Author: Andrew Wheeler

I feel bad picking on Jon Sable. He’s a favorite of the ComicMix team, and they’ve been very nice to me over the years. In fact, the book I have here is a limited edition for Baltimore Comic-Con 2008 — number 96 of 100. [1] It makes me wish I liked it better.

But we can’t choose to like things, can we? I’ve never been any good at that. (I read four Jon Sable collections two years ago, which I was not able to choose to like, and buried my thoughts about them in a belated round-up post .)

Jon Sable Freelance: Ashes of Eden was a new story about the ex-big-game-hunter turned freelance security expert and bestselling kids-book writer, appearing on the ComicMix site before being collected into book form a decade ago. (That was a model that had a lot of promise in those days. And people do buy books of comics that appear online first, it’s just that they only seem to buy them if the books and comics can creditably claim to be self-published.)

Ashes of Eden has got some big-white-hunter stuff — you have to expect that with Jon Sable Freelance; it’s baked into his origin as deeply as possible — but I didn’t find it particularly racist, maybe because this story takes place mostly in the US. It’s a bit sexist, but if we’re going to complain about that in mainstream comics we’ll be here all day.

Jon is hired to guard a fabulous diamond and a fabulous dame, both coming from South Africa to NYC for an auction. (The dame is going to MC the auction, more or less.) The diamond is massive, and is expected to be world-famous once it’s cut. The dame is a fictional Iraqi version of Sharbat Gula , somewhere in her mid-20s and oozing sex and neediness the way such women always do in stories about tough gun-slinging men told by other men. There are, of course, nefarious forces that want to hijack the diamond, which is why it needs guarding. The dame — I might as well give her her name: Bashira — needs guarding because she’s the kind of recovering addict who has no self-control but looks absolutely perfect at all times. (She’s addicted to drugs, obviously. Grell also makes the obvious hints that she’s addicted to sex and danger, as all such fictional women must be.)

Jon gets Bashira and what’s eventually called The Maguffin Diamond to the auction, where of course further nefarious actions happen. Some of them are the obvious ones, and some of them are slightly less obvious. Jon’s old nemesis/lover Maggie the Cat — the obligatory gorgeous female cat burglar — also becomes involved, hint hint nudge nudge.

And, yes, in the end Jon saves those worth saving and kills the rest. That’s what he does. He has a confusing dream sequence along the way, in which the spirit of death (in the form of a sexy mostly naked African woman, of course) runs him through the kind of breakthroughs that usually costs a few thousand dollars and takes several years in therapy.

I find it difficult to take Jon Sable Freelance seriously; if he were anything like real, he would have been dead a hundred times by now. Luckily for those who enjoy reading his exploits, he is nothing like real. Grell tells a good adventure story in the standard style, and draws it equally well — especially the many, many naked women who stalk and lounge around these pages.

[1] The cover at right is completely different from the book in front of me — it even has different styles for the “Jon Sable Freelance” and “Ashes of Eden” logos. But the one shown here is the book you could find if you looked for it, and it’s the one that exists online, so it’s the picture you get.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

There are a lot of quirky comics out there — and the point of quirkiness is that isn’t not for everyone. Any particular quirk will only appear to a particular subset of readers. And even someone who, like me, thinks he’s fond of quirk in general can find a particular instance just doesn’t work.

I wanted to like Strangehaven: Brotherhood . I love the story behind it: how creator Gary Spencer Millidge did all the work himself, writing and drawing, and how it was deeply English and full of his influences and ideas. I appreciate the fact that it’s exactly the comic he wanted to make, influenced most obviously by The Prisoner and Twin Peaks but to a lesser degree by a host of very specifically British works. I admire the fact that he worked on it for so long, telling just the story he wants to tell.

And the set-up is intriguing, too: Alex, a middle-aged Londoner with a broken marriage behind him, goes on a vacation in the West Country, has an ambiguously ghostly encounter, and ends up stuck in the small town of Strangehaven, full of colorful characters and odd secrets.

(Although, parenthetically, I would personally loathe every second of that — being stuck somewhere I don’t want to be, loads of chatty people who won’t shut up, barely any mod cons, and the most exciting thing to do is walk around a bunch of grass and hills.)

Brotherhood is the second Strangehaven collection, but Millidge has a thoughtful introduction from Alex’s point of view that brings the reader up to speed, and, even more importantly, explains who the characters are with pictures. (Another reason I wanted to like this: Millidge is doing it all right.)

