Author: Andrew Wheeler

Amadeo & Maladeo by R.O. Blechman

Blechman has been making comics and related art for six or seven decades now, going back to 1953’s The Juggler of Our Lady. Most of that stuff was collected a few years back in Talking Lines — but Blechman is still around and still making art.

(If anything below ends up sounding critical — I never know which way my fingers will tend — let me say up front here that it’s really damn impressive that Blechman is still around, still working, and still getting books published. This is a man who was born in 1930 and got into the Art Directors Hall of Fame nearly twenty years ago…and he had a new book out in 2016. I only hope I can be around when I’m 86.)

Amadeo & Maladeo is a historical graphic novel, something of a compare-and-contrast about two musician-composers in the late 18th century, loosely inspired by the life of Mozart. And it looks like it will have a crisp, defined contrast between the two of them, but then…wanders off into specifics on both sides that make that comparison muddied.

I’m torn on whether that makes this book stronger or weaker — on the one hand, the book it seemed to be heading towards could have been dull and obvious, with the rich prodigy brought low in the end and the poor kid finding fame and success in America. On the other hand, their careers aren’t particularly parallel, and there’s a moment where something bad happens to a middle-aged Amadeo — a carriage accident of some kind — that Blechman never quite explains.

But, anyway, Amadeo is a prodigy, performing for the crowned heads of Europe in the 1750s, before the age of ten. Maladeo, born on the other side of the blanket to a servant girl who had a happy night with Amadeo’s violin-teacher father, performs on street-corners and is shanghaied to New York at a young age.

In the end, we are with Maladeo as a happy old man, which I suspect is the big clue — Blechman himself lived to an impressive old age, and he had Amadeo die at an age similar to Mozart’s. Neither man could choose his life, of course, and both had successes and happiness along the way — but Maladeo is still going at the end, and that has to count for something.

So there may not be a moral here, just the story of two contrasting lives. The world has enough morals, though, so the lack here is not a problem. And Blechman’s trademark “shaky line” is as expressive and wonderful here as ever — note that it’s not because of age; he’s always drawn like that on purpose. If you’re not expecting something stark and classical in its construction, you’ll likely enjoy Amadeo & Maladeo a lot.

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

Giant Days, Vol. 2 by John Allison, Lissa Treiman, and Max Sarin

I will keep telling you to read John Allison’s comics until either you do so or you stop listening to me entirely. So take that part as read — like Scarygoround and Bad Machinery , Giant Days is a lovely mix of smart dialogue and real characters and quirky situations. Though Giant Days, being set away from Tackleford, those quirky situations are less likely to involve dimensional portals and selkies and alien potato creatures. (At least so far….)

Volume Two finishes up the first term at an unnamed British University for our three main characters — Susan and Daisy and Esther — who have a big formal dance, and a big visit back to Susan’s hometown during the break, and the big finals, and then…um…a big new boyfriend for Esther? (Parallelism can only go so far, it seems.)

These four issues also see the big art hand-off, as original artist Lissa Treiman bows out after what was supposed to be the six-issue mini-series and Max Sarin steps in. To my eye, Sarin’s lines are a bit thinner than Treiman’s, and his art seem to have less depth…but, then, when does anyone ever think the new artist on a favorite comic is an improvement? He does a good job, and I’m sure I’ll bitterly resent it if he ever leaves Giant Days and someone else takes over.

So: female-focused writing, with believable people and real-world situations and some of the best dialogue available in comics anywhere. What are you waiting for?

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

Giant Days, Vol. 1 by John Allison and Lissa Treiman

This series does not necessarily have to be connected to Allison’s webcomics, if the reader doesn’t know of that connection. One of the three main characters — gothy center-of-all-drama Esther De Groot — was a major character in Allison’s strip Scarygoround, but Giant Days is a mildly alternate version of that Esther, who went off to college in about 2004 from that strip and landed in college in about 2013 in these comics stories. (That’s one long road trip on the way to school!) And this comic is set entirely at college so far, with no excursions back to the Tackleford of Allison’s webcomics, and I don’t expect there to be any.

