Articles by andrew-wheeler
Wed Jul 23, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Erotic Comics' by Tim Pilcher
A history of the stuff sold under the counter
Erotic Comics: A Graphic History from Tijuana Bibles to Underground Comics
By Tim Pilcher with Gene Kannenberg, Jr.
Abrams, March 2008, $29.95
We’ve reached an interesting point in modern culture, when even something as disposable and downmarket as sexy comic books can be the subject of a classy art book from a major publisher. Abrams is about as respectable an art-book publisher as you could find; they’re the official book imprint of both the Whitney and Guggenheim museums. And they’re also the publisher of Erotic Comics, a well-crafted and thoroughly conventional art book with lots of pictures of comics panels featuring people at least half-naked – if not actively engaged in various lascivious acts.
Erotic Comics is, except for the smutty pictures, an absolutely standard coffee-table book – printed at a large but comfortable size, not too expensive, with several color reproductions on each spread, occasional background images as well, helpful, detailed captions, and a body text that’s thin beer but perfectly acceptable. It makes no sweeping claims for the field of erotic comics, and is content mostly to show some pictures and retell the same old stories about the men who drew them.
Tue Jul 22, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Bluesman' by Vollmar & Callejo
Twelve bars of sorrow and dread in the Mississippi Delta
Bluesman
By Rob Vollmar and Pablo G. Callejo
NBM, August 2008, $24.95
Bluesman was published once before, as three album-sized collections, but this is the first time the entire story has been collected between two covers. It’s a moody tale, told in black and white – but mostly in grays, from the background to the characters.
Lem Taylor is a blues guitarist, wandering through the rural Mississippi Delta in the late ‘20s, hungry and foot-sore. With him is a blues pianist, Ironwood Malcott, and together they make some excellent music. But that doesn’t put food in their bellies half the time, let alone a roof over the heads and a bed at night more than every so often.
As the book begins, their luck is beginning to look up: they get a decent gig at a popular juke house called Shug’s and are invited up to Memphis to record some sides by J.L. Dougherty, a traveling salesman who also acts as a talent scout.
Fri Jul 18, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: High School!
Three books about the best/worst time of our lives
Ah, high school! The greatest time of our lives, right? The time when we all were either on the student council or locked in a life-or-death struggle with the evil student council, when we harnessed powerful robots to save the world, and when the most attractive member of whatever gender we fancied suddenly fell into our laps.
What? High school wasn’t like that for you? You should have been smart enough to go to a manga high school…
Kujibiki Unbalance, Vol. 1
Story by Kio Shimoku; Art by Koume Keito
Del Rey Manga, July 2008, $10.95
It would be very unfair of me to pick on Kujibiki Unbalance for being silly, since it’s whole purpose is to be silly: it’s the fictional manga series beloved by the main characters of another manga series, Genshiken. As such, it was designed to be full of clichés and way over the top. But being less than serious doesn’t keep Kujibiki from being a lot of fun.
Chihiro is the nebbishy hero – he’s had bad luck his entire life, and is otherwise the epitome of the plucky but downtrodden shonen shlub. That all changed when he was chosen in a lottery to attend the ultra-prestigious and powerful Rikkyoin High School…and then learned that everything at Rikkyoin is determined by lottery.
He’s quickly chosen as student council president, with his long-time platonic best friend (and source of a whole lot of panty shots) Tokino as his VP. The secretary is a cold, bossy, super-genius named Renko, who’s been at Rikkyoin since kindergarten and is always accompanied her her home-made super-robot slave Kaoruko. And the treasurer – well, that’s what the first story is about: finding the treasurer so that the whole new council can go present themselves to the outgoing council.
Thu Jul 17, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: New 'Fables' & 'Jack of Fables' Volumes
On Good & Bad Princes
Fables is one of the big successes of the current version of the Vertigo line, where every book has a Hollywood-style high concept: all males on Earth are killed – except one!; New York’s mayor can talk to machines!; Refugee fairytales live in the modern world! And, in another Hollywood-esque twist, Fables even has a spin-off of its own, like Diff'rent Strokes
Last month, both the parent and spin-off series had new collections, with titles that implied a connection. So let’s look at the two of those books together:
Fables, Vol. 10: The Good Prince
By Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, and others
DC Comics, June 2008, $17.99
Fables, as you might know, is a series in which all of the folkloric and fairy-tale characters that you’ve ever heard of are real, and originally lived in an array of alternate worlds. But “the Adversary” – whose identity was revealed a few volumes ago – led huge goblin armies to conquer nearly all of those worlds, sending a few (but mostly very well-known) Fables to our world, to live in secrecy in an enclave in New York City.
