Tagged: Andrew Wheeler

Review: ‘The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch’

Review: ‘The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch’

Neil Gaiman has been too busy lately to write much for comics unless it’s an event — like 1602 or his curiously pointless Eternals miniseries — but there’s still an audience for his stories in the direct market. So what’s a poor comics publisher to do? Well, if it’s Dark Horse, what you do is get various folks to adapt Gaiman stories into comics and publish them as slim trade-paperback-sized hardcovers. So far, Michael Zulli did Creatures of the Night, John Bolton adapted Harlequin Valentine, and P. Craig Russell tackled Murder Mysteries. And now Zullis is back again for:

The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch
By Neil Gaiman, Michael Zulli, and Todd Klein
Dark Horse Books, May 2008, $13.95

Now, for most writers, “[[[The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch]]]” would be by far their longest title ever, but Gaiman is not most writers. He’s also responsible for “[[[Being An Experiment Upon Strictly Scientific Lines Assisted By Unwins LTD, Wine Merchants (Uckfield)]]]” ” [[[Forbidden Brides Of The Faceless Slaves In The Nameless House Of The Night Of Dread Desire]]],” ” [[[I Cthulhu: Or What’s A Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing In A Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47º 9′ S, Longitude 126º 43′ W)?]]],” and ” [[[Pages From A Journal Found In A Shoebox Left In A Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, And Louisville, Kentucky]]].” So “[[[Miss Finch]]]” may just be one of Gaiman’s more punchy and terse titles.

According to the Neil Gaiman Visual Bibliography — and why should we mistrust it? — “Miss Finch” is one of Gaiman’s more obscure stories, showing up in the program book for the convention Tropicon XVII and a magazine called Tales of the Unanticipated before turning up in one of his collections — though in a different one depending on which side of the Atlantic you live on.

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ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending May 18, 2008

ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending May 18, 2008

According to The Google, today marks the anniversary of the birth of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School of Design, whose influence can still be felt daily by urban workers every time they look up at a skyscraper featuring way too much glass.  Meanwhile, here’s what our designer columnists have created for you this past week:

Sure to keep your eyes from glazing over!

Manga Friday: Toto & Tokugawa

Manga Friday: Toto & Tokugawa

Manga Friday returns after a brief hiatus — I was on a secret mission in Darkest Florida, and unable to read manga and coherently think about them for several days — with a look at two very, very different books. We’ll start with the easier one to explain.

Toto!: The Wonderful Adventure, Vol. 1
By Yuko Osada
Del Rey Manga, May 2008, $10.95

Toto! is an adventure story about Kakashi, a boy who desperately wants to get off the small island he was born on and get out into the wide world to have adventures. (Not to do anything in particular, just to "have adventures." Manga boy-heroes are often oddly nonspecific. Kakashi’s father, similarly, was famous as "an explorer.") While somewhere there is probably a humorous manga series about a guy who keeps trying and failing to leave his hometown — come to think of it, I’d like to read something like that myself — Toto! falls into the more usual pattern, and Kakashi stows away on a blimp almost as soon as the story begins.

(Toto! is set in the indeterminate future, not an alternate history, depsite the presence of airships. It is an iron rule of alternate-history stories that every possible world but our own is completely covered in zeppelins, and I guess the same may hold true for odd, indefinite futures.)

But just getting onto the zeppelin is not nearly enough; it has been hijacked by the Man Chicken gang, who forced all of the passengers and crew to dive into the sea as they stole the airship for a quick getaway to their secret hideout.

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Review: ‘The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard’

Review: ‘The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard’

Eddie Campbell has always done comics his way, without worrying about other people’s expectations or preferences — one of his two major series has been a fictionalization of his own life as a comics creator, and the other, a superficially more populist sequence about Greek gods in the modern world, was itself about storytelling more often than not. So it’s no surprise that his latest graphic novel — co-written with Dan Best — is more about telling its story than it is the story being told.

The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard
By Eddie Campbell and Dan Best
First Second, August 2008, $18.95

[[[Monsieur Leotard]]] will be published by First Second — who published Campbell’s last book, The Black Diamond Detective Agency, and have been putting together an impressive list of graphic novels for adults and younger readers for the past few years — in August, and the first thing to note is that it’s not the story the reader expects.

You see, the famous acrobat Jules Leotard lies dying of smallpox on page 12. So, we think, the book will be a series of flashbacks showing his life? No, he’s dead by the bottom of page 13, and the story moves on. So far, so very Campbell.

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Review: ‘Too Cool To Be Forgotten’ by Alex Robinson

Review: ‘Too Cool To Be Forgotten’ by Alex Robinson

We’ve all occasionally wanted to go back in time — to fix something we screwed up the first time, to relive some particular time in our lives, or just to do something differently. But would we be able to do better the second time around? Alex Robinson’s new graphic novel — coming up in July from Top Shelf — asks exactly those questions.

Too Cool To Be Forgotten
By Alex Robinson
Top Shelf, July 2008, $14,95

In 2010, Andy Wicks is coming up on his fortieth birthday — he’s married with two daughters and working as a computer technician. And, to finally stop smoking, he agrees to his wife’s suggestion to get himself hypnotized.

He closes his eyes, listens to the doctor…and wakes up in his 15-year-old body, back in 1985. He soon decides that some kind of hypnotic construct — though he never internalizes that thought, or really acts as if it’s true — and that the whole scenario is designed to make him decide not to have his first cigarette, and thus stop smoking back up in his own time.