But…you knew there was a “but,” right?

I didn’t much like Alex, and, as I said just above, my personal reaction to “stuck in a somewhat supernatural way in a small town of quirky people” would be to burn the whole fucking thing down with cleansing fire until the bastard town let me out. So I was not so much in sympathy with his point of view as I might have been.

This is a talky comic, and I found it a chore to read a lot of the time — only a scene where Basil Fawlty talks, from the TV screen, directly to a character really sang for me. (That was laugh-out-loud funny, I’ll admit. I expect more things here are equally funny to actual British people.) Millidge also has a very heavily photo-referenced art style, particularly for people, and that struck me as fussy.

I guess “fussy” is the one word that hits me about Strangehaven. It felt like one of those claustrophobic rooms where an old person has been collecting bric-a-brac for fifty years, and then the old bag decides to tell you about every last piece of it.

There are certainly American readers who will love — or already have loved — Strangehaven. You yourself may even be one of them. But it didn’t work very well for me, which means I’m not nearly as much of an Anglophile as I think I am.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

America is more Christian than a lot of the rest of the world realizes. It’s not just a right-wing thing, either — the King James Bible is as central to the language of the USA as our Constitution is, and the question of what church someone belongs to [1] is important in hard-to-describe ways across a lot of this country.

It shouldn’t be a surprise: most of the founding myths of the USA boil down to “Those People wouldn’t let us do our weird Christian sect the way we wanted to, so we got the hell out of there and started in a new land, where We could be the ones oppressing everyone else.” That got baked in early, and deeply. It’s not a Christian country, officially — because, when it was founded, trying to pick a flavor of Christianity would have torn the nascent country apart — but it’s a country dominated by Christianity in a million flavors…though most of them these days are much more sure that a rich man will get into heaven than that a camel can pass through the eye of a needle.

Thus Gilbert Hernandez’s bizarre biblical sex-fest Garden of the Flesh . Thus R. Crumb’s textually rigorous Book of Genesis . And, more than a decade before either of them, Kyle Baker’s 2002 graphic novel King David.

As is typical for major comics-makers turning to biblical matters, King David is weird. It’s from that era where Baker was shifting from making comics that looked traditional — ink on paper, in separate boxes drawn on a page, and then colored by someone else — into a more painted look that I think was mostly done electronically, and looks like the images might have been created separately and later assembled into pages. (Baker, then and now, had tremendous chops, so it’s not easy for my eye to be clear on what tools he used to do whichever particularly impressive thing. ) That’s not particularly weird, though.

How about this? King David is presented in a format more like a picture book than a comic: large pieces of art arrayed on the page in loose layouts, with text floating around them (often in very large passages) in a fussy italic font. There are a lot of words to read here, and a text that does not make that easy.

OK, and what about the tone? King David bounces back-and-forth from a relatively respectful style that echoes some Jacobean language without trying to sound Olde Englishe to snippy, snappy dialogue that would be more at home in Baker’s What I Hate About Saturn. That’s pretty weird, too.

For those of us brought up at least nominally Christian in America, most of King David will be familiar — it’s telling us a story we know, with a uniquely Bakeresque twist. (I have no idea how any biblical story plays out to someone unfamiliar with it, but at least this part of the Bible is relatively light on random massacres, plagues, and general horrible Bronze Age morality.) We start out with David as a cute kid, and see him first soothe the crazed King Saul, and then battle Goliath. The wars with the Philistines go on, and David grows into a popular hero, which of course does not sit well with paranoid, still-crazy Saul. Eventually, David becomes King, and we see him fall himself at the very end, cause the death of Uriah the Hittite so that he can take Uriah’s wife Bathsheba for his own.

Baker calls out some of the problematic material in that occasional snarky tone — the ancient Israelites were much more fond of one rich guy having a lot of wives than we are, for example — but the religion at the core of it is taken seriously. I don’t know what Baker believes, or what he did believe in 2002, but this is a book about faith in God and doing the right thing. None of the showy miracles come in, so it’s all people talking about faith in God and doing the right thing, but they firmly believe it, and Baker presents that belief honestly.

Again, this is a biblical comic by a serious comic-maker, which means it’s weird: it’s neither a proselytizing work nor one that mocks religion, but nods in both directions alternately, and occasionally simultaneously. It may be the quirkiest work in Baker’s career, which is saying something about the creator of Special Forces .

