Category: Reviews

In Waves by A.J. Dungo

In Waves by A.J. Dungo

A.J. Dungo obscures the central theme of his first graphic novel for a long time. The cover copy only hints at it. I have to assume that’s all on purpose. And, to be a fair reviewer, I feel like I should do the same.

But know that In Waves  is a true story, that it’s about something major and important in Dungo’s life – I hate to say “that happened to him,” for reasons that would only be clear to people who’ve read the book – and that is related to but very distinct from what In Waves says it is about. I might say a little more, at the very end here, if I can do it without spoiling.

In Waves says it’s about surfing. And it is: it’s a four-hundred page graphic novel that largely traces the history of the sport, from pre-contact Hawaii through the greats of the early twentieth century.  It’s informed and interesting, a cultural history rather than the story of a sport’s winners and rules and contests. But that’s just one-half of the book; as the minimal back-cover copy puts it, the other half of In Waves consists of Dungo’s “personal narrative of love, loss, and the solace of surfing.”

Dungo came late to surfing, personally, despite – as far as I can see – growing up in Sothern California, somewhere near the beach. His girlfriend, Kristen, loved to surf, as did many other members of her family, so that’s how Dungo got into it. That half of the book is the personal part, the part I’m going to avoid talking in detail about. It is a narrative of loss, in the end – Dungo constructs the story so the loss happens about mid-way through the book, but it’s clear from early on that this will not be an entirely happy story.

Dungo tells those two stories on crisp light pages – the present-day storyline in a green-blue, a couple of shades lighter than the cover, and the past in a similarly light amber. He gives them both lots of pages, plenty of room to tell the story, to have small moments in both timeframes. The modern story is more personal, more immediate than the historical one, as of course it has to be. The historical story is mostly background or explanation: what this all means, the deeper history or significance, and maybe what Dungo researched and learned about to process that loss. But the core of In Waves is his story, as it should be.

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

Maids by Katie Skelly

Maids by Katie Skelly

The most interesting creators are the ones you have to learn how to read. They tell stories their way, making their choices but not going out of their way to explain. And it can take reading a few books to figure that out: not all readers will want to spend that much effort.

I think I’m beginning to understand how to read Katie Skelly’s comics. I’m getting more excited, more interested, with each new book I read, which is a good sign: creators should be engrossing, should be exciting, as you learn what they care about and how to see things through their angles. So I may not have quite clicked with My Pretty Vampire , but there was something unique there, which brought me back for The Agency .

And now I’m back again for Maids , Skelly’s 2020 book. I think this is her most important book to date; it’s also her most recent major graphic novel, which might be saying the same thing in a different way.

This is a true story, at its core – a true crime story. As I think is her standard, Skelly works in a cinematic fashion, connecting scenes through images and having a clear “camera” that views the action on her pages. Also as usual, she doesn’t go out of her way to explain things: she’s not one for captions, and her people talk to each other in the ways real people do; they’re not going to explain themselves for your benefit.

It is 1933 France. Christine and Lea Papin are sisters, who grew up poor – dumped in a convent school by their mother. Christine has been a maid for the wealthy Lancelin family for some time; she’s just gotten them to hire Lea as well.

The hours are long, the work both endless and tedious and never enough. The Lancelins – mother and daughter – are not actively oppressive or cruel out of proportion to their station and time, but that still leaves a lot of ground for oppression and cruelty. It is a horrible life for the young Papin sisters. They see no other options, no ways to get any better life. And Lea has visions or breaks; if she was living in the modern world she would probably get medical treatment, but a poor woman in 1933 just has to muddle through.

Skelly’s work is about women, always. The murderers and victims here are all women; all the violence, in both directions, physical and emotional and economic, is from women to women. The anger and scorn and fear and disgust are all between women.

And I think Maids is the purest, most extreme expression of that so far from Skelly, the book where her cinematic eye and genre-fiction influences click together to tell one crisp story of death and revenge and oppression and horror. I don’t know that I’d recommend this book for people who haven’t read Skelly before, but I do recommend it.

