Category: Reviews

As you might be able to tell from the year in the post title, I’ve gotten more than a little lackadaisical about keeping up with this annual series of the best in comics created by North Americans. (I reviewed 2006 at the beginning of 2007, 2007 later in 2007, 2008 in 2008, 2009 in 2009, 2010 in 2011 after the next book was published, 2011 in 2012, 2012 in 2013,  2014 in 2014, and have so far missed 2015, 2016, and 2017. If it were still my job to keep up with things being published, I would probably be deeply ashamed of myself — but it hasn’t been for a decade now, so I’m not.)

But I’m still interested in good comics, as always. So here I finally am with the Jeff Smith-edited The Best American Comics 2013 , only four and a half years after it was published and six-and-a-half to seven-and-a-half years after the work in it originally appeared.

This is the point where one is supposed to say “better late than never,” but I don’t want to tempt anyone. “Best of” volumes always have a problem with age: even in the best of times, the beginning of the year they celebrate is about eighteen months before publication, and sometimes it can be even longer. The Best American Comics has an idiosyncratic September to August “year” to begin with, which makes it more convenient for their publishing schedule but can be confusing to someone trying to keep track of when things were published. (Although there’s no real reason to bother to do that, if you’re not running a media outlet or reprinting books for a living.)

Anyway, in this fine book are full stories and excerpts (more of the latter, as usual) from comics works originally published from September 1, 2011 through August 31, 2012 and made by people either currently resident in North America or “North American” (whatever that means). Translations would be OK as long as you’re French Quebecois or Mexican, I suppose, though I don’t recall seeing any of either in this series so far. (Too bad the old Yiddish publishing industry died out: it would be fun to see that in the modern comics world.)

The usual suspects are represented with the expected work: Alison Bechdel with an excerpt from Are You My Mother?, Craig Thompson with one from Habibi, Leela Corman with a bit from Unterzakhn, Eleanor Davis with “Nita Goes Home,” Derf Backderf with some pages from My Friend Dahmer, and stories from Laura Park, Kate Beaton (who also provides the cover), Gabrielle Bell, Vanessa Davis, and Paul Pope. There’s something of a tropism to cartoonists over teams, which is probably mostly a reflection of what the literary/artistic end of the comics world is like.

More obviously commercial work is represented, too, of various kinds: Faith Erin Hicks is here with an excerpt from Friends With Boys, Tony Puryear with a piece from Concrete Park (before it became a series, I think), and Terry Moore with some of Rachel Rising. All in all, there are 30 comics stories here from 33 creators, with Evan Dorkin showing up twice, as writer of a story with Jill Thompson and cartoonist of a collection of his “Fun” gag strips from Dork!

Some people you might expect are missing: the Hernandez Brothers, Dan Clowes, Peter Bagge, and Charles Burns are ones I thought of. But, without doing tedious research, I’m not sure what they published in that time period, if anything. And anyone interested in a book like this is going to know who they are to begin with — making room here for Sophie Goldstein and Sammy Harkham and Jeremy Sorese is probably better, if we’re making judgments like that.

As always, it’s a kaleidoscope of very different kinds of comics. I tend to check to see if the guest editor has tastes wide enough that there’s at least one story in the book that I don’t like or get at all — paradoxically, that’s what makes the best editors. Smith doesn’t manage to do that, which means either my tastes keep getting wider or they’re very in tune with his to begin with.

Any book in this series is worth reading, if you like comics and want a sampler of what’s good out there. I found 2013 a little less adventurous than some other years, but it’s always impossible to tell if that was the year or the editor. Libraries have a lot of these books; check ’em out there. It’s what I do, these days.

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

To be a sad sack, a character has to be sad. If she’s just as put-upon by life, but has a chipper attitude the whole time, she turns into something else. I’m not sure if we have a name for that something else, but maybe we can start calling her a Lucky Penny.

Penny Brighton would be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl if she were a supporting character in someone else’s story, but Lucky Penny is her story, so she’s just manic. She’s also a mess, but it’s not entirely clear how much of that is her fault. In a fictional universe, luck can be a real thing that molds lives, and maybe Penny is just cursed to fail every single luck roll.

