Articles by andrew-wheeler
Fri Aug 29, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: As Different As Possible
Three books with nothing at all in common
I’ve generally tried to organize the weekly columns around some sort of theme, but sometimes themes just serve to hide the variety and depth of the comics world (whatever country it might be from). So, this week, I picked three books with nothing at all in common (except a Japanese origin), just because:
Nightmares for Sale, Vol. 1
By Kaoru Ohashi
Aurora, November 2007, $10.95
Nightmares for Sale is an old-fashioned kind of horror story, with two enigmatic characters – they appear to be a grown man (Shadow) and a young girl (Maria), but she’s older than he is – who run a store that’s usually a pawnshop. Nothing at all good can happen when they enter your life, though they usually don’t seem to be directly responsible.
Each story in this volume has a different set of characters – usually teenage girls, or the kind of adults that teenage girls want to become – who meet the pawnshop owners, and then come to nasty ends. A bullied girl triggers a curse on the friendship rings her tormentors made her buy for all of them, and nastiness follows. A model wants to appear beautiful in photographs, and gets exactly what she asked for…but no more and no less. A young woman meets an abused boy in the street, and learns that their connection is much deeper than she imagined. A young boy tries to pawn his baby sister. And so on.
Wed Aug 27, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Zot! 1987-1991' by Scott McCloud
A boy superhero of two worlds returns, in all his complex glory
Zot! The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991
By Scott McCloud
HarperCollins, July 2008, $24.95
There are those of us – only a few now, I bet – who keep hoping that Scott McCloud will finally get the comics-about-comics thing out of his system and go back to fictional comics. (1998’s The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln is generally skipped over in these laments, as it is in all other discussions of McCloud’s career, including the one in this book.) Oh, sure, Understanding Comics was one of the great graphic novels of the early ‘90s, and a major roadmark towards the modern comics field, and Reinventing Comics and Making Comics have their strong points as well, but, we keep wondering, what about Zot!?
We were heartened when Kitchen Sink Press reprinted three-quarters of McCloud’s Zot! run in three nice trade paperbacks in 1997-98, and then disheartened again when KSP went under before finishing up with the fourth volume to collect “Earth Stories,” generally considered McCloud’s best stories. And since then, we’ve mostly just been waiting and hoping, living on crumbs like “Hearts and Minds” and McCloud’s other webcomics.
But now Zot! is back, in something like a definitive form, from one of those real big-time bookstore publishers that the comics field is so in awe of. HarperCollins has been McCloud’s trade publisher as far back as Understanding Comics, so their imprint on this book implies a lot about their commitment to comics, and to McCloud.
But maybe I need to back up a bit, for those of you who weren’t around for the days of Eclipse in the late ‘80s. Zot! was McCloud’s comics debut, starting with a ten-issue storyline in full color in 1984-85 and continuing with twenty-six more issues in black and white starting in 1987. Those color comics are now only available in the first, long-out-of-print, Kitchen Sink trade paperback collection of Zot! from ten years ago, though this book hints that they may be reprinted if Zot! 1987-1991 is successful enough. (And maybe then we’ll get Chuck Austen’s art from two “fill-in” issues from the time of McCloud’s wedding, plus all of Matt Feazell’s “Dimension 10½ “ back-up strips.)
Continue reading Review: 'Zot! 1987-1991' by Scott McCloud ›
Mon Aug 25, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Wonder Woman: Love and Murder' by Jodi Picoult and others
Does it make any sense at all to a new reader?
DC Comics got a lot of press last year when they signed up bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult to write their monthly Wonder Woman series – gallons of ink about her being the first female “regular writer” on the series, and about how this would finally catapult WW into the position DC keeps insisting she already has: a central, iconic figure whose comics people actually buy and read.
Well, more than a year has passed year later, and Picoult’s run turned out to be only five issues long – so much for “regular,” huh? – and also served primarily as set-up for one of the log-jammed line-wide crossovers, Amazons Attack! Picoult’s five issues were gathered into a classy hardcover, suitable for libraries (where I found it, actually) and real bookstores, with her name given huge prominence.