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

REVIEW: Titans: The Complete Fourth Season

REVIEW: Titans: The Complete Fourth Season

The live-action Titans series had tremendous potential, from its source material to the pedigrees of the talent bringing the heroes to television. Titans failed to work from the first episode to the last. As a television series, it needed a bigger budget for better effects, and the caliber of actors needed to be stronger to pull off these larger-than-life personalities.

Most of the storylines were drawn from Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s seminal run from the early 1980s or the early issues from Geoff Johns and Mike McKone’s run in the 2000s. Both required a consistent tonality along with a budget to make the scope of the stories work.

In the fourth and final series, out now on disc from Warner Home Entertainment, the series tackled both Lex Luthor and Brother Blood. Either one could easily have been the Big Bad for these last dozen episodes, but they split the focus and, therefore, the team. The series never found its footing, either on the DC Universe service or its final home at HBO Max.

One of the things both runs celebrated was the group’s camaraderie, and the series split them up far too often and for far too long, robbing viewers of the very thing that worked in print. Add in the villain Jinx (Lisa Ambalavanar), now a former lover of Nightwing (Brenton Thwaites), and Bernard (James Scully), the wrong-headed lover to Tim Drake(Jay Lycurgo), (carrying over an egregious bit of pandering from the print side), and things were diluted, and the real sense of danger was mainly missing.

Wolfman carefully created a team that had someone for every genre, letting him and Pérez tell science fiction, occult, mystery, myth, and superhero stories. We’ve seen some of that, and the producers settled on magic to run through the final season, but then don’t do enough with it, Brother Blood (Joseph Morgan), or Mother Mayhem (Franka Potente). The other story, the growing connection between Luthor (Titus Welliver), and Conner Kent (Joshua Orpin), was an interesting story that needed more subtlety (and Krypto).

The strongest actors and characters in the show—Wonder Girl, Hawk, Dove—are long gone by now and are much missed. Instead, we waste time and space on threads that never quit epayoff, the worst being “Dude, Where’s My Gar?”, which is the obligatory multiverse episode using archival footage from The Flash, Swamp Thing, Shazam, Teen Titans Go!, Harley Quinn, The Joker, Batman (1966 and 1989), Superman the Movie, and a cameo from the much-missed Brec Bessinger’s Stargirl.

The final, “Titans Forever”, crams in too much to tie things up, suggesting things were not well plotted out in the Writers’ Room. And rather than Titans Together it’s Titans Apart, ending on a sad note.

The Blu-ray discs have a fine 1080p transfer in its original aspect ratio of 2.00:1 so visually it’s lovely to watch.  It’s well paired with the excellent DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio track.

Special Features include “Welcome to Metropolis” (5:00), “Baptism of Blood” (3:00), and “Mystical Women” (4:00). None are particularly enmlightening.

The Man in the McIntosh Suit by Rina Ayuyang

The Man in the McIntosh Suit by Rina Ayuyang

The publisher describes this graphic novel as a thriller, but I’d put it solidly in noir – that may seem needlessly nitpicky, but if you’re the kind of reader who has strong opinions on the location of the border between mystery and thriller, it may be helpful.

It’s written and drawn by Rina Ayuyang in a soft, mostly blue palette – I am not an expert on art or tools, but it looks like some kind of art crayon or soft pencil to me, with lots of texture and shades of a few colors but relatively muted lines drawn with a quick, energetic hand.

It’s 1929, somewhere in an agricultural field in Northern California. There’s a group of fruit pickers, who seem to be all Filipino. They aren’t exactly mistreated directly, but the larger white society is prejudiced against them, worker protections are scanty to begin with, and these guys do the poorest-paid, lowest-skill work: it’s a hard life. They all, we think, came here to the US to make money to send back home, either intending to return once they made “enough” or to bring more family members over, one by one, to make a new life in the USA.

The story starts centered on three of the workers, but one quickly becomes central: Alessandro “Bobot” Juaňez, trained as a lawyer in the Philippines and married to Elysia, who he hasn’t seen since he emigrated and hasn’t heard from in longer than he’s happy about. (The other two workers are Angel and Edison; they’re not unimportant, but Bobot is our viewpoint character.)