[1] Or, in the case of the lapsed or strayed, would have belonged to or used to belong to. Cultural markers aren’t removed that easily.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

This is not a graphic novel. It’s not even graphic non-fiction in a narrative form. It’s related to Lynda Barry’s last few books, What It Is and Picture This , but it’s less conventional and concerned with telling a story than those two books were.

Luckily, it has a title that tells us what it is: Syllabus .

Barry has taught courses in storytelling and creativity — that sounds vague, because they were inter-departmental courses that were about brain science as much as how to draw and write — for several years, mostly at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This book is something like a blended experience of being in those classes, or perhaps particularly “The Unthinkable Mind” class from spring of 2013. It contains what seem to be Barry’s actual handouts and worksheets from that course, along with exercises from the students that year, organized chronologically to cover that whole semester. There are also some pages, especially near the beginning, that set the scene and explain her process and and overall plan for the class — but, as the book goes on, more and more it is a record of what that class did.

So it’s possible for a devoted student to follow most of the instructions here, and make for herself a one-person version of that course. (She couldn’t do everything, since there are some exercises where work gets handed around the class, with each person adding something new.)

Syllabus is a much denser book than What It Is and Picture This were: those aimed to entertain while touching on profound ideas, while Syllabus aims to document an entire teaching method and program. It’s all related — Barry’s ideas on art and life have been basically the same through the past decade — but Syllabus is the operationalization of those ideas, if you’ll let me descend into bafflegab for a moment.

I frankly was surprised by Syllabus: I wasn’t expecting a book so dense and so school-book-y. (Perhaps I should have read the title a few more times! It was not hidden.) I appreciate a lot of Barry’s work and enthusiasm, while still fervently believing that I would hate every second of being in a class like this…and not just because I’ve never liked or been good at drawing. But be aware: this is deeper and denser than her previous work, and is for a more rarefied and self-selected audience of people really interested in the sources of creativity and how to teach stimulating those sources.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

I’ve already done my song-and-dance about explorers in my post four years ago about Bertozzi’s book Shackleton, so it’s best to take that as read here. [1] But Shackleton lived in an age when most of the world had been mapped and organized; he was trying to fill in one of the last few open spaces on the map, to be The Guy who got his name on that effort.

By comparison, Lewis and Clark were just military men sent off by their commander, with orders roughly equivalent to “check out what’s over that hill there.” It turned out “that hill there” was the Rocky Mountains, but there were a lot more empty places on maps a hundred years earlier. Lewis and Clark led a team through one of those big empty places, and helped fill it in.

(Well, fill it in for white people on the East coast of North America. The people already in those lands had a decent sense of at least their immediate area.)

But, anyway. Nick Bertozzi told a story about explorers before Shackleton. And this is it: Lewis & Clark , an album-sized graphic novel that I suspect was aimed at least partly at a school audience. If I still worked at a publishing company that sold into the trade — which I didn’t, for a good year or so even before I left Wiley in 2015 — I could have looked up how it sold, and maybe gotten a sense if that strategy was successful. But, instead, I can come to Lewis & Clark as just another reader.

Bertozzi tells this story in episodes, a page or three at a time. He has the whole 1803-1806 expedition to cover (plus a little before and afterward), and only 137 pages to fit thousands of miles of wandering and many many eventful days into, so that’s not surprising. (If there are any Lewis and Clark scholars out there, I can’t guarantee your favorite moment from the expedition is dramatized in this book.) He somewhat alternates between single pages and double-page spreads, which is occasionally confusing — the reader isn’t always sure whether to read straight across the top tier, or continue down the left page. That does make for some impressive vistas, though — Lewis & Clark takes advantage of its larger size, which can make up for the black and white art. [2]

I get the sense Bertozzi’s aim here was to faithfully chronicle the high points of a historically important event, and not provide commentary or his own opinions. If so, he did a great job: Lewis & Clark is the kind of comic that feels like a camera-eye, a view into a world long gone. His art is bold and strongly story-telling, moving the action forward. This is, inevitably, a very episodic book, but it’s an engrossing one, and the personalities of the main characters come through even told in episodes.

[1] Shackleton was a 2014 book I read when it was new; this is a 2011 book it took me seven years to get to. I have no compelling reason for why it happened that way, and must throw myself upon the mercy of the court.

[2] I’m fine with b&w myself — I got into comics in the ’80s, when b&w was hip and trendy — but, for a lot of people, it’s means the work is unfinished.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.