Author: Andrew Wheeler

Manga Friday: Plight of the Themeless

Manga Friday: Plight of the Themeless

  • News
  • April 18, 2008

Here’s the manga I read this week (no, seriously, that’s the only thing they have in common) –

Kaze no Hana, Vol. 1
By Ushio Mizta and Akitoski Ohta
Yen Press, 2008, $10.99

Momoka Futami is just your normal teenaged manga heroine – an amnesiac orphan who’s coming to live with her unknown family four years after the mysterious death of her parents. Oh, and she learns that she’s the rightful wielder of one of eight ancient magical swords that are need to keep back various monsters that regularly pop into existence in this town.

Kaze no Hana has a lot of characters, and they’re all related to each other somehow, and most of them have magical swords, and…it just turned into a Russian novel in my head, with the added problem that I couldn’t even keep some of them straight visually. (This is mostly my problem; they don’t look identical, but they’re different in manga ways rather than Western ways, which means I can’t tell people apart unless they’re in the same panel and I can compare them directly.)

So, um, Kaze no Hana is complex and interesting, but it made my head hurt, OK? And I really don’t need that from a comic about the secret family of people that kill monsters – I can get secret families killing monsters in a dozen places without any headaches.

Your mileage may vary…

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Review: Three More Books for Kids

Review: Three More Books for Kids

Here are three more graphic novels for readers of varied ages, gathered together for no better reason than because I read them all recently:

Gumby Collected #1
By Bob Burden, Rick Geary, & Steve Oliff
Wildcard Ink, 2007, $12.95

Bob Burden’s connection with Gumby goes back twenty years, to the great [[[Summer Fun Special of 1988]]] (illustrated by Art Adams), and he’s pretty much the dream writer for a modern Gumby comic. (Although Steve Purcell, writer of the equally-great Gumby Winter Fun Special, did a damn good job as well.)

But the idea that a big media creation – even an old and quirky one like Gumby – would actually end up being written by an oddball outsider like Burden, instead of some safe writer of corporate comics, is…well, it’s as unlikely as any Bob Burden story, which I guess makes it doubly appropriate.

This trade paperback – which has an ISBN and price only on the inside front cover, tucked away like an afterthought, so it may be difficult to track down – collects the first three issues of what is supposed to be an ongoing Gumby series. (It’s been late regularly, though, so it’s anybody’s guess how long it will continue. But this book came out, and that’s more 21st century Gumby comics than I ever would have expected to begin with.)

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Review: Three Pieces of Middle

Review: Three Pieces of Middle

These three books have almost nothing in common – they’re from three different publishers, in entirely different genres, and by very different creators. But they all are middle chapters in long-running series, so they raise similar questions about maintaining interest in a serialized story – when the beginning was years ago, and there’s no real end in sight, either, what makes this piece of the story special? (Besides the fact that it’s printed on nice paper and shoved between cardboard covers.)

Ex Machina, Vol. 6: Power Down
By Brian K. Vaughan, Tony Harris, Jim Clark, and JD Mettler
DC Comics/Wildstorm, 2008, $12.99

Ex Machina gets to go first, since it’s the shortest and it’s also the closest to the beginning of the series. (Both in that it’s volume 6 and because all of the [[[Ex Machina]]] collections are so short – this one collects issues 26 to 29 of the series, so we’re only into the third year of publication.) The premise is still the same – an unknown artifact/item gave then-civil engineer Mitchell Hundred the power to hear and command all kinds of machines, which he used to first become a costumed superhero (stopping the second plane on 9-11, among other things) and then successfully ran for mayor in the delayed election of 2001-2002.

This storyline begins in the summer of 2003, and provides a secret-historical reason for the blackout of that year. (This is too cute a touch for my taste – Hundred’s world is different enough from our own that this “explanation” couldn’t be true in our real world, and so the fact that both worlds had identical-seeming massive blackouts, on the same day, from different causes, stretches suspension of disbelief much too far.)

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Review: ‘Tônoharu, Part One’ by Lars Martinson

Review: ‘Tônoharu, Part One’ by Lars Martinson

Tonoharu: Part One
By Lars Martinson
Pliant Press/Top Shelf, 2008, $19.95

This is another one of those books where it would be dangerous to assume too much, but it’s so tempting to do so. Martinson is a young American cartoonist who “lived and worked in southern Japan as an English teacher for three years.” The main character of this book, Dan, is a new English teacher in the Japanese town ofTônoharu. To make it even more complicated, [[[Tônoharu]]] has a prologue from the point of view of another English teacher in Tônoharu, Dan’s successor, who may or may not be Martinson. From the prologue, we already know than Dan will only last a year in Tônoharu, and that he’ll go home with “that ever-present look of defeat on his face.”