Bobot is mercurial, with a strong sense of justice and a tendency to do things when they come into his head rather than thinking them through. He’s clearly smart, but doesn’t always let his smarts guide him. His life hasn’t gone the way he hoped it would, but he seems to still be looking forward, planning a better life in California. But he wishes he would hear from Elysia: it’s not clear if he even knows whether she’s in the Philippines or America.

Bobot gets a delayed letter from his cousin, Benny, saying Elysia is in San Francisco; he steals Angel’s fancy suit – this gives the book its title, The Man in the McIntosh Suit , though the suit itself isn’t as important as the weight that title seems to give it – and heads out to find her.

And that’s where it gets noir – or more so, since “migrant workers looking for better lives among prejudiced locals” can already be pretty noir, and there were hints of that plot in the first pages – as Bobot looks for Benny, and gets caught up in the local Filippino community in SF. He gets a job in a small restaurant, alongside Danilo and Dulce, who know Benny – he’s away on some sort of trip, vaguely explained, when Bobot arrives.

He sees the woman Benny wrote him about: La Estrella, the star of the late-night Baranguay Club (probably a speakeasy of some kind, illegal in at least one way), the center of the nightlife of the Filipino ghetto. His impulses get the better of him, and he runs afoul of Renato, who runs the Baranguay and, as he says, pretty much all of the Filipino community in SF.

Bobot wants to get La Estrella away from the Club, and she’s…not uninterested in him. But it’s more complicated than it seems, and Renato might either just swat Bobot down or have work for him to do. And some other players have aims that are not entirely aligned with Bobot’s – for instance, who did send that letter, and why?

All that adds up to noir: people living tough lives, with tough choices, random violence, and outbursts of anger. Men and women in relationships sometimes hidden, sometimes not what they seem. People not who they seem, hiding or mistaken for others. All of them looking for more, for better, and willing to go to extremes for it. And, above all, people making bad choices: that’s the core of noir.

Bobot makes it out at the end of this book; the very last pages imply he will return again. Ayuyang is not done telling the story of this 1929. But McIntosh Suit tells a full story: it stands on its own. It’s a deep dive into a murky world, focused on that essential noir hero, the man who can’t stop himself from his impulses and keeps getting dragged deeper into problems.

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

I Was Their American Dream by Malaka Gharib

I Was Their American Dream by Malaka Gharib

Identity is important in American life – the “what are you” question that probably can be asked politely, but rarely is. We’re a nation that needs to put people into specific boxes, to celebrate or denigrate based on what your parents and ancestors were and did – or, more reductively, what you look like.

I’m sure similar things happen in other nations. But it’s so central to American life, especially if you’re not the default. As it happens, I am the default: male, Northeastern, very WASPy, and now middle-aged. But even people like me can see how it works if we pay attention.

So the result is: many, possibly most immigrant memoirs by first- or second-generation Americans boil down to: this is who I am, this is where I came from, this is what’s important to me and my family, and this is why that matters. Those are the questions they keep hearing, so they answer them. Those are the things that are assumed to be central to an American identity: what’s on the left side of the “something-American” hyphen?

Malaka Gharib grew up in a diverse city – Cerrittos, California, mostly in the ’90s – and still had to deal with that question more than most of her peers, because her family wasn’t one thing, like most of her schoolmates. (There’s a page here where she shows a schematic of her highschool, with every group – Koreans, Taiwanese, Filipino, Pakistani, Portuguese, Mexican – in their clusters, and her all alone in the middle.)

The back cover of I Was Their American Dream , Gharib’s debut graphic novel from 2019, is a very slightly different version of a page from the book asking that very question, in that blunt American way: “Malaka, what are you?” (And note, of course, it’s always what, like a thing, and not who, like a person.) The book is her answer.

The short answer is that her mother was Filipino and her father was Egyptian; they met in California, fell in love, married, and had this one daughter before divorcing. Gharib tells that story here: that’s the start of every American story, explaining who your people are. But Gharib has two kinds of people: the Filipinos and the Egyptians. She lives mostly with the extended family of her mother, but spends summers with her father in Egypt.