Assuming that the point of making Picoult’s name so large is to draw in the many readers of her novels, or other casual bookstore browsers, it’s fair to ask whether Love and Murder makes sense as a book in its own right, and provides anything like a satisfying experience to those new readers.
I haven’t read any of Picoult’s novels, unfortunately, but I also haven’t ever read Wonder Woman, and I haven’t read a mainstream DC book regularly in a few years – so, with my ignorance wrapped around me like a cloak, I dove in…
Wonder Woman: Love and Murder
Written by Jodi Picoult
Art by Drew Johnson & Ray Snider with Rodney Ramos, Terry Dodson & Rachel Dodson, and Paco Diaz
DC Comics, November 2007, $19.99
Well, the first thing a seasoned comics reader notices is that the art team changes entirely twice during five issues, which is usually a bad, bad sign. Readers coming from the world of prose probably won’t notice that – the three art styles are all minor variations on today’s version of superhero-standard, and the transitions aren’t particularly jarring – but it is a danger sign, implying that something was going on behind the scenes.
And then, before the story actually starts, we get a one-page “Previously in Wonder Woman,” explaining how she killed Maxwell Lord in some other cross-over that we didn’t read and don’t care about, and now she’s pretending to be “Diana Prince” again, working at the Department of Metahuman Affairs with her face-changing partner Tom “Nemesis” Tresser under the literally iron-fisted Sarge Steel. (I’m not sure if we believe that, since Diana has some much trouble with ordinary life later that we doubt she could convincingly fake a history or paper trail to get such an impressive job.) OK, fine, that’s backstory, and we’ll get into a brand new adventure now, right?
Continue reading Review: 'Wonder Woman: Love and Murder' by Jodi Picoult and others ›
Fri Aug 22, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Lawless, Winged, and Unconfined
Three books about people with a little extra something on the shoulderblades
Poking through the stack of manga to be reviewed, earlier this week, I noticed several books featuring characters with wings of one kind or another. Quick to sense a theme, I dragged them together, and here they are:
Koi Cupid, Vol. 1
By Mia Ikumi
Broccoli, April 2008, $9.99
Koi Cupid is an all-ages series about cherubs-in-training – yes, cute little girls in white outfits, running around making people fall in love. It’s not quite as kawaii (cute, often cloyingly so) as it could be, though, so I came to think of Koi Cupid as actually fairly restrained.
(Of course, that’s by manga standards – recalibrate your cuteness detectors from American settings, or you’ll be instantly deafened by the alarm.)
Anyway, the story focuses on three cupids-in-training: Ai, the cheerful one; Koi, the shy one; and Ren, the way-ahead-of-the-others one. They’re taught by a full cupid named Rin, who is deferring her own promotion to Guardian Angel to continue to mentor them. Kou actually is a guardian angel who pops in for added firepower now and then; Sister Yuuri is a winged, talking cat who supervises the cupid training program, and Lizette is a sneaky demon who tries to foil their work, but whom Ai wants to be friends with.
Continue reading Manga Friday: Lawless, Winged, and Unconfined ›
Wed Aug 20, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Red Colored Elegy' by Seiichi Hayashi
A classic gekiga graphic novel from 1971
Red Colored Elegy
By Seiichi Hayashi
Drawn & Quarterly, July 2008, $24.95
Red Colored Elegy is like no other manga you’ve ever seen, a blast of pop art- and film-inspired storytelling from 1971 that was hugely influential to a generation of Japanese youth but has never been published in English until now. It’s like the American underground comics of the same era in being a break from the mainstream comics of its place and era, but unlike them – and unlike anything else I’ve seen before RAW in the ‘80s – in its style and visual language.
Sachiko Yamaguchi and Ichiro Nishimoto are a young couple, both connected to the manga/anime world, living together in Tokyo but unsure of what to do with their lives, in the way of all restless young people everywhere. Ichiro wants to be an artist of some kind: he abandoned painting when he couldn’t make a living at it, and quits an animation job to work on a graphic novel that he can’t sell. Sachiko is a tracer for another animation company; she has only the ambitions of a girl in a story by a man: to get married, to have kids, to run a house, to have a life.
