Articles by andrew-wheeler
Fri Oct 3, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Doctors & Lawyers
We're just like network TV!
This week, I have two fat books about the unlikely adventures of (on one hand) a scarred, secretive, arrogant doctor and (on the other) a self-doubting lawyer who defends the innocent. And since I couldn’t see throwing anyone else in between Black Jack and Phoenix Wright, those two will get the whole column to themselves, in a grand showdown between medicine and law.
Black Jack, Vol. 1
By Osamu Tezuka
Vertical, September 2008, $18.95
Black Jack is reportedly Tezuka’s most popular series among Japanese adults – kids prefer Astro Boy, as you’d expect – but there’s only been one (quickly aborted) attempt to publish it in the US before this. And it’s not like Black Jack is a quick little thing: it ran for ten years in Japan, and totals well over two hundred stories of about twenty pages each. But Vertical now is stepping up to the challenge, and plans to publish Black Jack every other month for three years until they get all seventeen volumes out. It’s an ambitious plan, certainly, but ambition is to be applauded, especially in publishing.
So this book reprints some of the earliest Black Jack stories – it doesn’t explicitly say that all of the stories will be reprinted in order, and several stories have never been reprinting, for various reasons, but these are probably from the beginning. It doesn’t start with an origin: some of these stories fill in bits of Black Jack’s backstory, but he’s in the middle of his career as the book opens, already legendary.
Black Jack is a supernaturally gifted surgeon, capable of amazing and unlikely feats, such as transplanting a brain into a new body or building a body for an intelligent parasitic twin and installing her loose, attached body parts into that body. To be blunt, he does the impossible, generally at least once per story. He’s also an outlaw, unlicensed anywhere in the world though still respected and commanding immense fees. (In these stories, his unlicensed status is mentioned but doesn’t affect the action at all.)
Thu Oct 2, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Love & Rockets: New Stories #1' by The Hernandez Brothers
The classic independent comic turns into an annual trade paperback
Love & Rockets: New Stories #1
By The Hernandez Brothers
Fantagraphics, July 2008, $14.99
It’s hard to believe Love & Rockets has been around for twenty-seven years now – longer than any of its peers in the “indy” comics world, and longer than a lot of “mainstream” comics characters as well – but dates don’t lie. This trade paperback marks the beginning of a third series of things called “Love & Rockets” – the first was magazine-sized, and started in 1981 (though it shrunk to the size of a regular comic eventually), and then the second was the re-launch of the comic in 2001 for the twentieth anniversary.
This time around, Fantagraphics and the Hernandezes have bowed to the winds of the comics world – the new Love & Rockets will be an annual hundred-page book, rather than a more frequent and smaller pamphlet. And so this book contains exactly fifty pages of comics each from Jamie and Gilbert Hernandez – with prodigal brother Mario turning up to script a six-page story for Gilbert’s art.
Love & Rockets has always swung between the dramatic and the silly – sometimes story-by-story, and sometimes in the space of a single panel. This volume isn’t entirely on the silly side, but it definitely tilts that way, with the first two parts of a long oddball superhero story from Jaime and some shorter, mostly minor pieces from Gilbert, probably unrelated to his major ongoing plots and characters.
Continue reading Review: 'Love & Rockets: New Stories #1' by The Hernandez Brothers ›
Tue Sep 30, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Gus and His Gang' by Chris Blain
Love troubles for three outlaws in the Old West
Gus and His Gang
By Chris Blain
First Second, October 2008, $16.95
There must be some reason why the good Western comics – hell, pretty much all of the Western comics – of the past three decades have all come from France, but I don’t know it myself. France never had a West of its own; never had a frontier on its border to expand into. (Rather the opposite, actually – their big neighbor is Germany, which spent several hundred years trying to expand into them.) But there’s a streak of Western comics – about the American West, of course – from France going back through the “Blueberry” stories by Charlier and Moebius up to this book.
