Category: Reviews

Review: Teen Titans Year One

teentitansy1-6915716The other day I was talking to James Kochalka, creator of Superf*ckers and the upcoming Johnny Boo children’s books, and he mentioned how difficult it is to find superhero books for his kids. Such offerings are mostly limited to comic book adaptations of cartoon series that were adapted from comics, he said, and “they’ve been pretty bad.”

For DC, the lifeline to younger readers has long been the Teen Titans, most recently through the TV spinoff Teen Titans Go! and Tiny Titans, which is almost too innocent for its own good. Now we also have Teen Titans Year One (issue #3 is out tomorrow), the “origin” story from writer Amy Wolfram.

The book succeeds on a number of levels, primarily in how it manages to be appropriate for kids without dumbing down. There are serious threats and the group faces violence and danger and interpersonal hangups. The art also perfectly fits the tone.

While I’ve enjoyed the series thus far, I doubt it’ll serve as a jumping-on point for any kid looking to get into comics. Another thing Kochalka complained about was how the youth-oriented Marvel and DC comics rely on readers coming into the book to have a firm understanding of the mythos, and that’s certainly the case with [[[Teen Titans Year One]]]. New comics readers will be fairly lost, if not out and out discouraged by the lack of exposition.

The Year One tag also only hampers the series, forcing it into a ridiculously incongruous existence amid decades-old comics. For instance, these Titans use cell phones and instant messaging, devices that weren’t around when the Teen Titans debuted. That’s nit-picking, to be sure, but when an editor’s note tells me this storyline happened right after [[[The Brave and the Bold]]] #54, I can’t help but be yanked out of the plot.

Van Jensen is a former crime reporter turned comic book journalist. Every Wednesday, he braves Atlanta traffic to visit Oxford Comics, where he reads a whole mess of books for his weekly reviews. Van’s blog can be found at graphicfiction.wordpress.com.

Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Van Jensen directly at van (dot) jensen (at) gmail (dot) com.

Review: Brian K. Vaughan’s ‘Batman: False Faces’

batmanfaces-1-4292282With the recent and much heralded conclusion to Y: The Last Man, the continued strong run of Ex Machina and a gig writing for Lost, Brian K. Vaughan is living pretty high on the hog nowadays. But it can easily be forgotten that Vaughan wasn’t always a superstar writer, and the new collection of comics from his formative years at DC serves as a telling picture of the artist in progress.

In Batman: False Faces ($19.99), we’re taken back to Vaughan as a struggling writer, working a day job at the psychiatric ward of St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. Three stories in the collection feature Batman or his rogues, and the fourth sets Wonder Woman against Clayface.

As Vaughan writes in his introduction: “[A]nyone who thinks that pitting a character made of magical clay against friggin’ Clayface isn’t a totally awesome idea is a dirty communist.” True enough. But while the setup is golden, the execution isn’t. What could have been a deeply introspective story is more cursory and trivial, while also moving a bit too slowly in places.

The Batman stories (which Vaughan wrote later) show the expected improvement. Further exploring issues of identity, Vaughan takes a thoughtful look at Batman’s two-bit-criminal alter ego Matches Malone in one story, and then he explores the diseased mind of the Mad Hatter. When Hatter says, “The only way you shall ever comprehend insanity is by ducking the shallow gerund,” Vaughan reveals the savvy and linguistic dexterity that would go on to make him a star.

[[[False Faces]]] isn’t for everyone, but for Vaughan devotees or those interested in the development of a talented creator, it’s a must-have collection.

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Review: Bryan Talbot’s ‘Alice in Sunderland’

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Alice in Sunderland
Bryan Talbot
Dark Horse Books, 2007, $29.95

Even for an artist as hard to pin down as Talbot, [[[Alice in Sunderland]]] is odd and unique: it’s one-half a local history of the town in northern England where Talbot lives now and one-half a popular history of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) and Alice in Wonderland. And then both of those halves are wrapped up in a metafictional package, since there are two narrators (the Pilgrim and the Performer, both of them Talbot) and one audience member witnessing this performance (the Plebian, who is also Talbot). To make things even more confusing, about half-way through the book Talbot breaks down and admits that Sunderland, the town he claims he lives in, doesn’t actually exist!

Except even that is a trick: Sunderland is a real town in the northeast of England, on the coast near Newcastle upon Tyne. And the various facts Talbot presents, about the history of Sunderland and of Alice, and the many connections between the two? Well, there’s an extensive list of sources in the backmatter, so I think they’re real. At least, most of them. I think.

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Review: Manga Sutra Volume One – Flirtation

 
It used to be, if you wanted to reach for the comic art form for your sex education you had to send a couple bucks to those want ads in the back of the cheesy magazines for “Comics – the Kind Men Like!” That stuff was a bit distorted; well, in the case of the ones that featured [[[Popeye]]], I’d have to say they were quite a bit distorted.
 