Giant Days is about three female friends: Esther, tightly wound Susan, and happy-go-lucky Daisy. Allison is amazingly good (particularly for a man) at writing about young women and their friendships and daily life — Giant Days is all about the small moments in life that don’t feel small at the time. These three freshmen at an unnamed UK university study (or don’t), have crushes and dates and boyfriends and friends who are boys, get angry and happy, and just talk to each other. It’s the moments they’ll remember fondly ten or forty years from now, presented cleanly and with truth, the story of three specific women and their lives.

Allison is joined here by Lissa Treiman on art — he draws his own webcomics — and she has a great energy and vigor that works well with his story. (But don’t get too used to her; she’s only on this series for these stories and the first two issues of the next collection.) Look, I’m clearly in the tank for Allison, but this series is a lot of fun — particularly for young women, who don’t get to see people like themselves in comics all that much.

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

Gou-Dere Sora Nagihara, Vols. 1-4 by Suu Minazuki

So there’s this guy, see? Name of Shouta. And he’s obsessed with the female lead character in his favorite manga story, which he re-reads over and over again. (He’s otherwise the usual shonen lead character: first-year in high school, glasses, quiet, no friends or respectable hobbies — the total otaku.) And then, on page two of this story, since we need to get going quickly, she appears in his bedroom, falling out of wherever right on top of him.

Wow, right? That’s Gou-dere Sora Nagihara.

But, of course, she only looks like the Sora Nagihara of the comics, and has a completely different personality. The demure, shy girl dying of Ali-McGraw-in-Love-Story disease of the comics has manifested in Shouta’s real world as a raging sex-obsessed force of nature. Since this is a humor comic, she’s not obsessed with actually having sex herself — that would be too easy — but with making sure Shouta has a lot of sex with random women and thus populates the world with his offspring so he can rule the world. (This last doesn’t make any sense, and probably isn’t supposed to — it’s big and bizarre and funny, probably more so to the Japanese.)


Again, probably because of the Rule of Funny, Sora’s efforts to strip and degrade the young women near Shouta result in Shouta getting arrested, and then immediately released. (Because if there’s a girl running around ripping off other girls’ clothing and spraying them with various thick viscous substances, the thing to do is declare the closest man responsible, right? This series finds new and different ways to fail feminism on nearly every page — it’s quite breathtaking.) Oh, and some of the girls thus harassed are actual characters — like the tough-as-nails head of the dorm where Shouta was living, and the schoolmate who lets him (and Sora) stay with her family when he inevitably gets kicked out of the dorms — who both blame Shouta for Sora’s actions and yet never become entirely hostile to him. Oh, and the other male characters (only two of them, notably) are really weird, over-the-top martial-artist types, grown-ups who are even less connected to what we’d call reality than Sora.

Hmm. Know what we’ve got here? It looks like a harem manga, And a particularly baroque, self-aware one, at that. Shouta is very much the standard nebbish, though Sora is more specifically all about sex in her plot-driving wackiness, but otherwise it follows the pattern very closely — down to the one girl that the hero really loves, even amid all of the crazy sex-comedy going on around them. (Though Gou-Dere is a self-aware harem manga; it lampshades that relationship a good two volumes before it even really pops up as a serious thing.)

Things get more complicated from that beginning, of course, as they must — the whole point of a harem manga is that things get more complicated, until only the most devoted readers can even tell who all of the various girls are and what their individual very specific personality quirks are. (This is probably the point to mention that “gou-dere” is a Japanese manga-girl descriptor which essentially means “fanatically devoted to her master and particularly to obtaining nubile females for him to impregnate.” The title of this series could literally not get more on-the-nose. You know how Inuit languages supposedly have a hundred words for snow? Well, Japanese manga readers have at least that many terms to describe the vast number of commedia dell’arte-esque standard characters that pop up in story after story.) But it’s all harem manga-style stories, and knowingly so — they go to a hot springs, for example, and Sora comments on the genre expectations.