Her book is Lucky Penny; it’s a comedy in graphic novel form — not quite a romantic comedy, closer to a comedy of errors. It’s by writer Ananth Hirsh and cartoonist Yuko Ota, who work together regularly and also appear to be a couple.

It opens with Penny, who is somewhere in her twenties but not precisely an adult, losing her clothing-retail job and her apartment in the same day. (The apartment should have been a longer-term issue, since her roommate Helen is moving away to get married, but I get the sense that Penny doesn’t make “plans” the way other people do.) So, since her judgment and adult skills are so good, she moves into Helen’s vacated storage unit (cheap!) and cajoles Helen into getting her a job at the family-owned laundromat, where she will be bossed by Helen’s kid brother David. (I can just barely believe in a laundromat that has one person working there full-time, to watch it, but two at once? That doesn’t seem right. What do you do working in a laundromat?)

Penny is energetic and lackadaisical and would be happy-go-lucky if she consistently was lucky or had more things to be happy about. But either her own lack of adult skills or the weight of the universe continually throws obstacles in her way — luckily for her and us, this is a comedy, so they’re funny obstacles. She does fail to plan for a lot of things — how will she stay warm in that unheated storage unit? how will she handle showers and other bodily needs living there? what kind of security does a roll-up door provide when you’re inside it? is she saving up to get an actual apartment? does she go shopping for food ever, or just live on her own manic pixie energy? — but, again, this is a comedy, so I should just relax.

And it is funny. Penny is a Weeble — she gets bounced around, but nothing in this particular fictional universe can actually knock her down. This is not the story of how she learns adult skills and finds a sensible apartment that she can afford, and starts taking night classes in double-entry accounting to get her foot on the ladder of success. It is the story of how she meets a cute guy at the community center, tries to scam him to get free shows, and ends up dating him in the end. Oh, and saves him from her evil boss’s plot of destruction, because Lucky Penny makes a hard left turn into another, but equally silly, genre at the end.

This is not a book to take seriously. Penny is a world-class goofball, and her world has strong goofball tendencies to begin with. And that ending genre-switch comes totally out of nowhere. But it is funny and amusing: Hirsh’s dialogue and captions are smart, and Ota is a fine cartoonist of moods and manic energy.

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

There’s not a whole lot to say about this book as a book, so it might be time for some Book-A-Day behind-the-scenes. You see, to keep the hopper fed — especially early in the year, which sets the tone and energy for the whole project — I’m making sure to read at least one book a day, and that generally means a book of comics. (Call it a graphic novel or a bande dessinee or a tankobon or a trade paperback or whatever you want: a book-format work of comics.)

Actually, so far, every single day it is a book of comics. Some other things, too, on top of that, but the one book every single day is comics. (I’ve got a book going in the smallest room of the house, one going by the bed, and one going here next to my computer, and I’m also reading a “real” book of prose every week, but the comics are the day-in, day-out engine that keeps this running.)

Sometimes I plan to read a particular book: I’m working through my longer graphic novels right now, for instance. But I might find, as I did one day recently, that it’s deep into the evening and I haven’t touched that book. So it’s late and I’m tired, but I want to keep the engine going. For times like that, I have a few things I know I can read quickly.

One of them was Bizarro Heroes , a 2011 collection of Bizarro comics by Dan Piraro with a superhero theme in one way or another. Bizarro is a single-panel daily cartoon anyway, with no continuity, so it’s all one-off jokes to begin with. So it would be the perfect strip to birth a series of one-off thematic books like this — get some intern earning “college credit” to tag all ten-thousand-plus strips in a database, input some search criteria, and prepare to pump out product.

Sadly, the era for one-off thematic books (Bizarro Golf! Bizarro Tennis! Bizarro Smug Vegetarianism! Bizarro Inexplicable Melancholy!) ended not too long after Piraro launched Bizarro in 1985, and his obsessions were never all that in tune with mass America to begin with. So I don’t think the glorious era of themed Bizarro books ever got off the ground. But this one does exist, and superheroes are even hotter now than they were in 2011.