Trust the Japanese to get real. After all, they’ve been using the comic art form to foster all kinds of truly educational venues: business, economics, history, language, and so on. You’d figure sex ed would be a no-brainer. 
 
Be that as it may, doing sex ed comics in the form of a genuine story with a plot and character development is uniquely Manga. And TokyoPop brought the first volume of this series, Katsu Aki’s (Futari H) [[[Manga Sutra]]], to American shores. 
 
Manga Sutra is a sweet and sensitive series that focuses on the psychological aspects of sex as much as – actually, more than – the mechanics. The story is about a young couple, Makoto and Yura, who met through an arranged “marriage meeting.” This is sort of a counseled dating service, but one where the ultimate intent of marriage is upfront. The two 25 year olds dated, liked each other, got married, and only then discovered they were both virgins with a lot of understandable insecurities and a lack of any clue.

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Review: Locke & Key #1

You can understand why Joe Hill waited so long to publicly acknowledge that his father is famed writer Stephen King. For several years, Hill used that shortened version of his name (Joseph Hillstrom King in full) so that he could test himself in the fantasy/horror writing world without the spectre of his father lurking about.

Now jumping into comics for the first time with the new series Locke & Key ($3.99), Hill saw that experience affected by the elder King even before Locke & Key #1 hit shelves. While publisher IDW didn’t promote the famous father angle, it didn’t stop some such as Rich Johnston from playing up that lineage as a bit of comics speculating.

Those who actually read the book and didn’t just seal it away in plastic to put up on eBay at a later date were treated to a very good first issue that succeeds in areas a lot of novelists-cum-comics writers fail. That is, Hill clearly understands the medium. He knows when to rein in the verbiage and let artist Gabriel Rodriguez drive the story. 

The narrative is split in three parts: the teenaged protagonist Ty witnessing his father’s murder, sobbing through the funeral and relocating to a spooky house in the ominously named town of Lovecraft, Mass. Aside from a few awkward transitions, the story runs seamlessly.

First issues, of course, are incredibly difficult to do well, making it all the more surprising that in his first 32 pages of comics, Hill establishes a great deal of depth to his characters and lays out a handful of intriguing plotlines to follow. The last few pages are particularly effective, as Hill takes what was previously a down-to-earth story and shifts to a more supernatural paradigm.

It’s a series to watch, even if you aren’t just looking to make a buck.

Review: Crossing Midnight, Vol. 2

The news of Mike Carey writing a fantasy/horror comic set in Japan sounded too good to be true, and when Crossing Midnight debuted more than a year ago it struggled to live up to that promise.

Carey created a deep and supernatural world to backdrop his story of mystery: Two twins, Toshi and Kai, were born on either side of midnight, leaving each with an otherworldly power and putting them at the mercy of dark forces. But Jim Fern’s stiff art and some uneven storytelling held the series back. When sales weren’t strong, the rumors of a looming cancellation kickstarted.

After the so-so showing of that first arc, I gave up on the series. But, when Vertigo sent over a copy of the second volume (the cover seen at right is from DC’s website, but isn’t the cover on the actual book), Crossing Midnight: A Map of Midnight ($14.99), I realized I just didn’t give the series enough of a chance.

The volume picks up with Toshi, the female twin, struggling as a slave under an apparently evil spirit. She must fly through Japan at night, cutting unpleasant memories from people’s dreams and collecting them for some unrevealed purpose.

Following the archetype of most stories featuring children, Toshi’s impudence puts her and others into danger as she squares off against one of death’s faces. Perhaps because of the more fantastical nature of the content in this volume, Fern’s art loosens and adeptly adapts an ethereal tone. Later, Eric Nguyen takes over on art and, if anything, is an improvement.

Meanwhile, Kai stumbles onto a group of “telephone club” girls — early teens working essentially as prostitutes — and must help save them from an evil spirit that’s on the prowl. While this storyline feels a bit tangential to the larger theme, it is easily the high point for the series. Carey clearly has strong opinions of such clubs (he denounces them in a postscript) and how deplorable it is that they operate uncensored.

It is only then that the book goes farther than dipping a toe into Japanese culture, and Carey unleashes his horror-writing instincts. Sadly, the series seemed to be finding its footing just as the rug was being pulled out from under it. As Carey wrote on his Web site, [[[Crossing Midnight]]] will be wrapped up at issue #19.

Carey wrote that he knew a cancellation might happen, and all the plot threads will be wrapped up in that final issue.

Review: ‘Confessions of a Blabbermouth’

Mike Carey is a noted writer of both comics and prose – Lucifer, The X-Men, the “[[[Felix Castor]]]” novels – but, one might ask, what does he know about being a teenage girl? Probably not a lot…but he does have a secret weapon on his side: his daughter Louise is a teenage girl, and she’s the co-writer of this particular project.