Well, whatever the reason, the French like stories about our Old West at least as much as we do, and now here’s another one: Gus and His Gang, a collection of stories originally published between 2004 and 2007 about three outlaws and the women they pursue (and are pursued by). Gus, Clem and Gratt do rob banks and hijack trains – that’s how they make their living – but those things are mostly incidentals in these stories. These guys are much more concerned with getting a leg over – money never seems to be a problem (there’s always another bank to knock over), but sex always is.
Gus is the title character, the guy on the cover, and the ostensible leader of the three-man gang, but he has the worst luck with women of the three. The first story, “Natalie,” sets the tone – a woman from his past (he knew her five years before, in Cincinnati, when he was working in a wild west show) comes back into his life, and he chases around after her – as she leads him on by his exceptionally long nose – but doesn’t get anything out of it.
Continue reading Review: 'Gus and His Gang' by Chris Blain ›
Fri Sep 26, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: The Old In-Out In-Out
Shamelessly pandering by reviewing three books about sex
I haven’t reviewed books about sex in close to a month, so it must be time again, right? (As always, I’m reviewing what I have on hand, so, if you publish manga and want me to
cover it, contact me at the e-mail address far below.If you don’t publish manga, but want me to review something in particular, just leave a comment with a suggestion. If you don’t publish manga, and have no suggestions…then I think you’re good the way you are.)
Sundome, Vol. 3
By Kazuto Okada
Yen Press, September 2008, $12.99
I liked the first volume of Sundome, but wasn’t entirely comfortable with how focused on leering at teenage girls it was. (I have no problems with teenage boys leering at teenage girls – in any case, they’ll do it no matter what I think – but I don’t think it’s really appropriate for me to do so. And that can bother me, even in fictional form.) The second volume made me even more uneasy, because the “games” that teenage cutie Kurumi played on utterly-gaga-about-her Hideo were getting dangerous and cruel.
Their relationship is still shifting in this third volume; Hideo’s devotion to Kurumi is showing some positive results (he’s gotten stronger from all of his bike riding-cum-sublimation, and Kurumi’s teasing is turning more girlfriend-ish than purely mean), and the more dangerous or kinky moments are part of obvious sex-play between the two. Oh, she’s still insisting that she’ll never have sex with him…but she isn’t acting as if that’s true.
Even given the cultural differences, Sundome is one of the most raw and realistic depictions of adolescent sexuality I’ve ever seen. Sure, it’s exaggerated for fictional effect, with the usual manga shorthand, but these kids are both horny and confused in a way that fiction rarely shows. And, of course, since there’s some moderately explicit sexuality in this book – more that the previous books, I think – it’s rated “M” for adults only, and teenagers are officially not supposed to read it. That’s irony for you: because it’s so true about teenagers, teenagers aren’t supposed to read it.
Thu Sep 25, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down' by David Heatley
Autobiographical comics pushed to the limit
My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down
By David Heatley
Pantheon, September 2008, $24.95
Right at this moment, I know more of the minor details of David Heatley’s life than I do of my own. This is because I don’t typically spend my time obsessing about the minutiae of my past, while I have just spent several hours reading Heatley’s comics – in which he obsessively chronicles every tiny detail of his life (as organized into thematic categories) that he can possibly remember.
My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down collects many (all?) of Heatley’s previously published short strips, and organizes them into something like a memoir in comics form – but a memoir tightly focused and monomanically detailed in its chosen areas. It’s divided into five sections – Sex, Race, Mom, Dad, and Kin – and everything else in the world (including religion, which seems to be very important to Heatley) gets left out or included only at odd, disjointed moments.
Each section, except the last, starts off with a batch of dream comics. These are about as compelling as anyone else’s dreams ever can be, particularly since Heatley has a deliberately crude and flat style. He does generally draw his dream comics with larger panels and more varied transitions than his longer pieces, which gives them some more visual interest. But, still, they’re someone else’s dreams, filled with intensely personal imagery and characters that we don’t recognize (because we haven’t yet met them in the autobiographical stories). So they’re opaque at best, incomprehensible at worst.
