Author: Andrew Wheeler

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: The Architect

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: The Architect

Imaginative literature thrives on the “what if?” story. What if aliens invaded Earth? What if vampires were real? What if a superpowered infant was rocketed to Earth from a doomed planet?

Or, in this case: what if Frank Lloyd Wright were an insane evil druid whose wrath extended years after his death?

OK, the architect in this graphic novel isn’t precisely Wright. He’s a prickly, arrogant, obnoxious know-it-all (so far, that doesn’t just describe Wright, but all architects) building his dream home (with some Fallingwater-esque elements) in 1969 Wisconsin. He’s running low on money, but that never stops arrogant, visionary architects in imaginative fiction – he just runs off to do some lectures to raise some money. Which leaves his young, city-jaded, hot-to-trot wife alone, and bored, in the company of the young, dashing, level-headed construction foreman. Do I need to draw you a diagram?

I draw a veil over what happens next, except to say that the bulk of this graphic novel  (which has seventy pages of story, for those counting at home) takes place in the present day, among a group of young people cleaning up and restoring the aforementioned dream home.

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Super Hero Comics and Art

Super Hero Comics and Art

  • News
  • July 19, 2007

I took my two sons (ages six and nine) off to the Montclair NJ Art Museum Thursday afternoon for an exhibition with the unwieldy title Reflecting Culture: The Evolution of American Comic Book Superheroes. (The picture at the top is the free giveaway comic that MAM has in lieu of a catalog or list of exhibits.)

The materials on exhibit are a roughly even mixture of original art and published comics, ranging from a 1906 Little Nemo in Slumberland page to an issue of Marvel’s recent Civil War. The focus, though, is on the major superhero comics characters, from the Golden Age through today. So there’s a lot of Superman and Batman in the earlier sections, and then a lot of Marvel heroes once the exhibit gets into the 1960s. The original art tends to be by major names – I remember seeing work by Dave Cockrum, Jack Kirby, Neal Adams, and Dave Gibbons – including some very well-known interior pages and covers.

The exhibition is organized around real-world trends and events: World War II, the Wertham years of the ‘50s, the “relevance” years of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and so on up to a display case of 9/11 comics. The small size of the exhibition and tight focus on superheroes doesn’t always work in its favor – their Wertham area contains no EC horror comics, and I didn’t even see any reference to Wertham’s claim that Batman and Robin’s relationship was essentially homosexual. There also doesn’t seem to be a guiding philosophy other than “comics reflected their world,” which is applied very simplistically and obviously. (There’s all the covers you expect from the late ‘60s, for example – the “Speedy is a junkie,” the “black Green Lantern,” the “why do you always help the purple people,” and the Nehru-jacketed depowered Wonder Woman.)

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Today’s Smoky Comics Links

Today’s Smoky Comics Links

  • News
  • July 19, 2007

Marvel editor Tom Brevoort posts Mark Millar’s original memo/pitch for Civil War.

Comic Book Resources presents the third part of their look at Homosexuality in Comics.

Blogcritics reviews a pile of DC and Image comics, starting with Dynamo 5 #3.

Blogcritics also has a Marvel comics review, and is particularly fond of Nova #4.

Forbidden Planet International reviews a couple of Marvel Comics from years past..

Comics Reporter reviews Ted May’s Injury #1.

Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog reviews the saga of the Mighty Marvel MegaMorphs.

Hannibal Tabu reviews his purchases this week for Comic Book Resources.

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Scream, Harry Potter, Scream!

Scream, Harry Potter, Scream!

  • News
  • July 18, 2007

Various torrent sites, and others, have posted what are claimed to be scans of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, implying that either a few copies of the US edition have escaped the strict security measures or that some sneaky hacker has Mad Photoshop Skillz. This has caused just one or two small news stories, such as:

The Boston Globe runs another countdown story, this time quoting the Massachusetts governor, who claims to be a big Potter fan. (And it may even be true, though any time a politician claims to love something that millions of his constituents are currently doing, it has to be a bit suspect.)

Peace Arch News, man, gives the South Surrey spin, man, on Pottermania, man.

The Sydney Morning Herald wants to let the book speak for itself.

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Big-Time Comics Links

Big-Time Comics Links

  • News
  • July 18, 2007

Comic Book Resources has the second half of their look at Homosexuality in Comics.

