Category: Reviews

This is not a new book by Sara Varon, cartoonist of Robot Dreams and Bake Sale . That may be slightly disappointing.

It is an old book by Varon — originally published as her first collection back in 2003 — expanded with as much new material as old, so it’s kinda new, and probably unfamiliar to most of Varon’s audience (who I suspect were, in most cases, not alive yet in 2003).

So this new edition of Sweaterweather and Other Short Stories has the eight stories from the 2003 first edition (plus the cover, presented as an interior spread), which originally appeared various places in 2002 and 2003. And it also has nine newer stories, created since the first edition of Sweaterweather and running up through 2014.

Some are fictional, and some are about Varon’s own life, though the distinction gets muddy — she draws all of her characters as animals and robots and creatures, and some of the “fictional” stories are directly from her life, just not presented as a “true” story about “Sara Varon.” And it’s all appropriate for fairly new readers — say the middle reaches of elementary school, and maybe even a bit lower — with an intrinsic sweetness and inquisitiveness that kids that age love and embody.

So the stories that aren’t Varon showing us around parts of the world — that aren’t specifically nonfiction with a “Sara Varon” narrator — are set in her usual Busytown-style kids-world, where all of the characters have adult lives and responsibilities (jobs, shopping, errands, and so on) but are essentially kids, almost playacting in that world. And, of course, everything is nice, and conflicts are almost entirely avoided. It’s a sweet, lovely, nurturing world of happy creatures who like each other and maintain great friendships.

A steady diet of that would be too much for most of us, but it’s a great thing to dip into now and then, to wash off all of the cynicism and unpleasantness of the adult world. Varon’s world is a kinder, happier place than the one we really live in, and should be celebrated for that. I hope this book is in a million schoolrooms and libraries, and as many homes as it can find a place in.

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

This is the end; this is not the end.

This volume finishes up Fantagraphics’ decade-plus reprint project covering the entirety of Charles M. Schulz’s fifty-year run on Peanuts, with the last full year of strips and the few in early 2000 that Schulz completed before his health-forced retirement and nearly simultaneous death. (Sunday strips are done six to eight weeks early; his last strip appeared on the Sunday morning of February 13, and he died the evening before, in one of the most perfectly sad moments of timing ever.)

So that’s the end.

It’s also the beginning: also included in this book are all of the Li’l Folks strips that Schulz created for the St. Paul Pioneer Press from 1947 through early 1950, and which he eventually quit when his attempts to move it forward were turned down, freeing him to rework much of these ideas (and even specific gags) into what would become Peanuts.

But it’s also not the end: there is one more book in the Fantagraphics series, the inevitable odds & sods volume with advertising art and comic-book strips and several of those small impulse-buy books from the ’70s and ’80s that Schulz wrote and drew featuring his Peanuts characters.

So The Complete Peanuts, 1999 to 2000 is the end of Peanuts. And it’s the pre-beginning of Peanuts. But it’s not the end of The Complete Peanuts.

Since we’re talking about a fifty-year run by one man on one strip, and a publishing project that spanned more than ten years itself, perhaps some context would be useful. Luckily, I’ve been writing about these books for some time, so have a vast number of links back to my prior posts on the books covering years 1957-1958 , 1959-1960 , 1961-1962 , 1963-1964 , 1965-1966 , 1967-1968, 1969-1970 , 1971-1972 , 1973-1974 , 1975-1976 , 1977-1978 , 1979-1980 , 1981-1982 , 1983-1984 , 1985-1986 , 1987-1988 , 1989-1990 , 1991-1992 , 1993-1994 , the flashback to 1950-1952 , and then back to the future with 1995-1996 and 1997-1998 .

By this point in his career, Schulz was an old pro, adept at turning out funny gags and new twists on stock situations on a daily basis.  But maybe his age had been catching up to him: there’s a wistfulness to some of the gags from the last few years of the strip, and something of a return to the deep underlying sadness of the late ’60s and early ’70s. But Peanuts was always a strip about failure and small moments of disappointment, and that kept flourishing until the end.

And, if his line had gotten a bit shaky in the last decade of Peanuts, it was still expressive and precise. And there’s no sign of his illness until in the the very last minute: the third-to-last daily strip, 12/31/99, suddenly has a different lettering style in its final panel — maybe typeset based on Schulz’s hand-lettering, maybe done by someone else in his studio to match his work. Then the 1/1/00 strip is one large, slightly shakier panel with that different lettering. And 1/2/00 is the typeset farewell: Schulz, as far as we can see in public, realized he couldn’t keep going at the level he expected of himself, and immediately quit. There was no decline. (The last few Sunday strips, which came out in January and February of 2000 but were drawn earlier, don’t show any change at all until that final typeset valedictory — the same one as the daily strip to this slightly different audience.)