More recently, the cold war with the Adversary is beginning to heat up, with Fabletown’s leadership striking alliances with the “Cloud Kingdoms” (you know, where the beanstalk led?) and with the as-yet-unconquered world of the Arabian Knights. (There’s also an unsubtle parallel between Fabletown and Israel that Willingham is a bit too fond of.) As we hit this tenth volume, we know that the Adversary is building for a major attack three years from now, and the characters of Fables learn that quickly as well.
The last storyline, Sons of Empire, served to ratchet up tension, but The Good Prince goes the other way; Flycatcher – Prince Ambrose, the Frog Prince – has finally regained his memory, and is grieving over the loss of his family centuries before. But Red Riding Hood goads him out of his misery, and he rushes off to get fighting lessons from Boy Blue.
Continue reading Review: New 'Fables' & 'Jack of Fables' Volumes ›
Wed Jul 16, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: Three Kids' Books
Robots, escape artists, and invisible men
To make up for Manga Friday being so “adult” and off-limits to kids lately, how about some reviews of books that are made for kids? Here are three very different ones – two of ‘em are even “educational!”
Robot Dreams
By Sara Varon
First Second, September 2007, $16.95
But let’s start off with a book with no particular pretensions of teaching anyone anything – it’s just the story of the friendship between a dog and his robot. Robot Dreams is a wordless graphic novel by Sara Varon, whose Chicken and Cat
Robot Dreams is set in the kind of world where there are some real people, and some anthropomorphic people – dogs, cats, raccoons, elephants – and nobody ever notices. Dog lives in a city, and sends away for a robot kit. It arrives, and he builds himself a new friend.
They are briefly the best of friends, until a trip to the beach for Labor Day. Robot goes in the water, and then rusts solid on his towel on the beach. Dog can’t move him, and has to leave. And, when Dog comes back a few days later – with a repair manual and some tools – the beach is closed for the winter, with barbed wire on top of a tall fence.
Mon Jul 14, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'The ACME Novelty Date Book, Vol. 2' by Chris Ware
One cartoonist's mostly self-lacerating sketchbook
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The ACME Novelty Date Book, Vol. 2
By Chris Ware
Drawn & Quarterly, December 2007, $39.95
In typical Chris Ware fashion, this is an attractively (and extensively) packaged book – so much so, in fact, that what this book precisely is isn’t immediately clear. Is it some kind of notebook, journal, or calendar, perhaps? No, it’s Ware’s sketchbook, or perhaps selected pages from that sketchbook, from the years in the title.
Drawn & Quarterly published the first volume of the “ACME Novelty Date Book” in 2003, which included sketchbook pages from 1986 through 1995. That book covered most of Ware’s twenties, starting when he was in college in Austin, Texas and following him forward as he developed the early ACME characters and themes. That first book also had a wide variety of materials; Ware was young and trying out different art styles, but he’d mostly settled down into his current mode by 1995.
So Vol. 2, as Ware mentions himself partway through it, is mostly made up of three kinds of entries: drawings from life, journal entries, and some short comics strips (mostly autobiographical). There are also some sketches and ideas for ACME Novelty Library, and the occasional joke or reference to older comics, but, mostly, it’s those big three.
Continue reading Review: 'The ACME Novelty Date Book, Vol. 2' by Chris Ware ›
Fri Jul 11, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Stories for Girls, But Not About Getting Boys
Four shojo comics that aren't about dating
Half by accident, I realized my manga reading this week included four shojo books – for girls – but that none of them were about dating, boys, or relationships. That’s probably not as unlikely as I think it is, but it’s my theme for the week, and I’m running with it. (Think of it as a nod to Alison Bechdel’s Movie Rule.)
Sunshine Sketch, Vol. 1
By Ume Aoki
Yen Press, June 2008, $10.99
Sunshine Sketch is mostly in 4-panel style, though it doesn’t seem to be primarily a gag strip. (Or, at least, if there were supposed to be jokes in each strip, most of them sailed over my head.) The beginning of each section is generally in a more standard page layout, though – and there’s an eight-page color section in the front, for any readers who need to ease into black and white slowly, like a cold pool.
Yuno is a first-year high school student, moving into an apartment complex near her prestigious arts-focused school and quickly becoming friends with her three housemates: Miya, Sae, and Hiro. (And once again I have to wonder – is it really common in Japan for thirteen and fourteen-year-olds to live on their own in apartments when they go to high school? Or is this an accepted fictional trope, something that happens a little bit in life – like a few Americans go to elite boarding schools like Choate – but happens a lot more in fiction?)