Now, I am a former science fiction editor, so I probably think about this stuff more than most people, but Andy never seems to really think through his situation, or quite decide how old he is. He never really thinks of himself as a 15-year-old; his self-image stays solidly middle-aged. But he also doesn’t think through the consequences of that — he thinks of other high-school students, who are exactly the same age he is, as “kids.”

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Review: ‘Ghost Stories’ by Jeff Lemire

Review: ‘Ghost Stories’ by Jeff Lemire

Lemire is in the middle of an impressive thematically-related trilogy of stories about a rural bit of Ontario, Canada – the first book was Tales from the Farm, in early 2007, and the third, [[[The Country Nurse]]], will be along in October of this year. [[[Ghost Stories]]] is the middle book, but it’s a completely independent story – you don’t need to know anything about Tales to read it.

Ghost Stories: Essex County, Vol. 2
By Jeff Lemire
Top Shelf, September 2007, $14.95

Lou Lebeuf is an old, alcoholic, deaf man, living alone on the farm that was his younger brother’s and their father’s before him. He’s also either going senile or just doesn’t care about his current life – and who would? there’s not much to it – so he ignores his new home-care nurse and instead wanders through the memories of his younger days. At first he remembers growing up on that farm, playing hockey with his younger, bigger brother Vince, but he soon moves into the main plot of Ghost Stories.

Lou came up to Toronto to play semi-pro hockey for the Grizzlies around 1950, and Vince followed him up in 1951 — Lou was a solid, smart player, but Vince was a giant bull of a man, dominating the ice once he got angry enough. But, unfortunately for both of them, accompanying Vince on that trip in 1951 was his fiancee, Beth Morgan. Lou was strongly attracted to Beth, and, once — the night after the Grizzlies made the playoffs that March — Lou and Beth had quick, secret sex on a rooftop.

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ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending May 4, 2008

ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending May 4, 2008

Hope you all had a great Free Comic Book Day!  Here at ComicMix, of course, every day is free comics day, with all our new original graphic material!  But don’t forget the original material from our columnists as well; here’s what we’ve had for you this past week:

And while every ComicMix reader with disposable income has probably already seen Iron Man, I have a date later on with my ironing board… that’s sort of the same thing, right?

Review: ‘Blue Pills’ by Frederik Peeters

Review: ‘Blue Pills’ by Frederik Peeters

Blue Pills
By Frederik Peeters; translated by Anjali Singh
Houghton Mifflin, January 2008, $18.95

This is another one of those semi-autobiographical graphic novels; I’m not going to assume that this is all “true” (whatever that means), but I will note that Peeters’s bio says that he lives with his girlfriend, her son, and their daughter — and that [[[Blue Pills]]] is the story of a man named Fred, his girlfriend, and her son. (And the main character of this book mentions that he working on a graphic novel about their lives.) So keep that in the back of your head — some proportion of this book is true, though we don’t know how much.

Fred, the narrator of Blue Pills, is a Swiss cartoonist, still in his mid-20s, who’s lived in Geneva his whole life. He remembers Cati vividly from a pool-party late in his teens, but never really knew her well. When he moves into the apartment building where she lives, though, he comes to see more and more of her and her young son (called “the little one” or “L’il Wolf,” but not named). Before long, Fred and Cati are drifting into a relationship, and Cati has to sit Fred down and tell him something difficult — both she and her son are HIV-positive.

(The “Blue Pills” of the title refer to their drug regimen to stay symptom-free, though they’re never called that in the body of the book. The fact that most Americans will immediately think of Viagra when blue pills are mentioned is unfortunate, but neither Peeters nor Houghton Mifflin seems to have taken a moment to worry about it.)

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ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending April 28, 2008

ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending April 28, 2008

Last weekend’s New York Comic Con affected ComicMix columnists in different ways, with Michael, Martha and myself all musing about the con experience (and Dennis and John discussing other events of note from that same weekend).  Here’s what we’ve written for you this past week:

Michael’s column totally wins for "best byline" this week..  He probably wins for  "best comment thread," too.

Review: ‘Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow’

Review: ‘Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow’

Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow
By James Sturm & Rich Tommaso
Jump at the Sun/Hyperion, 2007, $16.99

This is a profoundly worthy book — produced under the asupices of The Center for Cartoon Studies, by two respected, serious modern cartoonists, published by the premier imprint for African-American children’s books, and about possibly the greatest pitcher in the history of baseball. Luckily, it’s not as dry and dull as that might make it sound.

It’s not really a biography of the great pitcher [[[Satchel Paige]]], though it looks like one — it follows the life and very abbreviated Negro Leagues baseball career of an Alabama man named Emmet. (His last name isn’t revealed.) Emmet faced Paige in one of his first at-bats for the Memphis Red Sox, but broke his leg in stealing home — he made the run, but lost his career. Emmet’s life intersects Paige’s again, much later, but he also follows Paige’s career, and compares it to his wn life along the way.

Satchel Paige opens with Emmet’s fateful at-bat against Paige, and then moves on from there, with a few vignettes of Emmet’s life from the late twenties to the early forties. Emmet’s a sharecropper, a poor man in a poor part of the world, and moderately oppressed by the local white landowners. (His son is beaten once, and we see the aftermath of one lynching, but Emmet himself kowtows enough to keep himself and his family safe. Perhaps the correct word for his condition is “terrorized.”) The book makes it clear that those white landowners own everything — at one point Emmet thinks “walkin’ out your door is trespassing if they choose to call it that.”

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