This is culturally specific humor, like a lot of manga — it comes out of a culture where being polite and quiet and  worrying about others is the very most important thing that you have to do every single moment of every single day. And so breaking that norm — as broadly and completely as possible, in the most shocking ways possible — is a source of humor. I personally found Gou-Dere more weird than funny, but I’m not part of that culture. If you are culturally Japanese, or very deeply invested in that culture (as a lot of Westerners are), you’ll probably find this more immediate than I did. But even if this doesn’t hit you the way it’s supposed to, it’s still an intensely weird, self-consciously genre work, and it’s interesting to see that play out, even if the specific genre elements are not as familiar.

Zenith: Phases One to Four by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell

Zenith: Phases One to Four by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell

Zenith is quite likely the best possible revisionist superhero comic series told in five-page chapters. That sounds like damning with faint praise, and there’s an aspect of that — those short chapters put Morrison and Yeowell’s work in a straitjacket that they can never get free from, denying them all but the most absolutely necessary splash pages and forcing every installment to move forward quickly and efficiently — but it’s still an impressive achievement, and a pretty good revisionist superhero in general. His stories originally ran in the UK comics magazine 2000 AD, in weekly installments between 1987 and 1992, which explains the five-page-chapters issue. All the stories were written by Grant Morrison, at that point the current snotty Young Turk of British Comics, and drawn by Steve Yeowell, who had no such easy hook to be hung on and so had to get by on hard work and talent. (Not that Morrison was lacking in either of those.)

Zenith supposedly is a slacker superhero, and these stories are old enough that Generation X (my generation) was the one filled with young lazy layabouts who couldn’t be bothered to work — whereas now we know that really describes millennials, who have the bad grace to be young now, when so many of us are sadly no longer so. (We may all know different in another twenty years, but we’ll need to think up a new derogatory nickname for yet another generation first.) Zenith isn’t really that much of a slacker; he does hesitate initially to jump into the big superhero plot of Phase One. but that’s over very quickly (no room for Hamlet-esque equivocation in five-page chapters), and he’s flying around and punching monsters almost immediately.

Phase One quickly introduces us to what we need to know, with a prologue of this world’s end of WWII: the Nazi superhero Masterman is about to kill the English superhero Maximan in Berlin when he’s temporarily stymied by a nuclear bomb that levels the city. (No spoilers: we see the not-dead Masterman by the end of the prologue in the modern day. As I said, short chapters means this has to move fast.) Fast forward two generations: there were a bunch of British superheroes in the ’60s, who broke free from government control, called themselves Cloud Nine, and eventually broke up. Half of them are now dead, and the three left alive have all lost their powers.

But two of the dead supers had a son, and that boy — Robert McDowell — is the 19-year-old pop star Zenith in the fateful year 1987. Zenith is self-centered and arrogant and the kind of prick that only the teenage international celebrity only-superhero-in-the-world could be. His agent tries to keep him on-task, poor man, but it’s clearly an impossible job. Oh, but here comes Masterman, reincarnated by a secret society that worships the Lovecraftian “Many-Angled Ones” from beyond space that which to come down and eat our souls. (As in Loveccraft, it doesn’t do to think too much about why cultists would want to destroy the entire world and have their souls eaten first.)

And it turns out that the three depowered superheroes are not as depowered as previously thought, and that Zenith will join the battle once we get through a few scenes of him being petulant and young and thick-headed. So Zenith and the most powerful of those remnant ’60s heroes — Peter St. John, a powerful telepath and hippie-turned-Thatcherite PM — defeat Masterman and the thing from beyond space that inhabited him, saving the world and paving the way for St. John’s ascension to running the Defense Ministry.

There are, of course, Dark Hints about Zenith’s parents, which come out in Phase Two. This one is the least cosmic of all four Phases, with a Bond-villain-style mad billionaire who has bankrolled the creation of new supers — though a connection with the One Scientist that created all of the UK’s supers for three generations [1] — and plots to destroy the current world with nuclear fire and build a new one with his pet superhumans. Zenith needs the help of a CIA agent and (once again) St. John to foil this one, but of course it is foiled in the end.

As usual for events that supposedly killed entire super-teams, we learn by this point that hardly anyone in Cloud Nine actually died or was depowered in the ’60s. Half of the team fled to one of the infinite alternate worlds — this might be the first time Morrison uses that idea, so Morrison fans take note — as part of a larger Plan, which the three left behind (St. John and the two that don’t do much) didn’t want any part of.  But that’s still to come.