They’re both part of her identity. She’s different, special, unique. Which is not known for being a comfortable thing for a teenager.

American Dream tells that story – how she grew up, discovered she wasn’t typical, and how that worked out for her through school and college and early adult life. (She was around thirty when she drew this book.) The voice is the adult Gharib looking back: this is a book that could be read by younger readers, but not one specifically pitched to them.

Gharib had a second memoir, the more tightly focused It Won’t Always Be Like This , a few years later. That book is more thoughtful and specific, but American Dream is bigger – this would be the one to start with, I think. And Gharib has a mostly breezy tone and an appealingly loose art style throughout – she may be grappling with some serious themes, but not in a heavy-handed way. She seems to have had a happy childhood, and is celebrating that – comics memoirs so often come out of the opposite impulse that it’s important to mention that. This is the story of a happy childhood, in large part because it was quirky and specific and filled with interesting, loving people from two different cultures.

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

Keeping Two by Jordan Crane

Keeping Two by Jordan Crane

Each reader brings a different perspective to a book. A lot of the discussion about this book has focused on the central couple’s squabbling – about how couples fight each other, that snippiness you get with someone you love and don’t want to really hurt but still want to win when you’re exasperated with each other.

And that’s in there, to be clear. But it’s not as central, to my mind.

Instead, I read Keeping Two  – a magnificent, encompassing, deep graphic novel Jordan Crane put out last year – as a meditation and exploration of catastrophizing, of all the ways we think through what is happening now and what might have happened and how will I go on if it’s really the worst.

We open with a couple in a car, coming home from what was supposed to be a restful holiday weekend. Connie and Will are grumpy: maybe at that point where they’re just a bit sick of each other after so much time together in close spaces. Traffic is horrible – stop and go – and Will is driving too aggressively, following too close. Connie is reading a story out loud, some kind of literary novel about a couple (like them, not like them) and the tragedy of a pregnancy.

Crane uses that novel as a way to show the reader how to read Keeping Two: flashbacks, dreams, fiction, imaginings will be presented with wavy panel borders. Reality has solid straight borders. It’s a small difference, easy to mistake, so the reader has to pay careful attention as panels bounce back and forth between real and imagined. The mind can slip into fantasy at any moment – a stream of thought moving from what is to oh god, what if at any time.

It begins slowly. They do get home, before too many pages. They’re still snippy with each other, but clearly love each other – the couple in the novel are nastier, saying more cutting, thoughtless things, in a worse situation.

One of them goes out to pick up food for dinner; the other one stays to wash up the dishes left in the sink. And time passes.

Again, this is a book about catastrophizing. About those intrusive thoughts of they’ve been gone too long and what could have happened and what if they’re lying dead in a ditch. (In my family, the term is usually “if I get hit by a bus.”)

So reality is intertwined with the novel – we see the end of that couple’s story, and Connie pointedly says that story ends at a moment of inevitability but before we know what really happens, so the ending is our decision, each individually – and with those worries and intrusive thoughts, all the horrors we all imagine all the time. (We do, right? It’s not just me?)

It ends brilliantly. That’s all I’ll say about that part of it. I do wonder if Connie’s point about the novel’s ending is a clue about this ending, though I have to be very elliptical to avoid spoilers. There’s no obvious impending threat for Connie and Will, as there is for the novel’s couple – but something happened, and has not been, um, addressed before the last page, and so could have complications for one of them – potentially very serious complications. I don’t think that’s a “Lady or the Tiger” ending, the way the novel is: I think Crane’s ending is more straightforward – as evidenced by the fact that the last dozen pages have consistently solid borders: they’re together, in reality, living now.

Well, except. The very very end, the iris out. The panel borders disappear entirely, hidden on most of one full-page panel and gone on the closing double-page spread. It’s beautiful, emotionally satisfying, a perfect moment: a clear ending for Connie and Will.

All the catastrophizing is over, for this moment at least. Everything is all happening at once. And they are together for it.