Confessions of a Blabbermouth is the most recent publication of DC Comics’ Minx arm, which aims squarely at teenage and tween girls. (You remember: the audience that never, ever would read comics, so it was no use ever trying to get them interested – no, really, it’s just not worth it…until Sailor Moon ignited the manga boom and suddenly American comics companies were sitting on the sidelines watching those girls buy billions of dollars of Japanese comics? That audience.)

I’ve reviewed Minx comics twice before for ComicMix – Re-Gifters and Clubbing last August, and The Plain Janes and Good As Lilly in September. And the book that was most successful out of those four was Re-Gifters, written by one Mike Carey (without any assistance from anyone in the target audience), so I had high hopes for [[[Blabbermouth]]].

 

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Early Review: ‘Justice League: New Frontier’

 

Like many of you out there, a bad taste was left in my mouth coming off of Superman: Doomsday, so of course I was wary of DC’s next direct-to-DVD flick. I wasn’t a huge fan of the graphic novels (Isn’t that what we call thick comic books these days?), but I am certainly a fan of the [[[Justice League]]] and its animated counterpart. 
 
I’ll start with a warning to those who aren’t totally familiar with The New Frontier and its universe, but ARE fans of the established animated DC universe: this is a whole new direction from shows like Justice League Unlimited and others, but it is full of exciting DCU fan favorites. In fact, my biggest complaint about [[[Superman: Doomsday]]] was that there were no outside DC heroes, even though they were all over the original story. But I digress.
 
Looking at the animation first, I was very pleased that Bruce Timm (main creator of the animated DCU) and Darwyn Cooke (wirter/artist of The New Frontier graphic novel) were able to find a happy medium between the already established look of the animated Justice League and the very stylized look of Cooke’s art, thought I do think the eye-slits works much better for Superman than the baby blues. The entire artistic feel practically beamed with that golden age look, which is what attracted me to the books in the first place.

 

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Postcards edited by Jason Rodriguez

Everyone has a story – at least one. Every human life could be told in some way, to illustrate a point, or evoke an emotion, or just entertain an audience. Postcards attempts to tell some of those stories, or to create stories based on tiny pieces of real people’s lives, almost randomly – to invent stories out of the smallest of seeds.

Jason Rodriguez, author of the Harvey-nominated Elk’s Run, gathered up a bunch of vintage postcards, sent them to various artist-writer teams he knew, and asked for comics about the people who sent the postcards. In theory, it’s a great idea. (Of course, everything is wonderful in theory.) In practice, this particular collection of postcard-inspired stories are nearly all sad, depressing tales, and the relentless one-note gloom keeps any of the stories from really standing out. It’s not clear whether Rodriguez’s instructions were responsible for this, of if the choice of creators led to the unremitting bleakness, or if it was just bad luck. Rodriguez’s prefaratory notes to each story do make him seem like a micro-manager, though, with explanations that he gave this postcard to this person expecting X, and that he was sure another artist would be just right for another postcard because of Y.

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Graphic Novel Review: Del Rey Manga Round-Up, Part One

shugo1-8375909Let me be honest: I don’t know all that much about manga. I’ve read a few series (going back to Area 88 and Kamui, twenty years ago during the first attempt to bring manga to the US), but I’ve never really gone really deeply into the field. Well, I’m hoping to remedy that now. I’ve got a big pile of first volumes of various manga series, and I’ll be doing weekly reviews of about four of them at a time. (I’m aiming for Fridays; let’s see if I can hold to that schedule.)

We’ll start off with some books from Del Rey (all originally published by Kodasha in Japan), mostly aimed at young teenagers. (At least, all but one of these is marked “Teen: 13+,” but, from the content, I suspect the real Japanese readership, and possibly the American readership as well, is tweens to young teens.) This week’s batch also are primarily aimed at girls — I think.

First up is Shugo Chara!, which translates roughly to “Guardian Characters.” It’s by two women who work under the name Peach-Pit, and it’s about a fourth grader who discovers three eggs in her bed one morning.

Okay, I have to back up already. Amu, our heroine, is explicitly in fourth grade — we’re told that several times — though the structure of the school, and the maturity of the characters, would seem to put them more naturally in middle school. (Trust me; I’m the father of a fourth grader.) And, from an American perspective, it’s really bizarre that a story about fourth graders would be marketed to teens – or even tweens, as I suspect is actually the case here. In the US, kids generally only want to read about other kids their own age (maybe) or, preferably, a few years older. Fourth and fifth graders read stories about middle schoolers, middle schoolers read Sweet Valley High and the like, and high school students either stop reading for pleasure entirely or read stories about people in their twenties. Maybe, like so much else, that’s different in Japan – there is the well-known love of the small and cute there

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