a slight suspicion that the story was partially autobiographical. (Abouet did grow up in Ivory Coast, though she left in the early ‘80s at the age of twelve – so even Aya’s story couldn’t be directly hers. My personal theory is that Aya is based on an older sister or cousin of Abouet’s, one of her strong connections back to her homeland.)
By the end of Aya, Aya herself hadn’t been much changed, but her friend Adjoua had just given birth to a baby she claimed belonged to Moussa, the unmotivated son of local rich man and business owner Bonaventure Sissoko. But it was also clear that Moussa was not the father of Adjoua’s child, and that Bonaventure strongly suspected that.
Aya of Yop City begins almost immediately after the end of Aya; it’s a continuation of the same story rather than being a new, separate graphic novel. (And so the title is appropriate, like a Babar or Madeleine novel, or a line-extending superhero comic: Aya, Aya of Yop City, The Adventures of Aya, The Amazing Aya, Yop Comics Featuring Aya, The Spectacular Aya, and so on.) So it begins with a full-page close-up of Adjoua’s baby Bobby, who is very cute…but also looks absolutely nothing like Moussa.
Continue reading Review: 'Aya of Yop City' by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie ›
Fri Oct 24, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Does Three Times #2 Equal Six?
A second look at three series from Yen Press
This time I’ll be reviewing the second volumes of three series that I covered the first time around – so I should know what’s going on. But, with manga, that can be a dangerous assumption…
Kieli, Vol. 2
Story By Yukako Kabei; art by Shiori Teshirogi
Yen Press, October 2008, $10.99
I reviewed the first volume of Kieli back in April: this is the one set on a far-future colony world, about a ghost-seeing orphan girl and the brooding immortal soldier she met. This is actually the end of this particular story: Kieli was originally a series of novels (by Kabei), and these two volumes adapt the first one, The Dead Sleep in the Wilderness.
(Is every moderately successful Japanese story re-merchandised within an inch of its life? Just the other night, I was watching the movie Train Man, which was itself based on a novel and had also been translated into a manga – and probably a kelp-based snack food and a line of men’s underwear, for all I know.)
I’d though Kieli would be a long, episodic story, in which she and Harvey (the undying, tormented soldier I mentioned above) travel around this world, always one step ahead of the fiendish Church Soldiers (bent on putting Harvey into his final rest and taking for themselves the high-tech stone that he has in place of a heart), putting unquiet ghosts to rest in one town after another. Well, that’s partly true – I expect elements of that plot turn up in later novels – but the series has the structure of novels rather than that of manga episodes, which means larger plot arcs with more going on in each “episode.”
Continue reading Manga Friday: Does Three Times #2 Equal Six? ›
Wed Oct 22, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics' edited by Paul Gravett
Noir tales in black-and-white from the '30s to the '90s
The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics
Edited by Paul Gravett
Running Press, August 2008, $17.95
Every genre or medium has a great schism – the thing that practitioners and fans argue about when they can’t think of anything more substantive. For “speculative fiction,” it’s the battle between science fiction and fantasy. For “crime fiction,” the battling parties are cozies and hardboiled novels. Manga is divided shonen against shojo, and romances are contemporary or historical (with select ninja bands fighting for particular historical periods or contemporary subgenres, like the Regency or the prairie romance).
For comics, the essential question is: writing or art?
Oh, sure, we’re all supposedly grown up now; we don’t fight over that anymore. We can have both! we say, whether we’re indy geeks or Marvel zombies. But during those late nights at convention bars, and on obscure message boards, the knives come out, and we rumble.
At times like that, I always come down on the writing side. That’s my tribe; I came to comics from the SF/Fantasy world, and even now I read more pages of words without pictures than with. And the editor of The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics, Paul Gravett…well, I suspect him of running with the art crowd.
Maybe I’m wrong – it could just be the material that gives that impression. But Best Crime Comics has a total of five of its stories (out of twenty-four) credited to an unknown writer, a suspicious number. And Gravett’s story introductions always list the artist first.