Bizarro Heroes is about what you’d expect: a hundred pages of comics, generally one to a page, all with jokes about superheroes. Piraro knows the obvious stuff, but clearly isn’t a superhero geek: he makes a Batman/Manbat joke that shows he didn’t know there was an actual Man-Bat in the Batman comics. So these are sometimes jokes about other things using superheroes, sometimes jokes about how superheroes are silly, and sometimes jokes about the usual furniture of capes and secret identities. About half of the cartoons are in color; the rest are black and white. They seem to be entirely from the decade before the book — I found some dated as early as 2000, but they mostly come from 2007-2010.

If you’re in the market for a book of single-panel cartoons about superheroes, you probably don’t have many choices. Even with the lack of competition, though, this is a pretty good choice — as long as you aren’t so much more geeky than Piraro that his lack of geekitude will annoy you (and there definitely are plenty of guys like that; you’ll know if you are one).

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

Reading a book at four-year intervals is probably not the best way to keep it in the front of one’s mind. But I read the first two volumes of Shoulder-A-Coffin Kuro (one and two) back in 2010, and then the third in 2014, so, since it’s 2018 now, I couldn’t continue any earlier than now, can I?

(It would be nice to have a time machine, but, in real life, “today” is always the earliest anything can be done.)

So here I am in 2018, having just read Volumes Four and Five of Shoulder-A-Coffin Kuro, a comic I remember enjoying quite a bit back then. But, this time, I’m not as enthusiastic about Satoko Kiyuduki’s world and storyline — much of the dialogue feels like a lot of pseudo-philosophical windiness that doesn’t actually say anything (that could be translation issues, though, or lack of cultural context on my part) and the vertical 4-koma format (except for some pages that read right-to-left like regular manga, to trip me up) forces every interaction and conversation into the same four-box structure with a punch-line-like zinger at the end.

Kuro is a young woman, but precisely how young is difficult to say. She’s drawn to look pre-teen, but that could just be a style. She was cursed by a witch, for reasons and in a way that still isn’t entirely clear at this point, and has to wander the world, lugging her coffin, until she either becomes a witch herself or dies. (As finally becomes semi-explicit in these volumes.) This is not nearly as dramatic as you’re hoping it will be. Instead, she does a lot of vague talking about what it means to be a traveler, except when other characters are saying similar, and if possible even vaguer, things.

We also get an origin for that witch — I think; it’s someone’s origin and it’s not Kuro’s — somewhere in the middle here. It’s sad but vaguely pointless, unless meant to underline that life is arbitrary and capricious and that everything kinda sucks. The witch is also traveling, though she doesn’t have strong opinions on the subject the way other characters do. And they’re traveling through vaguely fantasy-ish lands, nowhere in particular and far away from cities and large groups of people and anything particularly exciting.

Kuro does occasionally wander through pieces of other stories along her travels, but she’s always at the center: everyone is happy to stop whatever they’re doing to engage in long conversations with the little girl lugging her own coffin. Late in the second volume, someone actually tries to kill Kuro, which at least adds a bit of variety. It doesn’t take, of course.

Kuro is not as mopey as she could be: she’s more dogged, in that essential manga way, devoted to keeping on moving forward and being as positive as she can be until something new happens. That’s encouraging, but I still wanted things to happen here, and not just have a moment of “oh, gosh, we all perceive this area differently! isn’t that odd” before Kuro and her companions move on.

So: the 4-koma format is inherently episodic and distancing, and is tending to make Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro spin its wheels through the same few philosophical thoughts at this point in its life. And sometimes mysteries are much more enticing than their solutions: I think this is a fine example of that effect. The fact that this book is published at really long intervals — a sixth volume, I see, just came out last fall — doesn’t help much, either.

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

I believe I’ve had this book on the shelf for ten years, which means it’s one of the small number of things that survived my 2011 flood. (That destroyed my entire basement and somewhere around 4,000 books.) I’m not sure why or how this book survived, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t managed to read it until now largely because Manga Sutra is unsuitable for reading on a public train, where I read most of my book-format comics.