Phase Threeis the big, gaudy Crisis of the Zenith universe, with supers from dozens of worlds gathering together with Zenith and St. John under the leadership of an alternate-universe Maximan to defeat the Llogior. (The Lovecraftian Many-Angled Ones having quietly rebranded themselves at some point while they were offstage in Phase Two, they will be known under this name from now on.) Zenith even meets his nice, heroic counterpart from another universe, Vertex, which allows for some tension near the end.

And, yes, the collection of superheroes vaguely familiar to British audiences of the late ’80s — and much less so to this American, or to anyone not deeply steeped in UK comics of the ’60s and ’70s — does save the multiverse, although some fall tragically along the way, to make it more meaningful. (And there’s at least one shocking betrayal, for the same reasons.) But Zenith has very little to do with it; he’s there, and he does punch a few things, but that’s about the extent of his involvement.

Finally, Phase Four came along after a two-year gap, and introduced color to the series. (I’m not sure if this is because 2000 AD finally went all-color around 1992, or if it had a color section for a while and Zenith was at that point considered worthy, or what. But this Phase is in full comic-book color, while the first three are pure Yeowell ink.) Now the Big Plan of the surviving members of Cloud 9 comes to fruition, and of course it has to do with conquering the world and the Lloigor and all the things every Zenith story is about.

And, once again, St. John is the one who actually saves the world, while Zenith is mostly just around for the ride. Morrison did continue to hint that St. John wasn’t what he seemed — hints that go all the way back to the final pages of Phase One — which would imply that a Phase Five would finally see Zenith battle St. John. (This is very much a minimalist superhero universe, despite the multiple universes in Phase Three; everyone comes from the same origin, and they keep fighting and killing each other — eventually, obviously, the last two standing will have to fight in the final battle.) But there never was a Phase Five; the Phase Four book ends with a late-Morrison mash-up story from ten years later that throws all of the toys up in the air and delights in the weird shapes they make coming down. There’s no sign that Morrison and Yeowell ever will, or could, continue this story in a conventional way: this is what we have, and this is all there ever will be.

As I said a thousand words or so ago, Zenith is inherently handicapped by being told in five-page chapters. Morrison was lucky enough to be writing in a time and for a magazine that was happy to have lots of captions, so he’s able to tell larger, more complex stories than you might expect given that scope — but, still, every chapter has to have a shape, and has to have some action or tension to close it, and that gives Zenith an inherently herky-jerky cadence, with confrontations and fights coming at predictable intervals and never lasting very long.

Yeowell is also handicapped by the space: there’s only so much superhero action you can draw when you need to have ten panels and at least that many captions on each page. He does get more than his share of striking images out of Morrison’s concepts, though, particularly in Phase Four (perhaps because the rising tide of the ’90s was privileging pictures over captions).

So this is another flawed masterpiece, much like its model Miracleman. I imagine that amuses Grant Morrison to no end.

[1] This is very much like Emil Gargunza, from Alan Moore’s slightly earlier Marvelman/Miracleman stories. The backstory of Zenith in general bears a lot of resemblances to Moore’s worldbuilding; Morrison substituted Cthulhu for Warpsmiths, pretty much, and went forward from there.

Deadman: Lost Souls by Mike Baron and Kelley Jones

DC Comics thought it was riding a horror revival in the early ’90s, when it turned out they just had the good luck to hire Neil Gaiman to write Sandman. (Sure, the rest of the early Vertigo lineup, and the Vertigo precursors like the Alan Moore Swamp Thing, had a strong horror flavor in their superhero gumbo, but it was always a flavor rather than a main course, and it died out pretty much in parallel to Sandman wandering further and further away from horror.) But, along the way, they put out a bunch of comics with horror flavors — from vampire Batman to the creepiness of Shade the Changing Man — and revived a number of characters with horror in their DNA.

Deadman is one obvious example. He’s one of DC’s third-tier heroes, who’s had an ongoing series a few times but never long enough to really deserve that “ongoing” name. But he is dead, and his power is possessing people so he can use their bodies to do whatever he’s doing at the time, and he was definitely available, so he got scarified and sent off to see if he could attract that Sandman lightning. (Actually, given the timing, I suspect it was Swamp Thing lightning — the bigger bolt hadn’t hit DC yet.)