Continue reading Review: 'The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics' edited by Paul Gravett ›
Mon Oct 20, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Burma Chronicles' by Guy Delisle
A third trip to an oppressive Asian land by the author of Pyongyang
Burma Chronicles
By Guy Delisle
Drawn & Quarterly, September 2008, $19.95
Delisle has a quirky history for a newish graphic novelist: he’s in his early forties, a Canadian long resident in France who spent ten years working in animation (both in France and overseeing animation production various places in Asia) before quitting that to concentrate on his graphic novels. And his first two major books – Pyongyang and Shenzhen – were both the stories of long trips to those cities (the capital of North Korea and a booming city in southern China, respectively) during the course of his animation career.
I should point out here that the country calls itself Myanmar now – since a coup in 1989 – but that many governments, including both France and the USA, still call it Burma to show that they don’t accept the legitimacy of the current government to make that change. It’s not clear if Delisle intends his title to be a political statement, though he does explain the difference between the two names on the very first page of this book.
Burma Chronicles is the story of another long stay in an Asian country – another relatively oppressive dictatorship, at that – but it wasn’t for his work, this time. Delisle’s wife works as an administrator for Medecins Sans Frontieres, an international non-profit organization that brings doctors and health care to parts of the world desperately in need of it – and this trip was because her work took her there, for a posting of fourteen months.
Continue reading Review: 'Burma Chronicles' by Guy Delisle ›
Fri Oct 17, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: New and Different
Three books beginning very different series
This week: three books with very little in common. Oh, they’re all recently published – on paper, and in English, even! – but that’s about it. So you won’t be bothered by my heavy-handed attempts to link everything together this time….
B.Ichi, Vol. 1
By Atsushi Ohkubo
Yen Press, October 2008, $10.99
In the nation of Japon, in the city of Toykyo, in the busy Chinjuku section – are your ribs sore from all of the nudging yet? mine were – an impressionable and unworldly young man named Shotaro is looking for his good deed of the day. You see, in this alternate world – you did get that it’s an alternate world, didn’t you? Because the alternative is that the translator was just really, really bad at spelling – there are “dokeshi,” who use more of their brains than the rest of us, to unleash superpowers, but they also each have a condition that governs those powers.
(OK, just for the record. The “people only use 10% of their brains” idea? Bunk. Utter bunk. It’s not true now, and it never was true – it was misreporting from an era when scientists studying the brain only knew what 10% of it did. But, even then, they knew it was all being used for something – they’d just only figured out part of it. But some people are so gullible they’d drown if they looked up during a rainstorm…)
Anyway, back to Shotaro. His power is that he gets the abilities of animals by chewing on their bones. (In the ever-lovin’ Animal Man vein, as if birds needed “superpowers” to fly, rather than wings, light bones, and strong muscles.) His condition is that he has to do a good deed a day. And his disposition is that intense sunnyness seen only in manga protagonists who have no clue about the actual rules of their world.
Wed Oct 15, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: Two 'Garfield' Collections (Including One Without Garfield)
A 30th anniversary celebration and a webcomic escaped into the wild
My brother was a huge Garfield fan when he was young, and my own two sons (currently ages ten and seven) have followed in his footsteps. They’re certainly not alone: as Dan Walsh writes in his foreword to Garfield Minus Garfield, “I wanted to be just like Garfield – lazy, sarcastic, lasagna loving, Monday hating, cynical but under it all, a darn good guy.” There’s something about Garfield that appeal to the slob in all of us – particularly those of us who are pre-teen boys.
But most of us, I think, grow out of Garfield in time. (I could be wrong, of course – the strip runs in something like 2500 papers worldwide, so he clearly has a lot of adults reading about him every day.) We realize that there are only five or six real jokes in the strip (Garfield likes to eat, Garfield likes to sleep, Garfield hates to do just about anything else), and move on to something with a bit more depth.
Maybe I am just speaking for the coastal intellectual elite when I say that, though. And I hadn’t seriously thought about Garfield in years – if ever – so I was happy to devote some time to these two very different Garfield books when they came my way recently.
Garfield: 30 Years of Laughter & Lasagna: The Life and Times of a Fat, Furry Legend
By Jim Davis
Ballantine, October 2008, $35.00
The first book was the obvious one: a volume celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the strip (which debuted June 19, 1978) with a selection of strips from every one of those thirty years and some commentary from Garfield’s creator and cartoonist, Jim Davis. It’s a fairly superficial book, without any deep insights or thoughts – but that does suit Garfield, which has never trafficked in intellectual depth.
