Tagged: Andrew Wheeler

Review: Bryan Talbot’s ‘Alice in Sunderland’

Review: Bryan Talbot’s ‘Alice in Sunderland’

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

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

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

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ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending Feb. 24, 2008

ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending Feb. 24, 2008

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  • February 24, 2008

Ah, it’s Oscar time again!  I know I’ll be glued to my seat, whilst falling asleep in it at the same time!  Look for all the geeky movies to win the usual geeky (technical) awards, most of which won’t be given out on the air.  Better to get your geek on reading our ComicMix columns for this past week:

I know Ratatouille will probably win for Best Animated Feature, but I’m still rooting for Persepolis, so there.

Review: ‘Confessions of a Blabbermouth’

Review: ‘Confessions of a Blabbermouth’

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

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

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

 

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ComicMix Columns For the Week Ending Feb. 17, 2008

ComicMix Columns For the Week Ending Feb. 17, 2008

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  • February 17, 2008

The WGA writers are back at work, thank goodness, so there’s finally some good stuff to watch this President’s Day weekend (how can one have a "day weekend" anyway?).  Meanwhile, our ComicMix columnists have been typing away as usual; here’s what we’ve done for you this past week:

Just as a reminder, Denny O’Neill’s column was a bit waylaid this week so we didn’t get to enjoy it until Friday, but he’s still listed in his usual date order above…

ComicMix Columns For The Week Ending Feb. 10, 2008

ComicMix Columns For The Week Ending Feb. 10, 2008

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  • February 10, 2008

There’s a new Marshall in town, and he’s laid down the law against punny headers.  So let’s just get down to business and rustle up this past week’s worth of ComicMix columns:

So if ComicMix newbee Rick is the Marshall, does that make me the schoolmarm with the heart of go — nah, I’m more like the extra mumbling "rhubarb" in the background…

‘The Wind in the Willows’ Review

‘The Wind in the Willows’ Review

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  • February 5, 2008

Classic Illustrated Deluxe # 1: The Wind in the Willows
Novel by Kenneth Grahame; adapted by Michel Plessix
Papercutz, 2007, $13.95 (paperback) / $17.95 (hardcover)

I’ve wasted a lot of time not writing the review for this book, mostly because I suspected it would be one of the shortest in my career. (And both you and my ComicMix overlords deserve better than a super-short review.)

The problem is that there really isn’t much to say about Michel Plessix’s adaptation of The Wind in the Willows: it’s lovely and sweet, one of the best adaptations of a novel into the comics form that I’ve ever seen. When a book does everything right, it can be hard to talk about it, and I can’t see anything that Plessix does wrong here.

Plessix’s linework is careful and assured, capturing complex scenes with ease and giving life and emotion to a wide variety of anthropomorphic animal characters. Even more than that, he’s mastered the tricky art of those animals: they’re human enough to have gestures and body language, but animal enough to be believable as talking frogs, badgers, rats, and so on. And then he draws humans in the mix as well, and makes the combination not just work for the space of a few pages, but feel natural and obvious.

On top of all that is a carefully-chosen palette of mostly light, pastel colors, trying it all together with the perfect touch. The art of The Wind in the Willows is simply exquisite, but you need to look at it closely; it doesn’t demand attention but instead serves and advances the story.

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ComicMix Columns For The Week Ending Feb 3, 2008

ComicMix Columns For The Week Ending Feb 3, 2008

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  • February 3, 2008

Snackies at hand?  Ready to cheer on the best ads in between the quarters?  Me, I’m psyched to see me some Tom Petty at halftime.  Before they take the field for Superbowl XLIIayeaye!!one!, why not warm up with this past week’s ComicMix columns?:

I love how the titles of those first three columns kind of go together… sex, hate, death (warmed over)… Anyway, Giants in, erm, four, just to be weird…