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

Onion Skin by Edgar Camacho

Onion Skin by Edgar Camacho

Two young people meet cute, share their dreams with each other over the course of a long drunken night, find they have a lot in common, separate for a while, and find each other again to achieve those dreams.

He’s Rolando; she’s Nera. Unusually for a story like this, there’s no romance or hint of it – no reason not to, it just doesn’t happen. They connect in other ways, the way any two people do.

This is Edgar Camacho’s graphic novel Onion Skin . Other stuff happens, too – and he doesn’t tell the story in order to begin with – but I’ll get to that. There’s only one copyright date in the book, 2021, so maybe it was translated quickly (by Camacho himself) for US publication after it originally appeared in Mexico? Or maybe the date of US publication just isn’t listed, and it made its way north in ’22 or this year.

Rolando worked as a graphic designer in advertising; he hated it. He hated it so much he injured himself – not quite deliberately, but maybe unconsciously – in order to lose the job and free himself. He wants to do something else – probably related to art – but he’s a bit vague.

Nera lives in a broken-down food truck. She’s self-sufficient and self-assured, but wants to be cooking food for people and has no idea how to get there.

None of that is where we start in Onion Skin. We start with the food truck Dawg Burger – they don’t seem to serve burgers, but never mind that – on the run from three bikers, on a lonely road somewhere in Mexico. There are two people in the truck: we don’t know yet they are Rolando and Nera. They get away.

And then we flash back, and we realize this story will be told in at least two timeframes: something like “now” and something like “then.” We meet Rolando; we meet Nera. Eventually, they meet each other. And we keep flashing forward to the two of them in that truck, some time later – traveling around, making great food, gathering a big following, attracting the attention of those bikers, getting into danger and out of it.

Camacho is serious about his characters and their concerns, but not overly serious. The big conflict with those bikers is just a couple of clicks down from cartoony: they are clearly dangerous, but not homicidal, and we’re pretty clear Rolando and Nera will make it out OK in the end. And telling the story inside-out as he does lets him breathe new life into a kind of story we’ve all seen many times before: he can bounce between the high points and interesting moments and never get bogged down in getting from Point A to Point B.

He also brings a stylized art style, design-y and modern, to add more energy. He’s particularly fond of quirky sound effects, another source of fun here. On top of all that, the focus on food is making me want to eat chilaquiles!

Onion Skin is a fun, energetic, visually interesting book by a strong new creator, telling its story with verve and excitement. It already won a couple of awards in Mexico, including the first National Young Graphic Novel Award, which I hope will be enough encouragement for Camacho to keep going and make more books like this.

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

The Lighthouse by Paco Roca

The Lighthouse by Paco Roca

This is a 2004 graphic novel – should I say bande dessinée? Roca is Spanish, but my sense is the term is used generally across Europe – that the creator’s afterword notes was tweaked a bit for subsequent publications, finalized (or abandoned, if we’re being Da Vinci-esque about it) in 2009. This English translation – which Roca might have kibitzed on, as his afterword talks a lot about kibitzing on the French and Spanish and other editions in the first years – was done by Jeff Whitman for a 2017 American publication.

So it’s older that it might look, but maybe not entirely so. The original work is about two decades ago now, but I’m not sure Roca didn’t touch it, one last time, before this edition.

The Lighthouse is one of Paco Roca’s earliest works, I think, but that picture is muddy. He’s been translated out of sequence here in North America, with The House from 2005 only arriving in 2019 and Wrinkles from 2007 lapping it handily in 2008. But he was already, according to that afterword, deeply into the working life of a cartoonist, coming off a complex book called Hijos de la Alhambra and working intermittently on the series Los Viajes de Alexandre Ícaro (neither of which, from what I can tell, has been translated into English) before diving into El Faro (the original Spanish title for The Lighthouse).

It’s a relatively simple story, as that afterword says: mostly in one place, two major characters, some action but a lot of talking. It wasn’t something that would require a lot of research and page design, and not in color. That’s one of the things that appealed to Roca, he says: it was a palate cleanser (and maybe, if I’m being puckish, also a palette cleanser, given it’s not in color).