Continue reading Review: 'Red Colored Elegy' by Seiichi Hayashi ›
Mon Aug 18, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Flight, Vol. 5' edited by Kazu Kibuishi
More short comics stories from animators
Flight, Volume Five
Edited by Kazu Kibuishi
Villard/Random House, July 2008, $25.00
As always, the stories in the annual Flight volume are gorgeous and fun, created by a group of artists who worked on storyboards and other art for animated movies, and Flight is easily the most visually diverse of the new breed of mass-market comics anthologies.
But I can’t help but think that most of these stories are square watermelons – the products of creators trained and taught to run their imaginations down narrow channels to produce upbeat, kid-friendly stories with defined beats and clear morals. Nearly every story in Flight 5 could be seen as the treatment for a big-budget “family” animated movie, and many of them feel explicitly like the first scene or two of such a movie. Even once these guys – and all but two of them are guys, which some people may find notable – have been given the freedom of Flight, they continue to tell stories in that one, confined mode, like so many victims of Stockholm syndrome unwilling to leave their own prisons.
The stories are each well-told, but, as they pile up one after another, the number of naïf protagonists learning about the world (often under mortal peril) become just more variations on the same theme. There’s the fox-like world-saver of Michael Gagne’s “The Broken Path,” the anthropomorphic fox-man of Reagan Lodge’s “The Dragon,” the self-consciously ironic Bigdome of Paul Rivoche’s “Flowers for Mama,” Dave Roman’s series of folks who could all be “The Chosen One,” the probably-delusional child Princess of Pluto in Svetlana Chmakova’s “On the Importance of Space Travel,” and – the youngest and most obvious lesson-telling of all of these – boy hero of Richard Pose’s “Beisbol 2.”
Continue reading Review: 'Flight, Vol. 5' edited by Kazu Kibuishi ›
Fri Aug 15, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: The Naughty Bits
Reviews of three books about sex
It’s another one of those weeks when I have to shoo the kids away; this time, Manga Friday looks at three books about sex. (This is all fairly mainstream stuff, not hentai and without any tentacles to be seen. But there are still naked body parts doing their thing, however tastefully.)
What we have this time is three views of sex – one a general guide (in fictional form) for the young and inexperience, and two romances of different genres.
Futari H: Manga Sutra, Vol. 1: Flirtation
By Katsu Aki
Tokyopop, January 2008, $19.99
I think of this as just Manga Sutra, but the title on the cover is Futari H Manga Sutra – and, on the first page, there’s the completely different title Step Up Love Story (which also seems to be the title of the related anime series). To avoid confusion, I’ll just call it Manga Sutra, since that’s what everyone has been and will call it.
This is the story of two very, very sheltered newlyweds – Makoto and Yura Onoda – who had a semi-arranged marriage somewhere in Japan at the age of twenty-five, and who seem to have not even seriously dated anyone before they met each other. Their families, though, are heavily populated with horndogs, and Makoto and Yura are the objects of much unwanted advice. They’re virgins – in the most extreme, literal sense of the word – when they marry, and it takes them about a week to manage to consummate their marriage. Even then, the sex isn’t all that good – Yuka is embarrassed by everything and Makoto has a major problem with premature ejaculation.
Tue Aug 12, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Scout, Vol. 2' by Timothy Truman
Fighting demons in the eco-wrecked near future
Scout, Volume Two
By Timothy Truman
Dynamite Entertainment, July 2008, $19.95
This, as you might have guessed from the title of the book, is the second collection of Tim Truman’s Scout series, originally published over twenty-four issues starting in 1987 from Eclipse Comics. (You young ‘uns won’t know from Eclipse, but they were one of the major “indy” comics companies, back before anybody used that term.) The first Scout collection came out last year, and I reviewed it then.