Continue reading Review: 'My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down' by David Heatley ›
Mon Sep 22, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Journey, Vol. 1' by William Messner-Loebs
Historical adventure on the old western frontier, in another blast from the '80s
Journey: The Adventures of Wolverine MacAlistaire, Volume 1
By William Messner-Loebs
IDW, July 2008, $19.99
Historical fiction is the odd duck of literature; it inevitably ages twice – once just because it’s set in a past milieu that even the original audience will be unfamiliar with, and a second time because it was really written for that original audience…and their society and expectations and ideas will age and become unfamiliar as well. Today’s historical fiction shows us the past through a lens of today, but yesterday’s historical fiction has a double lens – the historical era it was set in, and the one it was written in.
Journey is set nearly two hundred years ago, on the old Northwestern frontier of Michigan, soon after the election of 1808. And these stories were created twenty-five years ago, in black-and-white comic books, as part of a burst of creativity and possibility in the comics industry, originally driven by a wide array of idiosyncratic creators each telling their own particular stories but eventually buried (within another three years) by piles of cheap knock-offs of “hot” ideas. (Some things never change.)
Messner-Loebs’s hero is a legendary trapper and outdoorsman, Joshua “Wolverine” MacAlistaire – and 1983 is about the last time any comics character could be named “Wolverine” completely independently – who doesn’t dislike people, though he does prefer his own company.
Continue reading Review: 'Journey, Vol. 1' by William Messner-Loebs ›
Fri Sep 19, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Yen Plus Magazine
The first three issues of a new phonebook-sized manga monthly
Yen Press launched a new manga magazine last month called Yen+ (or maybe Yen Plus), to compete directly with those twin 800-pound gorillas of manga in America, Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat. I now have the first three issues here in my hands, so let’s take a look at Yen+ and see what’s in it.
Yen+, August to October 2008 issues
By various
Yen Press, Aug-Oct 2008, $8.99 ea.
All three issues have the same eleven serials in them, so it would be silly of me to review each issue separately and come back again and again to the same stories. (I’m not saying that I never do anything silly – just that I’m not choosing to do so this time.) So I’ll talk about Yen+ in general first, then cover the serials, and finish up with particular points in the separate issues.
The first thing a savvy reader notices about Yen+ is that it has two front covers, and a quick glance inside shows that it’s not just the covers – the whole magazine is divided in half. Japanese manga start at the “back” and run right-to-left for two hundred and some-odd pages, while Korean manwha and Western-originated comics go the opposite way for about the same number of pages. The Korean/Western side is the “front,” with the table of contents, editor’s letter, masthead, and the other usual “front-of-the-book” materials. But the two sides are close in length – the Japanese side has five serials (with generally longer page counts), and the Korean side six (plus the editorial matter). So Yen+, if I may be impertinent for a moment, is perfectly happy swinging both ways…
Yen+, if I may continue to torture a metaphor, doesn’t aim at one sex or the other, unlike the Japanese magazines that are its model – or like Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat in the US. (So it’s bisexual as well as swinging both ways – no wonder it comes in its own plastic bag!) The editor’s letter in the first issue explains that – since the audience for manga, and for manga magazines, in the US is not huge yet, trying to please both boys and girls will, they hope, allow them to reach an audience large enough to survive. (The other possibility is that it will fall between two stools, with too much mushy stuff for the boys and too many severed heads for the girls.)
Wed Sep 17, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Holy Sh*t! The World's Weirdest Comic Books'
The oddest and least likely comics of the last sixty years
Holy Sh*t! The World’s Weirdest Comic Books
By Paul Gravette and Peter Stanbury
St. Martin’s Press, October 2008, $12.95
This is the kind of book I’m actually surprised to still see – I thought “look at this weird stuff” books had been entirely superseded by the greater speed and flexibility of the Internet. (I can think of three similar sites just off the top of my head – Superdickery, James Lilek’s Funny Books, and Scott Shaw!’s Oddball Comics – and without even diving into the blog world.) But I suppose as long as there are cash registers in this world, there will be eye-catching little impulse-buy books to sit next to them and lure in the curious, unwary, or amused. Holy Sh*t! is a small-format hardcover, roughly six inches square, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was a corresponding point-of-purchase cardboard display that holds six to eight of them.