In the book, that loops right back around to the earliest Li’l Folks, which had typeset captions. And then we can watch Schulz take over his own lettering and get better at it over the three years of that weekly strip, hitting the level he maintained for fifty years of Peanuts after not very long at all.

We can also see Schulz’s art getting crisper and less fussy as Li’l Folks goes on, as he turned into the cartoonist who would burst forth with Peanuts in the fall of 1950. Li’l Folks is minor, mostly — cute gags about kids and their dog, mimicking adults or pantomiming jokes based on their shortness — but there are flashes of what would be Peanuts later. And I mean “flashes” specifically: Schulz re-used many of the better ideas from Li’l Folks for Peanuts, so a lot of the older strip will be vaguely familiar to readers who know the early Peanuts well.

Perhaps most importantly, putting Li’l Folks at the end keeps this 1999-2000 volume from being depressing. It’s already shorter than the others, inevitably, but putting the old strip back turns the series into an Ouroboros, as if Schulz was immediately reincarnated as his younger self, with all of his triumphs ahead of him (and heartaches, too — we can never forget those, with Schulz and Peanuts).

Peanuts was a great strip, one of the true American originals. And it ended as well as any work by one creator ever could, having grown and thrived in an era where Schulz could have control of his work. (If he’d covered the first half of his century, that probably wouldn’t have happened: Peanuts is the great strip that ended partly out of historical happenstance and partly because Schulz and his family wanted it so.) So there is sadness here, but there’s a lot of sadness in Peanuts anyway: it’s entirely appropriate.

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

I tend not to give up on things, so in my head Zander Cannon is still in the middle of a really long hiatus from his early and excellent fantasy series The Replacement God. (Yes, that hiatus is now twenty years long. But Mage: The Hero Denied was finally announced recently, so decades-old thought-dead things I really like do come back.)

For everyone else, he’s more likely best known as the artist of Top 10 and Smax in Alan Moore’s most recent stab at a superhero universe, back in the early Aughts. And his most recent solo book was the dark adventure Heck , which I liked a lot: Cannon is a real talent, both as a writer and a draftsman, so I wanted to see more from him.

So why did it take this long for me to get to his not-all-that-new-anymore ongoing series? This collection — Kaijumax, Season One: Terror and Respect — is nearly a year and a half old at this point, and a second series has had time to come out and get collected since then.

Well, I was looking for it. I wanted to poke through it in person before buying it, and I’d never seen a copy in front of me. Finally, I just broke down and ordered it through the library — have I mentioned that I have a NYC library card these days, and that system has a ridiculously large number of books that they’re happy to deliver to a location less than a block from my office? And so, now, I’ve finally read it, and am almost caught up with Cannon.

The title explains the premise: this is a world full of giant monsters (kaiju, in Japanese), of many different types, and they seem as hard to kill as in most monster movies. So there needs to be a place to put them after the army, or Ultraman, or whoever, has stopped them from destroying the other half of Tokyo and more-or-less captured them. That place is an unnamed Pacific island, now just called “Kaijumax” — a maximum-security prisoner for monsters, guarded by guys and gals in Ultraman-style super-suits that let them instantly grow to monster size for smackdowns when needed.

So, yes: it’s a prison story about giant monsters. In comic-book form. Cannon’s afterword notes that many people would find all three of those things silly, but he loves all of them, so sucks to their assmar. (He’s somewhat more polite and felicitous in his phrasing.) But a reader does need to be ready for that — Cannon isn’t joking or goofing around; there are silly things here but they’re taken basically seriously, in a world where they’re not as silly as they would be in ours.

As usual in a prison story, our focus is on the new guy — the innocent guy. This time, it’s Electrogor, a sea-dwelling giant monster who was trying to find food for his two kids when he ran into a human ship and things went bad. He never attacked a city, he never tried to destroy much of anything. But he was found, and caught, and now he’s in monster prison. And those two kids are outside, and the best case is that they’re still at home and getting really hungry. Electrogor wants to be helpful and nice and get out quickly…which never works in a prison story.

He learns better, more or less, and plenty of other things go on around him in the six issues it takes him to learn what he does. Terror and Respect has an ending that fits that “Season One” note — not a real end, but a good place to break for the summer, to come back for more stories with a somewhat different emphasis.

Kaijumax is another fine comic from Zander Cannon, and I hope it’s a huge success: the season structure means it can’t run forever, right? And that means, once it’s a massive crossover bestseller and millions are lining up for the next Zander Cannon joint, the time will be right for that Replacement God revival!