Brian Cronin at Comics Should Be Good has a new, useful, term for our collective little dictionary of comics: False Epiphany Characters. (Also for that same dictionary, and from the same place: Grace Notes.)

Steven Grant gives us a thumbnail history of the convention once and forever known simply as “San Diego.”

And Josh Elder (any relation to Will, I wonder?) of the Chicago Sun-Times looks at the launch titles for DC Comics’s Minx line.

Borders is moving Tintin in the Congo to the adult section in the USA as well (after British complaints), reports Fox News.

Edward Champion thinks the “real books” industry should take an idea from the comics world and institute “Free Book Day.” I think that’s a splendid idea.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Scout, Vol. 1

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Scout, Vol. 1

It’s a good time to be a comics fan of my age – someone in his thirties who started reading comics in the late 1980s – since there’s been a continuing wave of reprints of the better comics of those days in more permanent form. A lot of things that I hadn’t read in a decade or more, because the original issues are bagged up in longboxes now buried under other things in a messy basement, are coming back into print on slick paper with square covers. It’s very nice to have these things in a form that fits on a shelf, but I do sometimes worry that some things that I loved at eighteen won’t be as compelling to me at thirty-eight.

I think I was on board for Scout when Eclipse started publishing it in 1987; I’d been following comics for a year or so then, and I knew Truman’s work from GrimJack, which he illustrated over John Ostrander’s scripts. I know I loved it immediately, and have been known to grouse, in the years since, about wanting all of the sequel series that Truman had sketched out, way back then. (Scout: Marauder and Scout: Blue Leader, which I’m still waiting for…but I’m also waiting for Ty Templeton to return to Stig’s Inferno and Zander Cannon to pick The Replacement God back up, so I may just not know when to give up on things.)

I was a bit apprehensive to go back to Scout after twenty years. On the one hand, I was pretty sure I’d still be happy with Truman’s art, since the recent GrimJack reprints (on much nicer paper than back in the day) showed off all of the little details of his line work, and that still thrilled me. But I remembered that Scout was a post-apocalyptic story, and I’ve developed an allergy to those since having kids. (It’s just one of those things – if a book is set in the near future, I work out how old my sons would be in that world, or how old I might be, if I’m not dead yet, and try to figure out what I or they might be doing. Stories that slaughter my family and I, especially as part of megadeaths off-stage for cheap pathos, aren’t things I’m as interested in any more.)

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Science-Fictional-Type Links & Things

Science-Fictional-Type Links & Things

  • News
  • July 17, 2007

Fantasy Book Critic reviews Warren Ellis’s first novel, Crooked Little Vein.

BestSF has reviewed a few magazines this week:

Don D’Amassa’s Critical Mass has new reviews on the Science Fiction page, including Blake Nelson’s young adult novel They Came From Below, Robert Charles Wilson’s Axis, and Charles Stross’s Halting State.

D’Amassa’s Fantasy page also has new reviews: Steph Swainston’s The Modern World, Charles Stross’s The Merchants’ War, and others.

And D’Amassa’s Horror page has new reviews as well: Scott Thomas’s Over the Darkening Fields, the new Tales from the Crypt #1, and more.

Nader Elhefnawy, at Tangent, goes off on a dumb Christopher Hitchens quote from Atlantic Monthly to the effect that SF has a “dearth of sex.”

Elhefnawy also had an essay at Tangent about Michael Moorcock and censorship.

The Space Review has published a transcript of the talk, and the following question and answer session, given by NASA Administrator Mike Griffin at the recent Heinlein Centennial.

The Contra Costa Times has an article on the huge science fiction collection at the University of California-Riverside.

Ben Bova’s regular column in the Naples News is devoted to talking about his own Campbell Award-winning novel Titan, Campbell himself, and science fiction in general.

The Salt Lake Tribune looks at the interesting phenomenon of Christian fantasy novels.

Neth Space is annoyed that so many titles begin with the word “the.”

SF Scope reports on editor and author Gardner Dozois’s recent quintuple bypass heart surgery. Details are few, but it sounds like he’s recovering pretty well – I certainly hope so, and send him all best wishes. (In happier Dozois news, he recently turned in a new original anthology, tentatively entitled Galactic Empires, to Rome Quezada of the SF Book Club, and I’m sure that book will be another winner.)

Cory Doctorow has another one of his periodic essays at Locus Online this week, all about different kinds of visions of the future.