To recap: Scout is set in a world of the worst fears of mid-‘80s liberals: global warming ran riot, turning most of the US into a desert; the US government collapsed into corporate fascism; the US economy basically dried up and blew away; and everything generally went to hell. It also went to hell really, really quickly, since Scout starts in 1999, only twelve years after it was originally published. By the beginning of this volume – the eighth issue and the start of a new plotline – it’s possibly a year later than that, but everything is still horrible, and getting even worse. (It’s one of those post-apocalypse settings in which regular people, like you and me, seem to have all died off quietly, without even leaving rotting corpses or giant piles of bones behind, so that the tough survivalist types can battle it out over the scarce resources left.)
But Scout’s world is different from our own in other ways: it’s not really a science-fictional world, despite being set in the near future. Various kinds of magic and mysticism really do work, and our hero, former Army Ranger Emanuel Santana, is explicitly on a mission to destroy a series of legendary monsters that are behind the USA’s troubles. (The first storyline was called “The Four Monsters;” in that, he tracked down and killed four monsters from Apache mythology, all masquerading as powerful humans. At the beginning of this volume, his spirit guide – a talking prairie dog called Gahn – leads Santana to the next monster, which is a part of him.)
Continue reading Review: 'Scout, Vol. 2' by Timothy Truman ›
Mon Aug 11, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'The Fart Party' by Julia Wertz
From a webcomic about one girl's life
The Fart Party
By Julia Wertz
Atomic Book Company, May 2008, $13.95
Julia Wertz’s comics would be terribly juvenile if they weren’t wonderfully juvenile – little snippets of life from a young woman in San Francisco, obsessed with beer, cheese, bicycles and comics. (Not to mention the occasional outburst of cartoony violence.)
Wertz has been posting her autobiographical comics at www.fartparty.org for nearly three years now, with occasional published-on-actual-paper minicomics as well, but this is the first collection that sits comfortably on a shelf. It seems to collect roughly the first year of the online strips, when Wertz was living in San Francisco with her boyfriend, Oliver, though the book itself doesn’t say that, or have dates on any of the strips. (Wertz’s life has changed a bit since the time of these strips; she’s currently ensconced in Darkest Brooklyn.) The strips here do form something of an arc, and have a natural ending, which is rare for any collection of regularly published comics, from the web or anywhere else.
Wertz’s style is simple and cartoony, but springs out full-formed from the beginning of the book with all its rubber-armed, pointy-eyed, casually-violent energy. Wertz does include a couple of strips she created earlier, in a more conventionally “realistic” style. But she buries those strips in the middle of the book, and they’re definitely less distinctive than her current style. I’m sure the fine-art brigade will hate her work – as will the good-taste brigade, which is similar but not identical to the first brigade – but she’s a real cartoonist, and that’s something to be celebrated. There’s still room for improvement in her style; her faces are only intermittently expressive at this point, and the figures’ body language tends to huge, stagy gestures even when those aren’t appropriate.
Fri Aug 8, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Here We Go Again
Returning to the scene of previous reviews
This time around I have a volume two, a volume three, and a volume four – all in series that I’ve read at least some of the earlier books. Let’s see if I can still remember what went before – since manga often don’t have “who the heck are these people and what are they doing” pages – and whether they’re getting more or less interesting.
Kaze No Hana, Vol. 2
By Ushio Mizta and Akiyoshi Ohta
Yen Press, August 2008, $10.99
This is the series about an amnesiac teenage girl, Momoka, who is part of a family that wields magical swords to drive monsters away and protect their city. I reviewed the first volume in April, and had to admit then that there were too many characters with too few faces for me to keep them all straight.
Well, this time, we get even more characters, including another sword-wielding family that likes the monsters and wants to see them take over the earth or rampage through Tokyo or do whatever it is these particular monsters would do. Their leader is the cute girl Kurohime – and the only thing more dangerous than an old man in a Hong Kong movie is a cute girl in manga – and they have “sacred swords,” which are utterly different from the heroes’ “spiritual swords” in ways that perhaps don’t entirely translate well.