The title gives away the whole point of Holy Sh*t! – it’s a collection of amusingly weird, or weirdly amusing, covers from the last sixty years or so of comics, supposedly covering the whole world but actually staying, for the most part, very close to the mainstream of American corporate comics (with regular excursions into the well-known underground movement). I should mention, to save confusion, that the UK edition has the somewhat more boring title The Leather Nun and Other Incredibly Strange Comics.
Continue reading Review: 'Holy Sh*t! The World's Weirdest Comic Books' ›
Mon Sep 15, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'The Good Neighbors, Book One: Kin' by Holly Black and Ted Naifeh
First in a new graphic novel series about faeries in the modern world
The Good Neighbors, Book One: Kin
By Holly Black and Ted Naifeh
Scholastic/Graphix, September 2008, $16.99
Holly Black is a major writer for young people – one-half of the team behind the phenomenally popular “Spiderwick Chronicles” (along with Tony DiTerlizzi) and the author of three dark contemporary-fantasy novels for teens, starting with Tithe. Getting her to write a graphic novel series for teens is of the same magnitude as the long-underwear companies signing up bestsellers like Brad Meltzer and Jodi Picoult.
But the difference here is that Black is working for Scholastic, one of the oldest and smartest publishers of books for younger readers around. Scholastic, unlike DC with Picoult, didn’t try to shoehorn Black into some already-existing corporate property, but worked to her strengths. The Good Neighbors is an original graphic novel series set in the modern world, mixing teen drama with an otherworld of nasty folkloric faeries – faeries along the same lines as those in Black’s novels for teens. Scholastic also paired Black with Ted Naifeh, a well-known cartoonist and illustrator in his own right, whose most popular works have a Goth flavor and likely are loved by the same kids who read Black’s books.
This is how it’s done: you get a good writer, let her work on something she knows and does well, pair her with a complimentary artist, and package it for the audience that already knows and loves both of the creators – note that this is a $16.99 hardcover, a price point similar to teen novels and comics collections. (Are you listening, DC?)
Continue reading Review: 'The Good Neighbors, Book One: Kin' by Holly Black and Ted Naifeh ›
Fri Sep 12, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: The New Number Two
Three more chances to jump into the middle of something
I haven’t done a week of jumping-into-the-middle in a while, so I thought it was about time to try that out again. This time, I have three books from Yen Press, all second volumes in series that I haven’t read before. So let’s see if they make any sense to me…
Goong, Vol. 2
By Park SoHee
Yen Press, July 2008, $10.99
Goong is an alternate history series, in which the last Emperor of Korea (Soon-Jong) wasn’t actually the last Emperor, and that Korea got its independence from Japan (as it actually did) and stayed unified (as, of course, it hasn’t). Park has a short comics afterword in this volume to explain the set-up – and something of why she chose to make the royal family in her series Kings rather than Emperors.
That’s the background: Korea is unified, and has a King. That king has a disinterested, self-centered teenage son, Prince Shin. And, in the way of royal families through the ages, Shin had an arranged marriage to a teenage girl, Chae-Kyung (our viewpoint character). Their marriage takes place at the very beginning of this book – we know that Shin and Chae-Kyung don’t love each other, and barely know each other, but we don’t see (in this volume) all of the machinations that led to the wedding. (Presumably, though, it has something to do with the fact that Chae-Kyung’s family is poor.)
Chae-Kyung has somewhat more interior life than the usual run of girls’ manga heroines, and Shin isn’t the standard spoiled brat, but something more nuanced. So Goong has a lot of generic elements, but assembles them into something more substantial and interesting. I’m also finding that Korean comics have less of the over-exaggeration of Japanese comics, which works better for my eye. Goong might not be groundbreaking, but it’s quite good for what it is.