As always, I like looking at the early, crude form of a comic that became more sleek and streamlined later on. The scruffy, more obviously fat Garfield of the first year is simply more interesting to the eye than the sleeker, more designed creature he became later – but it was much harder, clearly, to keep that first Garfield on-model. Davis mentions that he started Garfield because there were a number of “dog” strips, but none about cats – what he doesn’t mention are B. Kliban’s cat cartoons, which look to have been a strong influence on Davis’s early drawing style. He also doesn’t mention the general explosion of cat-stuff in the market after Kliban’s massively popular book Cats appeared in 1975; at this point Davis obviously wants Garfield to look like the beginning of the cat boom, and not merely another offshoot of it. (Kliban is safely dead these days, and won’t be raising any fuss.) Davis does allude to the possible competition, though, when he mentions, on p.72, that the original plan was to “develop him for about a year and get a good backlog of strips. …[W]e felt a certain urgency as far as the cat idea was concerned. It would have hurt if someone else came out with a cat feature before Garfield.”
Continue reading Review: Two 'Garfield' Collections (Including One Without Garfield) ›
Mon Oct 13, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Jamilti & Other Stories' by Rutu Modan
Collected shorter comics by the author of 'Exit Wounds'
Jamilti & Other Stories
By Rutu Modan
Drawn & Quarterly, August 2008, $19.95
Rutu Modan came to the attention of most American comics readers last year, when her graphic novel Exit Wounds was published to great acclaim. Exit Wounds went on to hit a number of top ten lists, and won the Eisner for Best New Graphic Novel. But no cartoonist comes out of nowhere – Modan had been writing and drawing shorter comics stories for a decade. Those would be these stories, which have now been corralled between two covers.
Jamilti collects seven stories, all of them but the title piece originally published in anthologies from the comics collective Actus (of which Modan was one of the two founders). (“Jamilti” itself was originally published in Drawn & Quarterly, Vol. 5, for those seeking closure.) Modan’s style has changed slightly over the years, but her artistic progression isn’t obvious. Her most recent work – Exit Wounds, “Your Number One Fan” from How To Love, the currently running serial The Murder of the Terminal Patient – have a tighter, cleaner line and solid blocks of brighter, purer colors than her earlier stories, but that’s more of a tightening of what she was already doing than anything else. The stories before that bounce back and forth from color to black and white, with the drawing similarly getting looser and tighter as Modan worked out what she wanted to do.
Continue reading Review: 'Jamilti & Other Stories' by Rutu Modan ›
Fri Oct 10, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: High School All Over Again
Three more books set in those hallowed halls
A lot of manga take place in high schools – and that’s natural, since the original audience for most of the popular manga series were Japanese teenagers, and it’s hard to find someone more self-obsessed than a teenager. So ignoring high school would almost mean ignoring manga all together, and I wouldn’t want to do that – but I do try to quarantine the very teenager-y books into their own little cliques (they’re used to that, anyway). It’s time for another one of those, so join me for a look at three new series set in the best and worst time of all of our lives:
Papillon, Vol. 1
By Miwa Ueda
Del Rey, October 2008, $10.95
Papillion builds its foundation upon a plotline much beloved in song, story, and Olson twin movies: there are these two identical twin sisters, and they’re completely different! The viewpoint character is Ageha – and, by the way, does that name sound as frumpy and old-ladyish to the Japanese as it does to me? – who grew up in the countryside, and, because of that, is shy, socially inept, unfashionable, and wears glasses. (The equivalent cliché in an America story would have her be a rough, woodsy, outdoorsy kind of girl, great at riding horses and starting fires, but Japanese heroines apparently must always be pretty and decorative, with slim wrists and no obvious skills.)
Ageha’s twin sister Hana – who grew up in the city, because their parents separated them very young (possibly on a whim; this isn’t explained) – is gorgeous and poised and the most popular girl in the school they both attend.