Continue reading Manga Friday: Stories for Girls, But Not About Getting Boys ›
Wed Jul 9, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Ordinary Victories: What is Precious' by Manu Larcenet
Semi-autobio stories about a French photographer
Ordinary Victories: What is Precious
By Manu Larcenet
NBM/ComicsLit, August 2008, $15.95
Ordinary Victories, in France, is a series of four graphic novels about a photographer named Marco Louis. They’ve been very successful, selling hundreds of thousands of copies of each book. But those books are each only about sixty pages long, so they’ve been combined for the American market. This volume contains the second half of the series: volume 3, “What Is Precious,” and volume 4, “Hammering Nails.”
Continue reading Review: 'Ordinary Victories: What is Precious' by Manu Larcenet ›
Tue Jul 8, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Skyscrapers of the Midwest' by Joshua W. Cotter
Anthropomorphic people and giant robots
Skyscrapers of the Midwest
By Joshua W. Cotter
AdHouse Books, June 2008, $19.95
If Chris Ware were a few years younger, grew up in a more religious household, and had less of an obsession with comics formalism, he just might have become Joshua Cotter. Or maybe that’s just me being flippant – it isn’t really fair to Cotter; his work covers some of the same emotional terrain as Ware’s, but is otherwise very different.
Continue reading Review: 'Skyscrapers of the Midwest' by Joshua W. Cotter ›
Mon Jul 7, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'PvP Vol. 5: PvP Treks On' by Scott Kurtz
The fifth collection of the popular webcomic
PvP Vol. 5: PvP Treks On
By Scott Kurtz
Image, June 2008, $14.99
Image is a comic-book publisher, and sees everything through that lens. So, for them, this is a book “collecting issues 25-31 of the hit comic strip series,” as the cover proclaims. For most of us, though, PvP (http://www.pvponline.com/) is a daily comic strip on the web, so what’s important is that Treks On collects strips from June 12, 2005 through April 9, 2006. (Possibly not all of them, since several seem to be added at the beginning and others are missing at the end – and there were some duplicates in the middle, too – but most of them, at least.)
Continue reading Review: 'PvP Vol. 5: PvP Treks On' by Scott Kurtz ›
Sat Jul 5, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Lobster Johnson, Vol. 1' by Mike Mignola and Jason Armstrong
Two-clawed adventure on the eve of WWII
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Lobster Johnson, Vol. 1: The Iron Prometheus
By Mike Mignolla and Jason Armstrong
Dark Horse, June 2008, $17.95
Lobster Johnson is the mystery man of the Hellboy
So here we finally get Lobster Johnson’s own story…in which he’s a mysterious, pulpish hero in 1937 New York who punches a whole bunch of evil things. The Lobster does have a secret lair, which gets some on-page time, and a group of Doc Savage-esque helpers – but we still don’t know who the Lobster is, why he fights evil, or even the point of his lobster-claw emblem.
On the other hand, we do get a vril-powered (look up your Edward Bulwer-Lytton) super-suit; its wearer, ex-lab assistant Jim Sacks; his kidnapped scientist employer Kyriakos Gallaragas; and the doctor’s requisite lovely daughter Helena, also kidnapped. Not to mention their kidnapper, an evil Asiatic villain.
(Said villain looks very familiar from other Hellboy stories, but he’s not named here, so I’ll leave it at that.)
Continue reading Review: 'Lobster Johnson, Vol. 1' by Mike Mignola and Jason Armstrong ›
Fri Jul 4, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Honey and Clover
Two volumes of manga and a live-action film
Manga Friday tackles the thorny question of book-to-movie adaptations head-on this week, by comparing and contrasting the first two volumes of the Honey and Clover manga with the movie of the same name – which was adapted from the manga story.
Honey and Clover, Vol. 1
By Chica Umino
Viz/Shojo Beat, March 2008, $8.99
Honey and Clover, I am told, is one of the most popular shojo manga series in Japan in recent years, selling (in aggregate) over ten million copies so far. It focuses on a group of students at a Tokyo art school – in particular, on their love lives.
Now, no series about simple love-lives will last very long, and Honey and Clover ended its run in Japan a couple of years ago with more than sixty chapters, so you things are going to get complicated. But I’ll start out slow.
Our central character is Takamoto, a sophomore in a painting program who lives in an apartment building near campus – it doesn’t seem to officially a dorm, but it’s rented essentially only to male students. Two of his neighbors are also close friends – Mayama, a studious senior on his way to be an architect; and Morita, a seventh-year sculpture student given to long absences and odd behavior.