So the team of Mike Baron and Kelley Jones — Baron one of the more inventive and interesting mainstream comics writers of that generation, with excellent work from Badger and Nexus and a fine run on Punisher at roughly the same time; and Jones an impressionist of the comics page, a heir of Bernie Wrightson with a great eye for grotesques and extreme situations — relaunched a Deadman serial in Action Comics Weekly in the late ’80s, which eventually led to two short “Prestige Format” miniseries in 1989 and 1992.

Those two miniseries — each one was two 48-page issues long, under the titles Love After Death and Exorcism — were collected in Deadman: Lost Soulsin 1995, which stayed in print some time after that. (DC didn’t including printing numbers or dates during this era — in fact, I’m not sure if they do that now — so I can’t tell precisely how old my copy is. Comics publishers are about fifty years behind prose publishers in some very basic putting-books-together stuff.)

The two are discrete stories, but this book tries to disguise that by running them together without separation — it’s a bit jarring to go from the Love After Death “deadend” page immediately to two pages of Exorcism that quickly retell that story and the rest of the Deadman backstory — and they are related, since Love After Death basically breaks Deadman and Exorcism puts him back together. (Well, he actually breaks after the end of Love After Death, but that’s just quibbling.)

So we begin with Deadman sour and unhappy and frustrated — he’s been bodiless for however long its been since his first story in 1967, fighting to keep the cosmic balance for the vague goddess Rama Kushna, and his angst over that is rising. Deadman hears a rumor of a haunted house out in the Wisconsin woods, the abandoned home of a circus owner from decades before, supposedly haunted by the spirit of his aerialist wife. Deadman was a circus performer and aerialist in life, so he’s intrigued and goes to investigate. And he does find the ghost of the beautiful aerialist, who does have the power to touch living people at will — but she’s not the only ghost, and her dead husband is still around and powered by a nasty demonic spirit.

Does Deadman defeat the evil ringmaster and his demon overlord? Well, what do you think? Does he get the girl and (after)live happily ever after? You really haven’t read many mainstream comics, have you?

And so Exorcism begins with Deadman having gone crazy — comic-book style crazy, the kind that’s very demonstrative and can be snapped out of with a bit of help — and roaming around some other woods (in Vermont this time), where he runs into a heavy metal band and a pair of young lovers. The band is quickly possessed by three ancient, and very different, nasty spirits, and the young lovers are quickly in danger. Since Deadman is comic-book crazy, he basically caused that, and capers about gleefully. Meanwhile, Madame Waxahachie — a comics character who makes Amanda Waller look svelte and demure and non-stereotypical — finds the circus booking agent in Boston that Deadman has been possessing to beat up gay men — this part of the plot doesn’t entirely make sense — and drags that man and his regular therapist up to the abandoned church in Vermont where the possessed band is, in time for a guest appearance by the Phantom Stranger (who is as clear and helpful as he usually is).

And then things all go to hell, of course. But, in the end, Deadman is not-crazy again, and the evil spirits are banished back to wherever, and most of the good people are still alive. And, most importantly, Deadman is back to his standard status quo and available to show up in big crossovers and other superhero bumf for another couple of decades. As he did.

These two stories are more than slightly over-the-top; I suspect Baron was out of his usual comfort zone in this supernatural milieu, and he doesn’t deliver his best work here. The art is the real standout: Jones revels in the opportunities to draw cadaverous Deadman in tortured poses (often floating in mid-air) and all of the horribly fleshy monsters that Baron can think up. This is not a pretty comics story, but it’s full of excellent creepy art, and Jones’s inky blacks are well-supported by an equally spooky coloring job by Les Dorscheid.

I’ll be honest: this isn’t a lost masterpiece or anything. But it does collect two decent stories with great art from one of the quirkier characters in the DC Universe. If you have a fondness for DC’s supernatural characters — I know I do, and I don’t think I’m the only one — this could be a fun find.

Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? by Brian Fies

Building and sustaining a career as a graphic novelist is even harder than the equivalent for a prose writer: comics require at least twice as much work per page (writing and drawing — sometimes inking and coloring and lettering, too) for something that’s read in a fifth of the time. And that turns making comics, especially mid-list comics, into a time-sink which has serious trouble delivering monetarily on a level with the effort required. And yet people keep trying, like any artform: there are always people with stories to tell and images to share, and some of them manage to turn that into a career along the way. (Others fail entirely, or do a couple of stories and then move on to something else.)

Brian Fies is an interesting case along that continuum. His first major graphic story, Mom’s Cancer, was a memoir comic that originally appeared in installments online, about ten years ago. That attracted attention, and got reprinted as a book, and the book apparently did well. His follow-up, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, came four years later — quite fast for a two-hundred page book written and drawn all by one person — and was more thematically and conceptually inventive, a switch to mostly fiction, but eventually, it seems, was not quite as successful as his first book.

(This is really common: the disappointing second book/record/gallery show is a cliche across many media. Sometimes the disappointment is commercial, sometimes critical — and sometimes it doesn’t exist at all, which then is the surprising story in that case.)

Fies hasn’t yet put out a third book in the six years since Tomorrow. (Though, again, remember that comics take time to make — time to work up the idea, time to write, time to draw, and then all of the usual publishing stuff. And that often has to happen in between or on top of having a regular job.) And so outside observers like me wonder if Tomorrow was a disappointment to its publisher — though an outside observer can never figure that out, since it depends entirely on costs and payments and expectations.

I’m not the best reader for Tomorrow, temperamentally: it’s a thoughtful, careful fictionalization of the “why don’t we have jetpacks?” line of complaint, and I’ve long since gotten sick of that from hearing it in SF circles for around thirty years. [1] This particular incarnation of that argument starts with the New York World’s Fair of 1939, possibly the very height of technological optimism, and mildly asks why the dreams embodied in that fair never came true.

(How many dreams ever come true? But we’re not supposed to ask such questions.)

Tomorrow focuses on a father and his son — Pop and Buddy, as Everyman and Everyboy as Fies can make them — on a visit to the fair, where they’re thrilled and inspired by the wonders they see there. Fies clearly means these two to be iconic rather than real people, but, to my mind, that’s ignoring the more important questions: I found myself wondering about the rest of their family, about what Mom or Big Sis would make of these particular technological wonders, and if they would be as impressive to them. (Or what Grandpa, who already went from horse-and-buggy to airplanes and ocean liners, would say. Pop does have a speech along those lines, but it’s all in the service of Progress Always Thrusting Forward.)

After the Fair, Tomorrow presents a series of snapshot chapters in the middle of each of the next four decades — 1945 through 1975 — in which Pop and Buddy appear at the same ages as they were in 1939. (And there are still no other members of their family: no mother or hunt of what happened to her, no other siblings, no extended family — just two men, older and younger, and their technologically-mediated father-son bond.) So they witness V-E day, build a fallout shelter in the basement, watch a Gemini lift off from Cape Canaveral, and finally the Apollo-Soyuz separation — almost all specifically space-exploration moments, like yet another sour Stephen Baxter story about how the author didn’t get to visit Moon Base Alpha like he was supposed to.

And there’s a lot of narration along the way, as “Buddy” tells the reader all of the space-related history in each ten-year span — all still very much like those whiny “I was promised a house on Mars!” stories from SF magazines of 10-15 years ago. Again, I have never little patience for that viewpoint: I’ve heard it too many times, and I never bought into it myself. The Space Race is a thing that happened for geopolitical reasons, not scientific or exploration reasons, and it ended when those real reasons were no longer as powerful. There was no aim of history, no majestic purpose to spread monkeys in tin cans throughout the universe. And Tomorrow has a coda at the end — with Pop and Buddy finally broken free from their static ages — that somewhat addresses that, talking about the actual technological changes in the years since 1975. But it’s also unabashedly still in the tank for the “man must conquer the universe with big phallic rockets!” idea, as if the last forty years was just a pause in the Inevitable Thrust of Man.