I’ll also point out that the US-edition cover is a collage of panels from the book, maybe because the US audience needed the obvious weenie: a book called The Lighthouse must have a lighthouse prominently on the cover. Roca includes a much better-looking painterly cover in that afterword, but it includes the carved breasts of a mermaid figurehead, which may have killed it for an American audience. (I hate to say it, but my country is crazy in some ways that are very obvious and very well known globally.)

Francisco is a young soldier, fighting for the Republican side towards the end of the Spanish Civil War. He’s fleeing a disastrous battle, hoping to get across the French border to survive, assuming he’ll end up in a camp there but knowing the Fascists will kill him if he stays. He doesn’t make it to the border, but he does meet and is taken in by Telmo, the aged keeper of a remote lighthouse.

The book is about the two of them: what Telmo tells Francisco during his recuperation, the boat they built, the way Telmo rekindles a love for life in the younger man. Telmo has plans and dreams and schemes, which he draws Francisco into wholesale, while the reader probably notices they may not be entirely based on reality.

The war must return in the end, of course. And the young man must move forward, while the old man, having given his lessons, is left behind. We know how this story has to go. It all does happen, and it happens well. Roca makes Telmo’s lessons valuable, even if they are based on less than solid footings.

This is probably a minor book in Roca’s career; I’ve only seen his The House  before so I’m mostly guessing. But it’s the BD equivalent of a bottle episode: solid, interesting, accomplished, working within a limited space and accomplishing what it can there.

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

Enlightened by Sachi Ediriweera

Enlightened by Sachi Ediriweera

I think I’m writing for people roughly in my position: respectful, interested, only slightly informed. People who might have unexpected or unhelpful resonances with a book about different lives and different traditions on the other side of the world. (Do those old-fashioned clothes from Southeast Asia look like epic fantasy garb to anyone but me?)

I say that up front. If this is your culture, your tradition…well, I hope not to be wrong, or infuriating. But I doubt I will be helpful or insightful; you know this better than I do. Reviewers don’t say that often enough, I think: what you see always depends on where you stand, so I want to be clear about where I’m standing and the things I can see from there.

Enlightened  is a graphic novel, published for middle grade readers, about the life of the Buddha, Prince Siddhartha. It’s by Sachi Ediriweera, a Sri Lankan cartoonist, designer, and filmmaker. It is subtitled “A Fictionalized Tale,” and it’s about Siddhartha’s search, but it’s not a work of religious proselytization.

Maybe I should say that again: if there is a Buddhist equivalent of Chick Tracts, this isn’t it. This is a lightly fictionalized biography of a person of world-historical importance, the kind of book young readers will find, hopefully enjoy, and then probably write a report about. Siddhartha’s core insights are presented here, and the path he followed to find them, but the point is to inform, not to convert. [1]

Edirirweera tells his story slowly and quietly, starting with Siddhartha as a young prince chafing under the restrictions of his over-protective father. Ediriweera drops us into this world without explaining it, but the outlines are quickly clear: medieval-level tech, vast gulfs of wealth and poverty, what seems to be many small kingdoms living together peacefully, a mature and self-contained civilization.

Siddhartha’s is a story about suffering: despite his father’s coddling, he learns that other people suffer, that life is often pain. His people believe that they are reincarnated over and over, living lives slightly better or slightly worse, depending on the choices they made previously.

So Siddhartha grows up, still coddled and kept in the palace, with almost no contact with the outside world. He marries the princess of a neighboring kingdom, Yashodara. And when their son is born, he realizes he must break out and see the real world, and that this is his chance. He does; he runs away from his palace and wife and son and father and luxurious life, to join a monastery and live as a poor monk.

Years pass. Siddhartha has no contact with his old life. He studies and meditates and thinks and talks to other monks. In the end, he comes to a revelation: life is suffering, suffering is caused by desire, and so the only way to end suffering is to not desire. He teaches his new Eightfold Path, he gathers students, he becomes famous.