Fri Aug 1, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Who Are You?
Three books where things aren't who they seem
This week we’ll be looking at three books with main characters who look like one thing, but are something else.
Nephilim, Vol. 1
By Anna Hanamaki
Aurora, May 2008, $10.95
On a continent with the unlikely name of Elwestland, two political powers – with the is-it-quitting-time-on-Friday-already? names of “The Empire” and “The Federation” – are in a long cold war, having split the land right down the middle. Oh, no, wait! There’s also a nearly impassable jungle right in that middle, conveniently separating the Empire from the Federation. And in that jungle live the mysterious, nomadic Nephilim.
Nephilim appear in one form by day and another by night – this may simply be swapping gender, but the text of the book doesn’t quite say that – and their night-form is the true one. (They’re fertile in that form, among other things.) But if an outsider sees a Nephilim in his/her true form – possibly only if the Nephilim is naked, but that doesn’t seem to be the important bit – The Curse declares that Nephilim must kill that outsider personally, or start to die slowly.
And our plot begins when the dashing Imperial soldier Colonel Sir Guyfeis S. Northenfield, who is also a top bounty hunter, a master of unarmed combat, and probably a deft hand at Parcheesi, too, is charging through that not-nearly-impassable-enough jungle on a mission to retrieve the fair Lady Lia, who has been kidnapped by perfidious Federal agents. He avoids or kills Federals by day, and has a quick run-in with a wandering Nephilim named Abel. (Rolling a fifteen or higher on the Random Encounter table, clearly.) That night, Abel is bathing in a stream, so Guy sneaks up to catch an eyeful – either unaware of the curse, secretly hot for the cute boy he thought Abel was, or just terminally nosy. He discovers Abel is “truly” (by night, at least) female, and she then tries, very badly, to kill him.
Thu Jul 31, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Slow Storm' by Danica Novgorodoff
A firefighter and a stableboy meet in Kentucky tornado season
Slow Storm
By Danica Novgorodoff
First Second, September 2008, $19.95
This is Novgorodoff’s first full-length graphic novel; she was an Eisner nominee last year for the one-shot A Late Freeze. She’s got an assured, pseudo-outsider art style, with big blocks of color and slablike faces, but her writing isn’t quite up to the same level yet. Slow Storm will be in stores in September, but comics stores and online retailers are, as always, already taking pre-orders.
Ursa Crain is a firefighter in Kentucky’s rural Oldham County who has a very confrontational, unpleasant relationship with her brother and coworker, the very thuddingly named Grim. (What kind of family names their two kids Ursa and Grim, anyway? Did they know their kids would be characters in a story with heavy symbolism?) These two siblings clearly don’t get along, but we don’t know why – and their sniping and digs don’t give us much of a clue. Grim also complains that his sister “looks like a moose,” as if he wants her to increase her sexual attractiveness – which doesn’t sound like any brother-sister relationship I know. (Particularly since the other firefighters – the ones not related to her – are already sexually harassing Ursa in their mild, Southern, good-ol-boy way.)
Rafael Jose Herrera Sifuentes (Rafi) is a stableboy from Mexico, living in Kentucky illegally upstairs in the stable where he works. He comes from horse country himself, but he could only live hand-to-mouth there, and so he got himself smuggled into the US to be able to send money back to his family. He had the usual bad experiences on the way – robbed by the coyotes taking him over the border, shot at by a racist rancher – and somehow settled into this Kentucky stable.
Continue reading Review: 'Slow Storm' by Danica Novgorodoff ›
Tue Jul 29, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'The Country Nurse' by Jeff Lemire
The Essex County Trilogy comes to an almost-happy ending
Essex County Vol. 3: The Country Nurse
By Jeff Lemire
Top Shelf, October 2008, $9.95
The finale of the “Essex County” trilogy – which will be available in October, so start saving your pennies now – draws together the first two graphic novels in the series, but at the expense of not being as coherent as a story itself. It has two main plot threads – one set in the modern day, following the nurse of the title, and one in 1917.