They’re all somewhat connected to Professor Hanamoto, and, in the first story in the first volume, the boys need a new student – Hagumi, a young, very small woman living with Hanamoto (who is an unofficial uncle to her) and who has immense talents. Both Takamoto and Morita fall in love with her at first sight, but Morita also torments her by calling her “koropokkur” (after a fairy-like spirit) and making all sorts of photographs and other objects of her koropokkur-ness.
Tue Jul 1, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Prince of Persia: The Graphic Novel'
In between the game and the movie
Prince of Persia: The Graphic Novel
By Jordan Mechner, A.B. Sina, LeUyen Pham, and Alex Puvilland
First Second, September 2008, $18.95
The first Prince of Persia game was a 2-D platformer almost twenty years ago, and the next big thing with the name Prince of Persia on it will be a major Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movie next summer. In between have been a number of games, with a number of different protagonists and plotlines. (And I’ve played exactly none of them, as far as I can remember – just to make that clear.) This year, in between the games and the movie, First Second is publishing a graphic novel loosely based on the series – or at least the title. It’ll be in stores in September.
This graphic novel is credited as “created” by Mechner (seemingly because he invented the original game, and maybe still owns a piece of it), written by Sina, and with art by Pham and Puvilland. And, as far as I can tell, the story here has nothing specific to do with any of the previous incarnations of Prince of Persia. (If I’m wrong, please correct me in comments.)
In this graphic novel, you actually get two stories for the price of one – they’re told intermingled, though, which can make it difficult to remember which story a particular panel belongs to, or which characters belong to which stories. (Evil, nasty overlords being depressingly common in stories like this, for example.) I did read Prince of Persia in bound galley form, though – without color – so it’s quite possible that the palette of the two stories are different enough to make that distinction clear in the final book.
Continue reading Review: 'Prince of Persia: The Graphic Novel' ›
Mon Jun 30, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Superpowers' by David J. Schwartz
A new novel about a superhero team from Madison, Wisconsin
Superpowers: A Novel
By David J. Schwartz
Crown, June 2008, $14.95
There are two kinds of superhero novels, with very different rules. The more common – but less respected – kind of superhero novel takes characters and situations we already know from an existing comics universe and tells a story using that furniture. Those books can be amazing, like Elliott S. Maggin’s two Superman novels, Last Son of Krypton
The other kind of superhero novel tends to come from people outside the comics field, and usually reinvents the wheel in its vision of superheroics. (Like everything else, sometimes doing it elegantly and sometimes producing an oval object that doesn’t even work as a wheel.) Some of the better examples of that type of superhero novel are Michael Bishop’s Count Geiger's Blues
Superpowers is one of the latter kind of novels, down to the title. The British cover (see the continuation) even has line drawings of the characters in costume (by Norm Breyfogle, a name we who read comics will nod knowingly at), much in the style of last year’s Soon I Will Be Invincible. And the set-up is quite typical of an outsider superhero novel: five undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) develop individual superpowers after an evening of drinking homemade beer. (One of the endearing things about Superpowers is that Schwartz doesn’t even try to explain their origin – something unexpected happened, and they now have powers. Period.)
Continue reading Review: 'Superpowers' by David J. Schwartz ›
Fri Jun 27, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Girls and Boys, Boys and Boys
Into the worlds of redikomi and yaoi
This week's "Manga Friday" features titles from two Aurora imprints that are for adults only. I'll try to keep the review itself safe for somewhat younger readers, but, if you're twelve or so, picture me shaking my finger sternly at you and saying you should move on to something more age-appropriate.
Next week should see Manga Friday return to a variety mix, so you kids can come back then.
Most of the manga that get translated for the US market are either shonen (boys’ comics, like Naruto
But there are also seinen (stories for “men” – mostly in their twenties – like Lone Wolf and Cub
(My initial plan was to review two redikomi – books about boy-girl romances, with some tasteful sex – and then two yaoi – boy-boy romance stories for a female audience. But I only managed to get through one yaoi book, so there are only three reviews here this week.)
Love for Dessert
By Hana Aoi
Aurora/Luv Luv, May 2008, $10.95
Love for Dessert has six stories, all with a (sometimes very loose) food theme – the title story sets the tone. Koyama is a young woman who’s just gotten a full-time job at a big ad agency, working for a tough young boss, Kuze.
She’s also been befriended by “Morimoto from Sales,” who indulges her sweet tooth, and eventually (once the big rush job, which has been causing agida and getting Koyama behind, even after lots and lots of overtime, is done) gets her drunk and tries to seduce her.
Continue reading Manga Friday: Girls and Boys, Boys and Boys ›