The soul-searching about reviewing on blogs continues unabated into a second week, as Larry of the OF Blog of the Fallen explains why he reviews.

Similarly, Patrick, of Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist, has a long post about reviewing, book giveaways, and blogging.

 

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Tintin is racist, Batgirl is sexist, Punisher is black…

Tintin is racist, Batgirl is sexist, Punisher is black…

  • News
  • July 17, 2007

Department of “Shoulda Seen That Coming”: in the UK, a government minister issues a stern warning that a particular book, Tintin in the Congo, contains “hideous racial prejudice,” and that no right-thinking Briton should ever, ever read it henceforward. Result? Sales increase immediately by 3,800 percent. (Forbidden Planet International has a longer story on the complaint, including the fact that the Commission on Racial Equality – and isn’t that a nice Orwellian name? – demanded that Tintin in the Congo be banned.)

The Beat is not happy with the final cover for Showcase: Batgirl. (And there’s no reason she should be.)

Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog remembers the halcyon days when the Punisher was, briefly, a black man.

Media Life Magazine thinks that Zudacomics is a really swell idea and the most wonderful thing since sliced bread – but they also think that comic books are “almost an industry,” so I’m not sure if we should believe them.

The Chicago Sun-Times looks at DC Comics’s new teen-girl-focused Minx line.

Bookgasm reviews the newest reprint trade paperback of the Fables series, Volume 9: Sons of Empire, written by Bill Willingham and illustrated by Mark Buckingham and others.

Publishers Weekly reviews a number of comics this week, including House by Josh Simmons and the first volumes in two maanga series, Gin Tama and War Angels.

Dana’s Marvel Comics Reviews, at Comic Fodder, hits the week’s high points, starting with New Avengers # 32.

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Fall of the House of Harry Potter Mania!

Fall of the House of Harry Potter Mania!

  • News
  • July 16, 2007

In honor of Daniel Radcliffe’s roving eyes, today here’s a picture of what Emma Watson looks like on a regular movie screen, and what she looks like in IMAX 3-D. Quite a difference, eh? (And if you want to see the photo I almost used here — which is probably not safe for work, and presumably is from Daniel Radcliffe’s stage work in Equus earlier this year in London — it’s here. The caption would have been something like "Hey! That’s not Hermione!")

NPR interviews Arthur Levine, J.K. Rowling’s American editor.

The Philadelphia Inquirer profiles J.K. Rowling.

The Guardian profiles Christopher Little, Rowling’s famously tough agent.

My god, even Eddie Campbell has gotten into the act. Must everyone in the whole wide world write about Harry Potter?

The San Jose Mercury News, running a bit behind, files the standard Harry Potter story (interviews with kids, librarians, and booksellers; lots of impressive numbers; thumbnail history) that everyone else was doing last week.

KansasCity.com thinks the Harry Potter readers will be writing their own fantasy novels in six years. (So, agents, if you start getting a flood of boy wizards in 2014, remember that Kansas City called it first.)

Newsday, from bucolic Long Island, New York, gets a bunch of people to recommend other fantasy books for Potter readers.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Apollo’s Song

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Apollo’s Song

Like Ode to Kirihito, this is a major graphic novel by Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy and “godfather of manga,” translated and published in English by Vertical Publishing. I won’t repeat the background here, but you click to the earlier review if you like.

(I’ll just wait for you to get back.)

Apollo’s Song is from the same era as Ode to Kirihito – it was serialized in Shukan Shoen Kingu in 1970 (Kirihito ran during 70-71) – and has similar concerns and motifs, though it seems to be less aggressively counter-cultural than Kirihito was. There’s a strong medical drama element in Apollo, and even more mystical/religious ideas than in Kirihito, including an on-stage pagan goddess who I believe is meant to be taken as real.

Tezuka clearly doesn’t fear anyone’s scorn; Apollo opens with a ten-page sequence about impregnation from the point of view of sperm, characterized as a vast army of identical men, all seeking one woman, the ova. The story proper begins immediately afterward, as a boy – apparently meant to be about fifteen or so – is brought to a psychiatric hospital for treatment after having been caught attacking and killing animals. The boy, Shogo, explains that he is the unwanted son of a prostitute (or perhaps just a kept woman…kept by a long series of different men) who hates love, romance, and all manifestations of “tenderness.”

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