Thu Sep 11, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Scrambled Ink'
Another group of animators turn their hands to comics
Scrambled Ink
Edited by Anonymous
Dark Horse, July 2008, $19.99
Scrambled Ink is the latest in the recent flurry of comics anthologies by animators, following the high-profile and very successful Flight series (which recently hit its fifth volume) and the slightly newer but still popular Out of Picture (which had a second volume earlier this year). It was published quietly a few months back, and doesn’t seem to have made much of a stir.
And that’s a real shame, since Scrambled Ink is more inventive and ambitious than the most recent Flight and Out of Picture books put together. (And that despite Scrambled Ink being a physically smaller book with only six stories in it.) I’m not sure why that would be – Scrambled Ink comes from animators who worked on Bee Movie, not what one thinks of as an excitingly transgressive piece of cinema – but these DreamWorks animators are definitely doing something different from their Blue Sky compatriots from Out of Picture.
Two of the tales in Scrambled Ink – “Kadogo: The Next Big Thing” by David G. Derrick, Jr. and Ken Morrissey & Keith Baxter’s “Greedy Grizzly” – would have been right at home in one of the other anthologies: they’re morality tales, with animal casts, that could easily have been afterschool specials or “heartwarming” animated shorts. Both also have excellent art – Derrick with an earth-toned watercolor palette very appropriate to his African story and Baxter with an appealingly loose version of a cute-animal children’s’ book style. These stories could have fit in perfectly well in Flight 12 or Out of Picture 9, but here in Scrambled Ink, they’re notable for seeming a little less refined and a little more obvious than the other four stories.
Tue Sep 9, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'The Lindbergh Child' by Rick Geary
Neither murder nor Victorian, but Geary's back with a new twist on his historical series
A Treasury of XXth Century Murder: The Lindbergh Child
By Rick Geary
NBM/ComicsLit, August 2008, $15.95
Rick Geary has been chronicling in comics form the crimes of past ages since “An Unsolved Murder,” one of his earliest stories. Most of those stories have been funneled into his “Treasury of Victorian Murder” series – first an album-sized book of short stories in 1987, later an additional seven slim books, each chronicling one famous murder of yore.
Those “Treasury of Victorian Murder” books have been coming, one every year or two, since 1995, but Geary’s varied his approach this year – the book is the same size, the format is very similar, but the story this time is part of the newly-named “Treasury of XXth Century Murder.” And the crime is one of the many claimants to the throne of “Crime of the Century” – after Fatty Arbuckle and Sacco & Vanzetti but before the Manson Murders – though it didn’t start out to be a murder (and some people, even now, doubt that the Lindbergh baby really died). So now Geary has an entire new century of murder to work through – the pre-WWII years alone could keep him busy for years. (Particularly if he expands his plan slightly to allow larger crime sprees – like Bonnie & Clyde and the various Prohibition-era gangsters.)
Geary tells The Lindbergh Child in his usual detailed, nearly deadpan style – though hints of the Geary wit sneak through, particularly in the faces of his characters – starting off with maps and plans of the important locations and swiftly moving on to set the scene and get into the kidnapping itself.
Continue reading Review: 'The Lindbergh Child' by Rick Geary ›
Fri Sep 5, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Swords and Psychics
There's gonna be a whole lot of fighting in the old town tonight
This week was going to be Samurai Week, but I threw in a book about psychics for spice – just to keep it interesting.
Dororo, Vol. 3
By Osamu Tezuka
Vertical, August 2008, $13.95
This is the third and final book in a samurai saga from Tezuka, the “godfather of manga.” (I’ve previously reviewed volume 1 and volume 2 for ComicMix.) I’ve seen references that say this series was truncated rather than continuing to its expected end, and that’s plausible from the book itself.
It does have something like an ending; the swordsman Hyakkimaru confronts and defeats his evil father, and parts from the young thief Dororo (whose secret he’s recently learned). But the stories of these main characters aren’t actually done – Hyakkimaru is not finished with his quest to become human again, and Dororo needs to grow up (and probably to battle some evil feudal lords on behalf of downtrodden farmers).