(Oh, and there’s also a nasty fat girl, who seemingly exists in this story only to be Ageha’s only friend – a very, very bad friend at that – and to show that unattractive people are necessarily cruel, vindictive, and rude.)
Wed Oct 8, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle' by Jim Butcher and Adrian Syaf
A graphic novel prequel to the popular series of contemporary fantasy novels
The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle
Written by Jim Butcher; Pencils by Adrian Syaf
Del Rey, October 2008, $19.95
Butcher’s hero is Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only consulting wizard – and Harry’s literary background is more from the hardboiled mystery (Always Having Bad Luck With Dames Division, rather than the racier Always Falling Into Bed With Dames Division) than from the romance novel, like so many of his high-heeled and back-tattooed fellow explorers of the supernatural. Harry’s the hard-luck kind of mystery hero: he saves the day, but doesn’t usually get the girl, or much in the way of monetary reward, either. (But that’s OK, since his heart is pure – or as pure as anyone’s heart can be, these days.)
Dresden gets called in – usually by Chicago PD’s Lt. Karrin Murphy, head of Special Investigations (which gets all of the woo-woo cases) – when something seems to be “weird.” No one but Harry actually really believes in the supernatural, of course, but he does get results, most of the time.
Welcome to the Jungle is a prequel to the Dresden Files novels, taking place just before the events of Storm Front, the first novel. It’s written by Jim Butcher himself, and penciled by “rising talent” (which here means “someone I haven’t heard of – not that there’s anything wrong with that”) Ardian Syaf, an Indonesian artist.
The Dresden Files is like The X-Files (and many other series of stories about supernatural beasties, like Hellboy) in that there are “mythos” stories – ones that move forward the larger plot – and stories that are one-offs. Jungle is a one-off, concerning some unpleasant doings at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo.
Continue reading Review: 'The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle' by Jim Butcher and Adrian Syaf ›
Mon Oct 6, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Help Is On the Way' and 'Nothing Nice to Say'
Two webcomics collections, providing funny self-help and punk attitude
The world of webcomics has gotten to be nearly as large and encompassing as traditional newspaper strips – if there aren’t as many people making a living from webcomics yet,
give it a year or two and the one number going up will soon meet the other number coming down. It’s so big, actually, that there can be successful web cartoonists – successful enough to have a book of their work published – that otherwise smart and savvy people (meaning me) have never even heard of.
I don’t mean Scott Meyer: like everyone else, I started reading his online strip Basic Instructions when Scott (Dilbert) Adams linked to it. But I wasn’t familiar with Nothing Nice To Say – a strip about punk-rock culture by Mitch Clem – until I saw the first collection of that strip (confusingly titled “Volume Two”) in a comics shop.
So, since these two collections are both of webcomics, and both came out at the same time from the same publisher (Dark Horse, increasingly the home of webcomics in print), I thought they were just begging to be reviewed together.
And so they shall be.
Help Is On the Way: A Collection of Basic Instructions
By Scott Meter
Dark Horse, September 2008, $9.95
In my circles, and, I think, those of webcomics in general, Meyer is the bigger name. He’s been doing Basic Instructions on and off since 2004, but went onto a regular schedule sometime in 2006. Since the Scott Adams shout-out, he might not be making a living from his comics, but he probably gets enough ad revenue to pay for nachos now and then.
Basic Instructions follows a rigid four-panel format, and is both very wordy and completely rotoscoped (Meyer prefers to call it “traced”) from pictures. It’s also, to one degree or another, based on Meyer’s real life – he’s the main character, and his wife, best friend, boss and other family members and random bystanders make regular appearances (though usually without being given names).
Each strip explains how to do something specific – but Meyer isn’t really trying to explain anything, so “How to Correct Someone” and “How to Avoid Sounding Condescending” are, like most Basic Instructions strips, really about everyday interactions with people. So Basic Instructions is really a very wordy gag-a-day strip, with a recurring cast, running jokes, and all of the usual accouterments. (This is a feature rather than a bug: a strip like Basic Instructions appears to be would be boring and purely oriented to facts, which might be useful, but wouldn’t be funny.)
Continue reading Review: 'Help Is On the Way' and 'Nothing Nice to Say' ›