Tomorrow is an attractive, very well-presented version of an argument and a viewpoint that I rejected long ago. Other readers may be less negative towards the agitprop and thus be able to enjoy the book itself more than I did — I’ve just seen this very same kind of story too many times before, by too many writers around Fies’s age (fifty-ish, just old enough to be kids during the Apollo years and thus indoctrinated to expect they would go to space some day) to believe in it. And I’m young enough — I don’t get to say that very often, these days, so I’ll take any chance I can get — not to be part of that cohort; Apollo was dead by the time I was old enough to care.

If you love space, and the promise of ever-better transportation, and the dreams of the Space Age, you really will enjoy Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? In fact, if you’re just not nearly as negative about those things as I am, you’ll probably like it quite a lot.

[1] Short version of my comeback: geometric growth, in anything humans do, always flattens out. It never hits the asymptote, or comes close. We know this in general, but we keep forgetting it for specific cases. So the Transportation Singularity didn’t happen: we didn’t get ubiquitous flying cars or jet-packs, we can’t go to Mars for a vacation, and FTL is still a pipe dream. Similarly, the Information Singularity won’t happen either, for similar reasons. Any prediction that contains “and then it goes on just like this for a long time” is bullshit.

Monsieur Jean: The SIngles Theory

Monsieur Jean is the semi-autobiographical — a novelist rather than a cartoonist, and somewhat Everyman-ized — central character in a series of slice-of-life comics stories by the French creators Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian. Much of that series has been collected in English as From Bachelor to Father, after about half of it originally appeared over here as Get a Life. [1] (French albums are short, we must remember: to them, a full-length book-format comic is often just 48 pages. So American reprint projects typically stick at least two books together, and sometimes much more than that.)

The Singles Theory, as far as I can tell, came out of sequence and out of size: it’s a 120-plus-page epic of mundanity, set between two of the earlier books, in a popular period of Jean’s life. It’s the story of how he got inspired to write his second novel — which anyone involved with the literary world know is the really tough one. (Anyone can write one novel, but for it to be a career and a life, a novelist has to be able to write number two — three and the rest will then follow.) I suspect this is a popular book in the series, since the US edition is a translation of a special duotone edition that came out in France in 2011.

All of the Monsieur Jean stories have love affairs — dating, meeting new people, sex, relationship troubles, and break-ups — as central to their plots, but Singles Theory uses that as the central conceit: Jean’s friend Felix, in the middle of a divorce, has moved in with him and has understandably soured on the entire idea of romance and love. At the same time, Jean is having recurring nightmares of armed men who claim they are about to kill him, but always get distracted long enough for Jean to wake up. His friends insist this is all about sex…probably because, in a book like this, everything is all about sex.

Those are some of the loose threads that wind through a series of discrete, individual stories about Jean and his friends — they go to a birthday party for a friend far our in the countryside, Jean is interviewed badly about his work, Felix gets trapped in an elevator, and so forth. It’s not for readers who want gigantic moments and lots of punching in their comics, but they’re very unlikely to pick up something called Monsieur Jean in the first place. For people who like movies and books that are about characters and dialogue rather than plot — who appreciate that things don’t always have to move at a breakneck pace — this is a wonderful story about real people in a real world.

[1] I’ve read Get a Life twice — most recently just a couple of months ago — and reviewed it in a quick, desultory fashion here each time. I won’t bother to link; you’re not missing anything. Slice-of-life stories are difficult to criticize/analyze.

Elektra:Assassin by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz

In the late ’80s, Elektra: Assassin was possibly the very favorite comic of my brother and myself — he even bought an extra copy of the splash-page-filled climactic issue and covered a large portion of his ceiling with it. (I can still quote the important bit from memory: “And flesh/all flesh/will scream/and burn/and die” with the next page being the utterly perfect “and die/and die/and die/and die/and die.”

Does it hold up? Surprisingly well, actually. It uses some Marvel Universe furniture — SHIELD is important, with Nick Fury wandering through once or twice, and Daredevil shows up equally briefly in a flashback — but it’s really its own thing, a fever dream of politics and megadeath and violence and paranoia that’s set sometime that could be 1972 or 1986 or no year in particular. And for a book so over the top and full of grotesques, it’s got some of Miller’s most subtle writing — particularly impressive for those of us depressed at how Miller abandoned subtlety forever almost immediately afterward.