In any case, I read Vol. 1 of this series for a “Manga Friday” post at ComicMix back in August of 2008, and finally got to Katsu Aki’s Manga Sutra, Vol. 2 in February of 2018.At this rate, I could get through the remaining two US collections by the time I retire, which would leave me time to learn Japanese to read the seventy-two tankobon volumes (to date as of now; it’s still running) in my copious spare time.

Or maybe not.

Manga Sutra, sometimes known as Step Up Love Story (the title of the anime adaptation) or Manga Love Story, is a combination romance story and sex manual. It’s an odd romance, since it begins after the two main characters are already married and in love. But it’s a more typical sex manual: those tend to be for people who don’t know what they’re doing, and these two very inexperienced young people have no idea what they’re doing.

Makoto and Yura Onoda appear not to have had sex before getting married, with each other or with anyone else. They also seem not to have thought about sex, or possibly even known sex existed before that point, at least on Yura’s part. (They both have families filled with horndogs, though — his older brother and her younger sister most prominently — implying their extreme inexperience is purely for ease of storytelling.) They’re having a lot of sex now: this second volume takes place a few months into their marriage, when they’ve most mastered inserting Tab A into Slot B in ways that both of them generally find appealing, and they do it most nights.

There are problems, of course, or else what use would be the sex manual? Makoto has trouble getting and keeping an erection some of the time, which is largely solved in this volume by Yura learning that blowjobs are a thing and being taught how to do them by her kid sister, with the aid of the requisite banana. On the other side, Yura has not had an orgasm from sex, and probably hasn’t had one at all, and that’s not quite solved yet. (Makoto was performing oral sex on Yura earlier than she on him, so perhaps he just hasn’t had as effective a teacher as Yura did. Or maybe one breakthrough per volume is the maximum allowable.) And both of them are hugely apprehensive, and Yura deeply embarrassed, about talking to each other about sex other than the most basic “tonight?”

Starting to write this review, I was surprised to learn that this series is still running, after twenty years. And I wondered: is it locked into time like Kinsey Milhone, so that Makoto and Yura are still newlyweds in the late ’90s and not that good at sex? Or have they been leveling up consistently since then, and have sex powers over 9000? Either way could be fun.

Manga Sutra is a bit old-fashioned, so that it’s not too far ahead of anyone who might come to it. It’s also a bit old-fashioned because it’s a bit old at this point — twenty years is a whole generation. Old-fashioned generally means the sex is tasteful: penetration is only shown as cutaway graphics and genitalia are never clearly drawn. But old-fashioned also means those wacky families nudge-nudge wink-winking tediously, and a gaggle of office ladies trying to entice Makoto into an affair — luckily, he’s too in love with his wife (or too oblivious) to even notice.  In many ways, Manga Sutra is your father’s sex-instruction comic. And, if you need or want that, four volumes like this are out there for you.

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

We all regret our twenties. Some of us regret how quickly we settled down and got boring, and some of us regret that we didn’t settle down and get boring, at all or quickly enough.

I’m one of the former; I think Julia Wertz is one of the latter. Museum of Mistakes is the big collection of the comics she made at the time, and somewhat afterward, about her not being boring.

(Well. not exactly: Wertz shows herself as a massive introvert and an alcoholic, who spent way too much time in a tiny apartment making comics and drinking. One might well think of that as being boring.)

These days, artistic development happens in public more often than not, and it was that way for Wertz: she started publishing comics about her early-twenties life in San Francisco as “The Fart Party” about a decade ago, turned some of those comics into self-published zines soon afterward, and then turned those into books. She had two collections of Fart Party — I reviewed the first one, more or less, for Comic Mix in 2008 — and then went to a bigger company for Drinking at the Movies , which was billed as a full-length memoir but was really another collection of somewhat linked stories, all about her life at the time. It could have been Fart Party 3, but it wasn’t. (Big companies are not likely to start off a brand-new relationship with a #3.)

The big-company thing didn’t entirely work out for Wertz: she was part of the land-rush for cartoonists (especially autobiographical, especially female) in the wake of Persepolis and some other big successes. And the thing about a publishing land-rush is that a lot of stuff — good, not-as-good, half-baked — is published by people who haven’t figured out yet how to replicate success, and are hoping they can hit the target enough times to work out a coherent plan. Wertz’s comics were real and raw and true, but they were pretty far from the things that were working really big in those days, so it’s not surprising that Drinking didn’t rocket her to fame and fortune.