So this isn’t really the ending one would hope for – it doesn’t cut off, uncompleted, but there clearly were more stories to be told. (On the other hand, Tezuka left off work on Dororo in 1971, and lived for nearly twenty years afterward, which probably means something.) But the individual stories are still exceptionally well-told, in Tezuka’s characteristic clean lines, and the thematic undertones remain under, and deepen rather than threatening to sink the narrative.
Thu Sep 4, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'American Widow' by Alissa Torres and Sungyoon Choi
A 9/11 widow's story in comics form
American Widow
By Alissa Torres; Illustrated by Sungyoon Choi
Villard, September 2008, $22.00
Luis Eduardo (“Eddie”) Torres started a new job as a foreign exchange trader at Cantor Fitzgerald on September 10th, 2001. He was thrilled to get it – he’d been out of work for a few months, his wife, Alissa, was then seven months pregnant, and he was a Columbian national, so his immigration status could have been compromised by staying out of work too long.
Seven years later, we all remember what happened on September 11th, but perhaps only New Yorkers remember Cantor Fitzgerald as clearly. Their headquarters was at the very top of One World Trade Center: floors 101 to 105. That was directly above the impact site of the first plane; no one in Cantor Fitzgerald’s offices survived. Of the dead at the World Trade Center, nearly a quarter were Cantor Fitzgerald. Eddie Torres was one of them.
Alissa Torres quickly found herself a widow: one of the smallest of mercies was that her husband jumped, and so was identified quickly. And then she found herself a “9/11 widow” – alternately helped and hindered by charities, sought by the media, torn completely from her previous life. The fact that her husband had just started work – at a site whose records were utterly destroyed – only made things more difficult.
American Widow is Alissa Torres’s story, in her own words and presumably her own comics-panel layouts. The art is by Sungyoon Choi, a very young graduate of the School of Visual Arts; this appears to be her first major work. It’s also Torres’s first work in comics; before 9/11 she was an instructional designer for the New York City Department for the Aging and afterward she seems to have only written about herself and her late husband, with several essays on Salon and one in Redbook. (A search at Salon didn’t bring up those essays; nor does the Redbook essay seem to be online.)
Continue reading Review: 'American Widow' by Alissa Torres and Sungyoon Choi ›
Tue Sep 2, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!'
The classic '80s SF comic in a classy (and expensive) new package
Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!
By Howard Chaykin
Dynamic Forces, July 2008, $49.99
Science Fiction has never been quite as successful in comics form as it seemed it should have been. Oh, sure, there have been plenty of vaguely SFnal ideas and premises – from Superman to Kamandi to the X-Men to the Ex-Mutants – but they were rarely anything deeper than an end to the sentence “There’s this guy, see? and he’s….” One of the few counterexamples was Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!, starting in 1983 – that series had many of the usual flaws and unlikelihoods of near-future dystopias, but it also had a depth and texture to its world that was rare in comics SF (and never to be expected in even purely prose works, either).
American Flagg! suffered from Chaykin’s waning attention for a while, and then crashed and burned almost immediately after he finally left the series, with a cringe-making overly “sexy” storyline utterly overwritten by Alan Moore. American Flagg! limped from muddled storyline to confused characterization for a couple of years afterward – but the beginning, when Chaykin was fully energized by his new creation and the stories he was telling, is one of the best SF stories in American comics.
The series has never been collected well, though a few slim album-sized reprints were once available, and may be findable through used-book channels. This Dynamic Forces edition, reprinting the first fourteen issues of the series, is quite pricey. (Especially for a book with no page numbers, and one in which the pages are precisely the size of the original comics – not oversized, as those previous album reprints had been.) This book has a strong, thoughtful introduction by Michael Chabon – which has already appeared in his Maps and Legends collection, presumably due to the delay in the American Flagg! book – a gushing afterword by Jim Lee, and a new short story written and drawn by Chaykin.
Continue reading Review: 'Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!' ›