We also know that Dan’s unnamed successor isn’t particularly happy with his life in Tônoharu – the prologue sees him wrestling with the choice of staying for a second year, or bailing out – and the beginning of Dan’s story shows his unnamed predecessor leaving Japan after only a year, along with the predecessor’s only friend, another American teacher. So what is it about Tônoharu – or about Japan in general – that burns out and drives away Americans?

The main part of the story shows Dan feeling isolated and cut off from Japanese society, but he also doesn’t seem to be making much of an effort to connect to it. He has long periods of idleness at the school, which he’s supposed to use to prepare for class, but his language skills don’t get any better, and he’s always badly prepared. He doesn’t have much of a life in Tônoharu, but it’s hard to tell why that is – he says, at one point, that his hobbies are watching TV and sleeping, and he’s apparently honest about that. Honestly, he doesn’t seem to do anything, or to want to do anything in particular – he just wants not to be doing whatever he is doing.

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Review: ‘Paul Goes Fishing’ by Michel Rabagliati

Review: ‘Paul Goes Fishing’ by Michel Rabagliati

Paul Goes Fishing
By Michel Ragabliati
Drawn & Quarterly, 2008, $19.95

[[[Paul Goes Fishing]]] is the fourth in a series of semi-autobiographical graphic novels by an illustrator-turned-cartoonist from Montreal named Michel, about an illustrator-turned-cartoonist from Montreal named Paul.

Nosy Parkers, such as myself, will immediately start wondering just how “semi” this autobiography is. Paul and Michel are about the same age, in the same line of work, from the same city, and have the same family details (a wife and one daughter). On the other hand, these semi-autobiographical cartoonists are sneaky – and someone like Ragabliati could also easily have just done a pure autobio comic (there’s no shortage of those). So I’ll refrain from assuming that anything about “Paul” is also true of Rabagliati.

Like the other “[[[Paul]]]” books, Goes Fishing wanders through Paul’s past, with some scenes set when Paul was young (mostly when he’s fifteen and so frustrated with his life that he tries to run away) and some when he’s an adult (mostly in the mid-90s). There’s some narration, in the voice of a contemporary Paul, to organize it all, and explain when each scene is taking place, but the structure is quite fluid, with scenes flowing according to memory or other connections than along purely chronological lines.

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Manga Friday: Two Yen, Joe!

Manga Friday: Two Yen, Joe!

  • News
  • April 11, 2008

This week’s manga delivery brought two more books from mighty Yen Press, and they are…

Kieli, Vol. 1
Story by Yukako Kabei; Art by Shiori Teshirogi
Yen Press, 2008, $10.99

Some books, like this one, just have too much backstory for their own good, but let me roll up my sleeves and see if I can get it all clear: sometime in the future, mankind expanded to at least one other world, the planet Kieli is set on. (According to at least one character in this book, though, God decided not to travel, and so this unnamed world is godless.)

Anyway, about 80 years ago, there was a big war on this planet over fossil fuels – the two sides aren’t named, by the way – which seems to have gone global and gotten particularly nasty. Towards the end of the war, one side (or maybe both) created nearly indestructible warriors, called “the undying” from dead soldiers. The Undying had their hearts replaced with stones, and so stopped aging, could take ridiculous amounts of damage, and healed nearly any hurt in time.

After the war – we don’t know who won, or any real information about the politics or government of this world – the Undying were hunted down, mostly by “the Church,” and are now considered a legend.

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Manga Friday: Osamu Tezuka’s ‘Dororo’

Manga Friday: Osamu Tezuka’s ‘Dororo’

  • News
  • April 4, 2008

Dororo, Vol. 1
by Osamu Tezuka
Vertical, 2008, $13.95

Vertical continues to reprint some of Tezuka’s most interesting and idiosyncratic manga with this first volume of his 1967-68 serial Dororo – the other two volumes will follow a little later this year.

Dororo is, I guess, Tezuka’s take on a samurai manga – it’s set in pre-modern Japan and the main character runs around cutting people with a sword.