(And, possibly as important, Wertz was really ambivalent about fame and fortune. Around the same time, there was nearly a TV show based on Fart Party, but, as she’s told the story afterward in her comics, she sabotaged it, partly on purpose and partly unconsciously.)

Since the world loves irony, her book after the big-company book was stronger and more of a clear step forward in telling longer, more unified stories — that was The Infinite Wait , which brings us up to as close to now as Wertz got in her career. She hasn’t published much in the past half-decade or so; she got into “urban exploration” and maybe just living her life for a while instead of turning it into comics immediately.)

So this book, from 2014, is still (I think) her most recent. It collects all of The Fart Party and The Fart Party 2, plus another book’s worth of other strips: a section of stuff that wasn’t Fart Party 3 because she did Drinking instead, some pre-Fart Party work, sketches, zine work, and other things.

This is the definitive early Wertz: the snotty slacker who had a series of lousy food-service jobs, had her boyfriend move cross-country and then break up with her, and who herself moved from San Francisco to Brooklyn. She loved cheese and wine, she took as little shit as she possibly could, she swore a lot, and she had a weird childhood.

She’s probably still some of those things, or is the person formed by being those things in her twenties. Any book, especially a memoir, is a snapshot of who that person was at the time, and Wertz was very good at snapshots, with her deliberately crude art and sarcastic dialogue. No one wants the burden of being the voice of a generation, but Wertz did speak for a lot of millennials in the late Bush II years– grumpy, disgruntled, stuck in a crapsack world built by other people, looking for their own moments of happiness and fulfillment. She was good at it by not trying to do anything like that: she just told stories of her own life, which was close enough to a million other lives to catch fire. It was a Fart Party, and we won’t see it’s like again.

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

This book has more panels introducing its characters than any comic I’ve ever seen in my life. I know it was originally published as twelve individual issues of the Jack Staff comic, but it’s much more common than that — so often that I started to think this had been serialized somewhere, no more than five pages at a time, for an audience with short-term memory loss.

It’s clearly on purpose, even if I’m not sure why creator Paul Grist is doing it. Is it some meta-commentary on superhero comics? A sly jab at the big comics universe-building instinct, so that every important character gets a hook and a logo, ready to spin off into his own book at the drop of a hat?

In any case, that’s how Jack Staff, Vol. 1: Everything Used to Be Black and White goes — every time the plot shifts to Jack, or to Becky Burdock, {Spoiler} Reporter, or to Tom Tom the Robot Man, or to The Spider, or to Bramble & Sons, Vampire Hunters, or to Detective Inspector Maveryk, old-fashioned copper, there’s a logo-like treatment of their names splashed on the page, and usually some purple prose that almost but not quite tells the true believers to face front.

I suspect that Grist does not take his superhero comics entirely seriously, but that’s fine: I haven’t been able to do that for at least two decades now myself. And Jack Staff comes across as a book in which the creator is having an immense amount of fun, and is choosing the plot elements that make him cackle in delight as he draws them. That may make for a certain amount of whiplash, as he jumps from plot thread to plot thread every couple of pages, but it’s all clear, and the reader certainly has no trouble remembering who any of the characters are.

In any case: this is a British superhero comic, so it’s required by law to be somewhat self-effacing and to subvert expectations of the genre at least once per twenty-four pages. Grist is entirely happy to do that, but his subversion is of an older school than Moore or Morrison: he’s someone who seems to doubt, down deep, that dressing up in silly costumes and punching people is really a good solution to serious problems. That is entirely true, but it can be a fatal attitude for superhero comics unless it’s coupled with a light touch.

Grist does also have a light touch, so we’re good there.

Jack himself is a mildly brick-like superguy, dressed in his nation’s flag and first encountered during WW II doing his bit to defend democracy and battle the evil Hun. He’s clearly tough to some level, but he can’t fly or do any of that obvious super-stuff, and he needs a big stick to hit people adequately. On the other hand, he does seem to be much, much older than he has any right to be, and still looking mid-thirties in these stories from the late ’90s. There are more serious supernatural elements — I mentioned vampire hunters above, and they do have vampires to hunt — and one villain we see has definite weather-control powers. So this is a real superhero universe, even if we’re just seeing a quirky British corner of it.