That leads him back to his old family. In the way of religious stories, there’s a bit of anger, but everyone is completely convinced, almost immediately, by the obvious truth of Siddhartha’s path. And so everyone comes to follow his path, as they can. I may be making this sound like a radical philosophy – and it could be one, in a strict form, all leave-your-goods-behind and break-the-wheel – but there’s a lot of nuance. There’s a huge spectrum between desiring everything and desiring nothing, and Buddha’s path is a positive, peaceful one, as Ediriweera presents it – perhaps even assuming nearly everyone will fail, that eliminating all desire is a project over multiple lives, multiple passes through the world. I don’t see any sense of hurry here: it’s all about letting go of things, and the more you can let go of, the better off you will be in the end.

Ediriweera tells this story quietly, as I said, in an unobtrusive style with a few, mostly light colors overlaid on his black (for figures) and cool blue (for backgrounds) lines. It is a peaceful, undemanding look for the art, and entirely appropriate.

What I know about the life of the Buddha is scattered and random; Enlightened told me that story again in a clear, organized way and explained things to me that I probably didn’t realize I didn’t understand. It’s a fine, meditative, thoughtful journey through the thinking and life of a man we could all do well to emulate – and I hope its path into the hands of the younger readers of North America is simpler and easier than I fear it will be.

[1] I expect to see various astroturfed mothers pretending to support liberty demanding it be removed from school libraries, though. This is a county where yoga is feared as a gateway drug to Buddhism. And, no, I am not exaggerating .

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

Look by Jon Nielsen

Look by Jon Nielsen

Artie is a cute little robot in an apocalyptic, post-human landscape, roaming through a desert on Earth with a single job, that, frankly, seems a bit pointless. He has one friend, another robot, who pushes him to learn and discover more about his world, to break out of his programming, and to save something important.

I had to check the dates on Jon Nielsen’s graphic novel Look , because the parallels with the Pixar movie Wall-E were so obvious that I wanted to believe this was from the late ’90s and it was all parallel development. But no: this is a 2017 joint, so, unless I assume Nielsen (a fairly prominent web cartoonist) was living in a media-free cave during the Aughts, those parallels must be built-in, part of some plan.

Look is not officially a book for young readers, but it’s tone is very middle-grade and it’s entirely kid-friendly; I expect it has already found its way into a lot of school GN collections. And that means being similar to a twenty-year old movie might not be a problem. Ten-year-olds don’t know automatically which robot story came first, or have a deep knowledge of robot stories to begin with (oh, some ten-year-olds will have a deep and abiding passion for robot moves, or any other random thing, definitely) – or care.

Back to Artie. He’s the guy on the cover. His job is to circle a desert, endlessly, looking for something. Accompanying him, with a history we don’t know at first, is the vulture Owen – who, quirkily, seems to have a problem remembering things, like a different Pixar character.

The story here starts when Owen goads Artie into breaking his routine, going to The Village to talk to “Mr. Hew” (who turns out to be a wise old turtle – oh, and this may be a minor SPOILER, but every last character in this book is actually a robot, even if they look biological). Artie has realized that he doesn’t know what he’s looking for in the desert, just that he’s looking for something, and would like some more direction.

Mr. Hew doesn’t know what Artie is looking for either, and sends him to The Factory. Artie turns out to be defective – that should probably be in quotes; but you know what I mean; you’ve seen stories like this a thousand times – and the large scary robots at The Factory try to reprogram him to forget everything he’s learned and destroy his emergent personality.

Artie gets away, with Owen’s help. They head out of the desert to see what else is in the world. And then the rest of the plot happens; I won’t go into all of the details. It follows the path I mostly expected, though with some quirky surprises (ecological messages, sure, but a functional city portrayed positively?) and the requisite happy ending.

This is pleasant and zippy; Nielsen draws with thin crisp lines and gets a lot of life into the body language of his robots. It is a story pitched at that Pixar or kid-GN level, so don’t expect deeper insights or more complexity than that. But it’s just fine on that level, if possibly just a bit second-hand and familiar to an adult.

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

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