But let me back up a bit. Dororo opens with Lord Daigo, the typical nasty, ambitious nobleman so beloved in genre fiction around the world. He spends the night in the “Hall of Hell” – a shrine or pavilion filled with statues of forty-eight evil gods. Daigo wants to rule all of Japan, and wants to make a deal with the demons, so he offers up his about-to-be-born son. For the power he wants, he asks each of the evil gods to take one thing from that child…

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Review: Four Books for Pre-Adults

Review: Four Books for Pre-Adults

I had a pile of books more-or-less for kids, and thought: why not review them all together? And so I will:

[[[Flight Explorer, Vol. 1]]]
Edited by Kazu Kibuishi
Villard, 2008, $10.00

The popular [[[Flight]]] series, officially for adults but containing a lot of all-ages stories, has spun off a younger sibling. The cast of cartoonists is pretty much the same, and the editor is still Kibuishi, but this book is shorter, cheaper, smaller, and contains many more characters seemingly designed to headline a series of stories.

The stories are all fairly short – there are ten of them in a book just over a hundred pages – long enough to introduce what mostly seem to be series characters and given them a situation to deal with. The cover-featured “[[[Missile Mouse]]],” by Jake Parker gets the most adventurous, and will probably be the most appealing to the boy audience. (There’s nothing obviously aimed at the girl comics-reading audience – or maybe I mean nothing trying to poach some of the manga audience – though there are several strips with female protagonists, like Ben Hatke’s “[[[Zita the Spacegirl]]].”

The art is still mostly clean-lines enclosing solid colors – an animator’s palette – though the book gets more painterly towards the end, in the pieces by Ben Hatke, Rad Sechrist, Bannister, and Matthew Armstrong. It’s all quite professional and fun – all in all, a great book to hand to an 8-12 year old interested in comics.

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Review: ‘That Salty Air’ by Tim Sievert

Review: ‘That Salty Air’ by Tim Sievert

That Salty Air
Tim Sievert
Top Shelf, 2008, $10.00

For a book about the sea, [[[That Salty Ai]]]r feels awfully Minnesotan. (Or maybe I’m just reacting to the underlying Norwegian-ness of both Minnesota and Sievert’s story – but there is something hard and dour and northern about That Salty Air.)

Maryann and Hugh are a young couple who live in a lonely cabin by the sea, and whose main source of income seems to be fishing. One day, the postman delivers two letters from the local doctor – it’s immediately clear that Maryann’s letter has told her that she’s pregnant, but we get a couple of montages of sea life (red in tooth and claw, for some immediate symbolism) before Hugh gets his letter.

From it, he learns that his mother has drowned, and he immediately turns against the sea, blaming it for her death. Really, he curses the sea and throws a rock, beaning an important squid far below (which action will be important later). Hugh curses his life, runs off to town to get drunk, and generally behaves badly through the middle of the book, while Maryann sits at home, trying to keep things together.

She also hasn’t gotten a chance to tell Hugh she’s pregnant yet, since he flew off the handle so quickly and so completely. He eventually does come back, and they reconcile, with each other and with the sea…more or less.

That Salty Air is an exceptionally symbolic story, very obviously so. Sievert is clearly young and energetic, and I expect he’ll be someone to reckon with once he settles down a bit. This particular book has a lot of strong points – the particulars of characterization, the evocation of a particular landscape, the inky blacks and assured panel-to-panel transitions – but its story made this reader roll his eyes more than once. It’s a bit much to swallow.

But, on the other hand, it’s only ten bucks for over a hundred pages of comics by a real talent. It’s hard to beat that. And I expect Sievert’s next book will add some subtlety to the already impressive strengths of That Salty Air. He’s definitely a talent to watch.


Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He’s been reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.

Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Andrew Wheeler directly at acwheele (at) optonline (dot) net.

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Review: ‘Three Shadows’ by Cyril Pedrosa

Review: ‘Three Shadows’ by Cyril Pedrosa

This book will break your heart; I warn you now.

Three Shadows
Cyril Pedrosa
First Second, 2008, $15.95

Louis and Lise are farmers somewhere quiet and untouched, doting parents to their small son Joachim. Their life is bucolic, idyllic: “Back then…life was simple and sweet. Everything was simple and sweet…The taste of cherries, the cool shade, the fresh smell of the river… That was how we lived, in a vale among the hills…sheltered from storms…Ignorant of the world, as though on an island…Peaceful and untroubled…Then everything changed.”

Three figures appear ominously one evening, on horseback at the horizon. Somehow, everyone knows that they’re trouble, but they can’t be confronted. They disappear into the mist, into the distance. Joachim’s dog Diego disappears, and the shadows use his barking to lure the boy – and almost get him.

So Lise goes to the nearest big town to consult with Mistress Pike, whose sign reads “Midwife. Exorcist. Sympathetic Ear.” The truth is what they fear most: the shadows have come for Joachim. And they’re not going to stop.

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