Good For What Ails You

Good For What Ails You

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  • January 27, 2008

There’s something in the air, and unfortunately your author has caught it.  But it’s well worth rising from one’s sickbed to bring you the weekly roundup of ComicMix columnists!  Isn’t it?:

Apologies for not adding in Andrew Wheeler’s "Manga Friday" columns before now, but he’s only started numbering them himself.  And by the way, the best thing about being sick?  Erm, well, nothing, actually…

Sex and Death, by Andrew Wheeler

Sex and Death, by Andrew Wheeler

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  • January 25, 2008

 

This week: three manga series featuring sex and death in high school. (I don’t know about you folks, but if my high school was like some of the ones in manga series, I wouldn’t have bothered to graduate.)

Case in point: Sundome by Kazuto Okada, a story about a young woman who may just be the single biggest tease in the history of the human race. (By the way, the title is pronounced “sun-do-may” and is a Japanese term meaning “stopping just before.” And, yes, the general implication is pretty much what you think it is.) Her name is Kurumi Sahana, and, in time-tested manga fashion, she’s the transfer student who arrives at this high school on page two. Narrator Hideo Aiba falls for her immediately, and thus tries to resign from his “roman club” – a collection of three other exceptionally geeky young men dedicated to vague “romantic” ideals. One of the rules of the club is that members must remain virgins until graduation, and Hideo, being an honest young man, is hoping he can break that vow, and, being very Japanese about it, wants to quit first.

What follows is a very exaggerated but not completely unbelievable sex comedy. Hideo is a whiny little schlub – of course, he’s the hero of a sex comedy manga, so I’m repeating myself – and Kurumi knows exactly what he wants and refuses to give it to him. On the other hand, she’s more than willing to torment him, with a glimpse of this or a touch of that, to get him to do what she wants. One of the things she wants, though, is for Hideo to grow a spine and stop being such a wimpy little stereotype, so she doesn’t come across as a bitch. Manipulative, yes. More than a little cruel, clearly. Not someone to introduce to your mother, absolutely. But she’s honest, and not capricious, and she does follow through on what she says.

(Another girl – somewhat more conventional but also in her way tormenting Hideo and his fellow members of the Roman Club – shows up about halfway through the book.)

I feel I should apologize for liking Sundome, but I did enjoy it. It’s “sexy” in a completely sophomoric way, full of panty shots and nipples straining against fabric, but it’s authentically tawdry and juvenile. It’s probably not a book for women, or for men who have completely outgrown their own childishness (which I clearly haven’t), but if you’ve ever wished Superbad was a book, you are in luck.

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The Art of Bone Review

The Art of Bone Review

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  • December 17, 2007

The first thing I should mention is that, although this book is credited to Jeff Smith, it doesn’t seem to have been written by him. I think the text in it – aside from a stilted introduction by Lucy Shelton Caswell, curator of the Ohio State Cartoon Research Library – was actually written by the editor, Diana Schutz, but the book itself doesn’t actually say. The text talks about Smith in the third person, and doesn’t show any strong connection to his personal thoughts, so it certainly looks like it was written by someone else.

But no one reads a book like this for the text: the pictures are the main draw, and this is full of pictures. Over two hundred large, well-designed and cleanly printed pages showcase lots of Smith’s Bone art, from early sketches to final color work. The text tends to be descriptive – dating particular pieces, or explaining where in the process they were created – rather than more discursive.

The Art of Bone begins with a 1970ish comic from a very young Smith, in which a very Carl Barks-ian Fone and Phoney Bone have an adventure trying to retrieve a lost gem. (This is clearly juvenilia, but has some cute touches, such as a “title wave” which is not a misspelling.) There are a few other bits from the prehistory of Bone as well, such as a few strips from the Thorn comic Smith drew for Ohio State’s Lantern daily paper. (I’d love to see a full collection of these; the art is clearly professional quality, and the fact that he re-used a lot of the plot in Bone proper is no longer a big problem, since Bone is complete.)

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