It’s set before Elektra’s death in Daredevil — probably. A presidential campaign is heating up, and a young, personable candidate (Ken Wind), who is a Democrat but never named as such, is winning over America with his sunny vision. Meanwhile, The President, who looks mostly like Nixon but could be Reagan if you squint hard enough, is paranoid and obsessed with nuclear war and his own machismo. And if you think you know which of those is a bigger threat to the world, you’re wrong. (This may be a hint of Miller’s later right-wing stridency, but it works perfectly in context.)

And in a small Latin American tin-pot dictatorship — propped up by SHIELD and the US more generally — a deeply mediocre and not overly intelligent SHIELD agent named Garrett is about to get in way over his head. The Beast — the supernatural being behind the secretive Hand organization of ninja — is trying to possess a human being, to further that plot I hinted at in the first paragraph. And Elektra is there to stop him, mostly by killing people in inventive and spectacular ways.

But Elektra is in over her head, too. She’s been captured and indoctrinated by the Hand at least twice, not to mention the time she just spent in a snake pit of a local insane asylum, and her fuzzy and confused mind is running almost entirely on instinct and pure willpower.

Unfortunately, Elektra and Garrett are the only ones who can save the world. From the Beast, and his dreams of megadeath. From Ken Wind. From the technological wizards of SHIELD’s ExTechOps division, and the cyborgs they create to chase the AWOL Garrett — including his ex-partner, Perry, who would have been a serial killer if he hadn’t found an easier, more legal way to kill lots of people.

Miller tells this story in the best example of ’80s style I know of, all stream-of-consciousness narrative captions from multiple points of view and overlapping screamed dialogue. He throws hints into the air to have them hit targets perfectly sixty pages later, and weaves it all together seamlessly. And this is Sienkiewicz at the height of his visual ambition, right before Stray Toasters, painting like a demon and shifting from photorealist to a child’s scrawl to slashes of color instantly to support Miller’s equally quick changes of mood. (I’ll also note that Archie Goodwin, one of the unsung heroes of comics, was the original editor, and I expect that he had a lot to do with making Elektra: Assassin as coherent and crisp and powerful as it is.)

Elektra: Assassin is a smart, fast-moving, overwhelming, psychological, all-encompassing thriller comic, set in the Marvel Universe but not of it, and a superhero story only by courtesy. It does things effortlessly on the page that are thrilling and amazing, and has amazing depths of subtlety for a book about a ninja-girl stopping a demon from blowing up the world. This is one major ’80s comic that completely holds up, and one of the real highlights of the careers of two hugely talented creators.

Feynman by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick

Feynman by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick

There are times when I doubt that Feynman could possibly be real. A wild man physics savant who was also  a world-class womanizer, bongo player, and practical joker? No, no — that’s a fictional character, not a real man. But the world then gently points out that he was real.

Ottaviani has made a small career in comics out of telling stories about science and scientists, and this latest book-length graphic novel fits well into his oeuvre. Feynman is the most interesting scientist of the 20th century, beating out even Einstein and Hawking — quirky, fun, endlessly quotable, but still clearly brilliant at really esoteric theoretical physics and creator of a major explanatory theory that hardly anyone has ever understood.

(I know much less about Myrick — he’s got a lot of credits, but I haven’t seen much of his work. He has a slightly cartoonier style than I’d expect for a biography, which means his Feynman looks only slightly like the real man, but he has the skills to tell this story well, despite a lot of talking heads and big caption boxes.)

Ottaviani mostly tells Feynman’s story straight through, with a few digressions for style and framing. He uses unobtrusive captions to place each scene in a time and place, jumping forward occasionally to use a major lecture or discovery to frame earlier events. It makes what could have been a dull life — Feynman, for all of his energy and wit and wackiness, spent most of his time lecturing, writing, or sitting in a chair thinking about physics — into a thoughtful graphic novel that mediates on an interesting life lived well.

I expect this will mostly be read by physics nerds and young readers — it’s the kind of thing
that teachers and librarians hope will snare some resultant reader into a life-long passion — but that’s fine. Feynman was both of those things, in his time, and I think he’d be glad of the company.

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