Well, a man can dream, can’t he?

This is a fun series: serious but not self-serious, with vivid characters, interesting dilemmas, and a quirky and unique world. I’m going to enjoy it for as many seasons as I can get.

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

I don’t keep up with superhero comics anymore — I have to admit that. Astro City was probably the last thing in that vein I read regularly, and even that was only as “regularly” as Astro City itself was…and that’s not very. Eventually, I even soured on that comic.

At some point in your life, you either realize that punching people is not the solution to problems, or you become a full-blown psychopath. For all my flaws, I’m on the first path.

All that is to explain why I never bothered to read the Hawkeye run written by Matt Fraction and mostly drawn by David Aja, despite it being pretty much assumed to be the best superhero comic while it was coming out (2012-15). Even if something is the obvious best sushi in the world, it doesn’t matter if your taste for seafood has gone.

But time marches on, and curiosity keeps building. And there’s always time for one more book, especially one that’s a few years old and no longer the hot new thing. So I finally did get to the hardcover collecting the first half of that Fraction-Aja Hawkeye run — eleven issues of that series, plus a loosely related issue of Young Avengers Presents as a kind of flashback.

(That Young Avengers Presents issue comes off very badly by comparison, even with strong art from long-time expert ink-slinger Alan Davis. It’s very much Yet Another Superhero Story, in the middle of a big stupid story that people didn’t even care that much about at the time, with the bog-standard angst and drama and Whining About the Relationship. It’s everything “good superhero comics” usually are, and a major exemplar of why I stopped reading that crap. In a nutshell, it’s a story about costumes being moved around a chessboard, not about people or real relationships.)

The main Hawkeye story, though, is about people. Mostly Clint Barton, the least of the Avengers, whose origin is a bizarre amalgam of Robin I and Green Arrow and whose “power” is just being good at shooting arrows. And who isn’t actually all that good at the living-normal-life thing, for reasons Fraction wisely doesn’t explore — he just takes Barton as the overgrown boy he is, stumbling through his own life like a bull in a china shop, getting into trouble just because that’s what he does when left to his own devices. The trouble here is mostly about a Brooklyn tenement that he semi-accidentally bought (with stolen money from the Marvel Universe’s biggest gangsters), to drive away a low-rent Russian gang he calls the Tracksuit Draculas. Again, his plans mostly don’t work, or don’t work right, and he needs to be saved repeatedly by the women in his life. Which brings us to….

There’s also a newer, younger, female Hawkeye — always have to have a non-cishet-SWM person in the costume these days, and pretend that person will “always” be the “real” holder of the shiny superhero title, as if we haven’t seen a million “always” melt away in a million comics. (I think that’s mostly cynical audience-pandering, but it’s hard to tell in individual cases — and every superhero-universe character gets handled by so many people that they turn into river-stones, rubbed down to an essence that no one person intended.) She’s Kate Bishop, and I have no idea why she’s so good at shooting arrows, or why she went into the superhero game — she seems to have as few powers as Barton, and many more options. (She’s some variety of rich girl, as far as I can tell.)

But this is a superhero universe, so dressing up in tight spandex to jump around rooftops and beat up thugs is just what you do. Apparently no other entertainment media exist in this world, so this is the only thing to do to keep oneself occupied.

These are, as I said, mostly low-level superheroics. Neither Hawkeye saves the world, and the globe-trotting is more spycraft than Galactus-defeating. Aja’s art is perfectly suited for that level, and tells the story brilliantly, well aided by Matt Hollingsworth’s colors. (There’s also a two-issue story by Javier Pulido and a single issue by Francesco Francavilla here — both are good, but flashier than Aja and so they stand out too much for my taste.) Aja reminds me of nothing so much as David Mazzucchelli’s classic superhero period, particularly Daredevil and Batman: Year One. There’s a similar grounded-ness, with thin lines that frame often violent action without rationalizing it — keeping it shocking and unexpected even in the middle of a story designed to showcase violent action. It’s strongly compliments Fraction’s similarly grounded writing: both of them are committed to telling a story about people in a real world, moving through real space, whose actions have consequences and who bleed and feel and curse and laugh and wryly shake their heads.

Aja also delights in complex page layouts — or his ability energizes Fraction to create them, either way it’s a strong collaboration — which make the world part of the story, and not just flat backdrops for more punching. An issue told from the POV of a dog is particularly impressive, and probably hugely well-known by this point.

You don’t need to read Hawkeye. You never need to read any superhero comic, no matter what they tell you. But, if you do want to read about superheroes., this is miles closer to the real world than most.

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