The modern plot is similar to the frame story of the second volume, Ghost Stories
The other plot starts off about young Lawrence Lebeuf, a twelve-year-old orphan at an isolated orphanage deep in the woods. (Was it really common to have orphanages out in the middle of nowhere, staffed only by a nun and a caretaker? I guess it exemplifies “out of sight, out of mind.”) The orphanage is run by Sister Margaret, and the caretaker is a scruffy man named Charles Gerrard. Lawrence is something of a protégé of Charles’s; he’s the oldest of the orphans and Charles talks to him quite a bit about what he should do when he soon leaves the orphanage.
Continue reading Review: 'The Country Nurse' by Jeff Lemire ›
Mon Jul 28, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Swallow Me Whole" by Nate Powell
Insects and obsessive teenagers in the American South
Swallow Me Whole
By Nate Powell
Top Shelf, September 2008, $19.95
Ruth and Perry are stepsiblings, somewhere in the South – people say “shoore” for “sure,” biology teachers can’t even say the word "evolution," and the kids’ slowly-dying, live-in grandmother is called “Memaw.” It also seems to be sometime in the late ‘80s, from the clothes and the music and the hair.
And they’re both – how should I put this? Oh, let’s use the jargon – both are very far from neurotypical. Perry hallucinates a tiny wizard who makes him draw incessantly for “missions.” And Ruth may even be schizophrenic: she hears voices and feels patterns in everything around her, particularly with insect swarms. She has a huge collection of insects in jars in her room; she’s stolen at least some of them from school, but it’s not clear where they all came from. When she finally has a break at school and is taken to the nurse’s office, the school cop immediately assumes she’s high and starts loudly questioning her about drugs – she doesn’t get diagnosed has obsessive-compulsive for several days.
Swallow Me Whole is a slow, swirling, uneasy book, centered mostly on Ruth and her efforts to live in the world – talking to her Memaw, getting a work-study job at the museum, trying not to be swallowed up by the massive swarms of insects that comfort her and that may, or may not, be real. (Don’t decide either way until you get to the end.) It begins with a few short scenes set about five years earlier, when Ruth and Perry are both pre-teens and Memaw’s hospitalization ends with her moving in with them and their parents. From there, it’s hard to say how much time Swallow Me Whole covers, since there are no external markers. They go to school but we don’t see school begin or end for the summer. We don’t see the seasons change. Scenes could be separated by a day or three months. It’s all now; it’s all happening, like life, one thing after another after another.
Continue reading Review: 'Swallow Me Whole" by Nate Powell ›
Fri Jul 25, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: 'Me and the Devil Blues'
A big book about the life of Robert Johnson
It’s unofficially been Blues & Jazz week here in my reviews – and, if you’re wondering how Erotic Comics
Me and the Devil Blues, Vol. 1
By Akira Hiaramoto
Del Rey Manga, July 2008, $19.95
If you know anything about Robert Johnson – the archetypal bluesman, who came out of nowhere to record 24 songs and then die young – it’s that he sold his soul to the devil, one night at a Mississippi crossroads, to get his amazing ability to play and sing. Is it true? Well, it’s a damn good story, and that’s what matters most.
Speaking of damn good stories, Akira Hiramoto weaves one here, drawing from the legends and few known facts of Johnson’s life and bringing in careful research on the rural Mississippi of the ‘30s, plus his own speculation and fiction. In a life as full of holes and mysteries as Johnson’s, the only way to tell a story is to make it up.
Hiramoto starts his story in 1929 with a young man called RJ, who works on a plantation, dreams of becoming a bluesman (though he’s not very good at singing or guitar playing), is harried by his domineering sister Bessie, and loved by his pregnant wife Virginia. He sneaks off to the local juke joint just about every night, to drink, talk with his friends, and hear the blues. He keeps trying to play, but never gets far – he really is lousy. The traveling bluesman Son House tries to explain to RJ what the blues is, but RJ doesn’t quite get it.