I originally read Grist’s crime comic Kane in the ’90s — it looks like I kept up with it almost to the end, missing the last collection — and bought this 2004 collection about four years ago with a thought of maybe getting into his other big self-published series. There are three more Jack Staff collections, I see, though this series also seems to be definitively over. I might keep going, if I can find the books: this are fun adventure comics that don’t take themselves too seriously, and Grist’s inky art and smash-cut plotting make his pages lively and zippy.

If you, too, are willing to accept that superheroes are inherently goofy, you’ll probably enjoy it as well.

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

For those of you scoring at home, this is the major Brandon Graham comic that does not include a random hardcore sex scene thrown into the middle (The one that does is Multiple Warheads . Graham toiled in the sex-comics vineyards for several years, and one sex-comic idea blossomed or transformed into an idea that could be a comic about other things than sex.)

This is the major Brandon Graham comic that features a cat with drug-induced superpowers, though. So if that’s the one you wanted: here you go.

(There’s also Prophet, but I think he just wrote that and doesn’t own it, either. I’m enough of a purist to have a preference for the comics that someone owns and does all the work on.)

As I understand it, King City is a slightly earlier work than Multiple Warheads, though I think the publication history of both stories is a bit mixed and mingled. (And Prophet is later than both of them. Maybe still going on now, for all I know!) In any case, it was eventually twelve issues of comics, in two big clumps, from first Tokyopop and then Image. This big collection of the whole shebang came out in 2012 and says it was co-published by the two companies. (My guess is that Image did all of the work and just cut Tokyopop a check based on whatever they owned/controlled, but I am a noted cynic.)

King City is a young man’s comic, about a young man: Joe, the Cat Master who would have been the title character if Tokyopop hadn’t balked at Cat Master for a title. He’s back in King City after a few years away, learning the secrets of Cat Mastery somewhere in California and getting his weapon/partner Earthling along the way. In case you’re wondering, the cat doesn’t talk, or do anything particularly un-catlike except when Joe injects him with a syringe to unlock weird powers. Earthling is pretty much here to be Joe’s random superpower, and to give Graham an excuse to draw a bucket full of cat regularly.

Joe meets back up with his old friend Pete, who doesn’t have any particular super-stuff, but does strange odd jobs for one of the local gangs. King City is deeply weird, in a manga-meets-indy-comics way, so the gangs are inscrutable and hermetic and don’t seem to spend any time doing anything we’d normally think of as criminal activity — but they are dangerous, and have their own weird powers and abilities. There’s also Joe’s old girlfriend Anna, who he’s still pining for, but she’s now with Max, a shell-shocked survivor of the zombie war in Korea who is now addicted to the drug chalk (which turns its users, eventually, into chalk).

Those are the characters, more or less. There’s also Beebay, the mysterious woman who hires Joe for her gang, Pete’s nasty employers and the water-breathing nameless alien girl they hire him to transport (until he falls for her and pulls a double-cross), a few other cat masters who show up for the big showdown, and a gigantic Lovecraftian-cum-Akira-ball-of-flesh that must be stopped in the finale.

Well, stopped by someone. Not necessarily our heroes. It’s not that kind of story.

Graham bounces from just-slightly-satirical spy-craft to kitchen-sink drama to goofball pun-based comedy, often the the course of a single panel. What ties it all together is this overstuffed neo-future city, where everything is unreal enough for anything to be possible. It’s not a heavily plotted comic — things happen, and they happen in a logical sequence, but it doesn’t build up to anything, and Graham wants to subvert expectations rather than encourage them. His art is similar bouncy: here a little manga-inspired, especially in the buildings, here a little indy-goofball, here recovering sex-comics artist.

So King City feels a lot like another slacker comic: the characters aren’t exactly slackers themselves, but it has that laid-back vibe, as if nothing can get too bad, as long as you’ve got your cat with you. And that’s all right, man.

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