Tagged: Andrew Wheeler

Review: ‘Syncopated’ edited by Brendan Burford

Review: ‘Syncopated’ edited by Brendan Burford

Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays
Edited by Brendan Burford
Villard, May 2009, $16.95

For most of the past fifty years, American comics had been running
through an ever-tightening spiral of acceptable topics – somewhat mitigated by
occasional art-comics eruptions – as superheroes and (ever less and less) other
areas thought acceptable for children dominated ever more and more each year.
And one little-remarked side effect of that spiral was that nonfiction comics,
stories that actually were true, became so marginalized that they practically
didn’t exist. Everything was fiction – even the memoirish comics of the
undergrounds were transmuted into fiction – and the truth was nowhere to be
found on the comics page.

That’s changed in the past decade or so, as a generation of
new or newly energized creators have grappled with their own lives and
histories, bringing forth a host of primarily memoir-based comics, from [[[Perseopolis]]] to [[[Fun Home to Cancer Vixen]]]. And
that flood has brought attention to cartoonists who write about true stories
that
aren’t their own, like Joe
Sacco. Slowly, nonfiction is creeping onto the comics shelf – it may be mostly
memoirs now, but I hope that we’ll see ever more biographies (like Rick Geary’s
J. Edgar Hoover) and histories
(like Larry Gonick’s work) and even diet books (like Carol Lay’s [[[
The
Big Skinny]]]
) and less likely things. Maybe,
if I can be optimistic for once, in twenty years there will be comics (or
graphic novels, or whatever you want to call a couple of hundred of drawn pages
in a coherent narrative) in every bookstore category, filling the shelves with
real stories as well as made-up ones.

If that does happen – and I hope that it is
possible – Brendan Burford’s [[[Syncopated]]] will become a signpost on the way to that new world. Syncopated has sixteen original stories by sixteen
distinctive voices (Burford among them), on various nonfiction topics. It splits
fairly neatly in half between memoirs and personal reminiscences on one side
(seven pieces, by my count) and works of history and current events outside of
the artist (also seven pieces), with two portfolios of drawings, by Tricia Van
de Burgh and Victor Marchand Kerlow, to finish up.

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Review: ‘Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter’ by Darwyn Cooke

Review: ‘Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter’ by Darwyn Cooke

Richard Stark’s Parker, Book One: The Hunter
Darwyn Cooke
IDW, July 2009, $24.99

Richard Stark’s Parker novels come out of a particular
period in literary history: the heyday of the disposable paperback for men.
Paperbacks had appeared in their modern form just before WWII, and servicemen
got used to carrying small paperbound books in whatever pockets they could jam
a book into. The boom continued through the postwar years, with a flood of
short thrillers, detective stories, and soft-core porn – all to stave off
boredom for a man waiting for dinner time on a business trip in some hick town,
or hanging out at the PX on his army base, or riding the streetcar home at
night.

[[[The Hunter]]] was
published in 1962, at the height of that boom – a good decade before the ‘70s
taught publishers that women were even more dependable consumers of paperbacks,
and the long shift to romances and their ilk began. At first glance, Stark’s
hero is right out of the mold of the great hardboiled Mikes (Hammer &
Shayne) – tough, violent, single-minded, implacable. But Parker was less
emotional than the usual hardboiled hero – cold where they were hot,
calculating where they were impetuous. Parker could kill when he had to – and he
did it quite a bit – but he never killed for fun, or just because he could. As
the Parker novels went on he avoided killing as much as he could, simply
because deaths attract more attention than he wanted.

Hardboiled heroes came from both sides of the
law – Mike Shayne and Mike Hammer were detectives, but there were plenty of
law-breakers before Parker, from writers like David Goodis and Jim Thompson.
They usually weren’t series characters, though: Parker’s amoralism went beyond
his own actions to his world, and his stories told how a master criminal could get away with it – if he was smart and tough
enough.

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Review: B.P.R.D., Vol. 10: The Warning by Mignola, Arcudi, and Davis

Review: B.P.R.D., Vol. 10: The Warning by Mignola, Arcudi, and Davis

B.P.R.D. Vol. 10: The Warning
Written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi; Art by Guy
Davis
Dark Horse Comics, May 2009, $17.95

[[[The Warning]]] is the tenth volume
collecting the adventures of the [[[Hellboy]]]-less Bureau for Paranormal Research
and Defense, and the first in what the creators are calling the “[[[Scorched Earth
Trilogy]]].” The afterword by co-writer John Arcudi claims that events will get
bigger and more dangerous from here – though he does note that this volume
includes, among other thing, “[name withheld] gets kidnapped, … entire fleet of
helicopters gets wiped out, and gigantic robots trample [name withheld] into
rubble.” And previous volumes of this series (and, of course, of the related Hellboy)
have been no slouch in the near-Armageddon sweepstakes – particularly [[[The Black Flame]]]. That’s a lot of promise, but Mignola’s fictional
world does always teeter on the verge of utter supernatural chaos, in his very
Lovecraftian way. It would be wise to take Arcudi at his word.

The Warning begins with the team going
in two directions at once, urgently following up recent events – Abe Sapien
leads an assault squad out into the snowy mountains to try to find and retrieve
the Wendigo-possessed former leader of their team, and the others have a séance
to contact the mysterious ‘30s costumed hero Lobster Johnson, whom they think
will have information about the robed man taunting and manipulating firestarter
Liz Sherman in her mind. But neither one of those leads works out as the
[[[B.P.R.D.]]] hopes, and, before long, they’re face-to-face with another
high-powered menace and seeing another city being assaulted by giant robots.

And yet, remember that note from Arcudi. The plot of The
Warning
turns out to be just a warm-up; the antagonists here
are not the true enemies of the B.P.R.D. Near the end, that mysterious man
claims that he isn’t their real antagonist, either. The B.P.R.D. is
fumbling in the dark in The Warning, unsure of what the
real menace is, let alone how to stop it. But they go on, because that’s what
they do.

The Warning is a great installment
of a top-rank adventure series, filled with wonder and terror, eyeball kicks
and quiet character moments. It’s a magnificent brick in a more magnificent
wall, but it’s no place to start. If you haven’t read B.P.R.D.
before, go back to the beginning with [[[Hollow Earth
]]]– or, even better, go back to the beginning of Hellboy
with [[[Seed of Destruction]]]. But, if you enjoy adventure
stories with characters who don’t wear skin-tight outfits,
you should have discovered Mignola’s world by now.

Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional
for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science
Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He¹s been
reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal,
mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com
.

Publishers who would like to submit books
for review should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Andrew
Wheeler directly at acwheele
(at) optonline (dot) net.

Review: Goats: Infinite Typewriters by Jonathan Rosenberg

Review: Goats: Infinite Typewriters by Jonathan Rosenberg

Goats: Infinite Typewriters
Jonathan Rosenberg
Del Rey, June 2009, $14.00

It’s not true that every webcomic will eventually have a
book, even if it seems that way. There are some projects that even [[[Lulu]]] will
choke on; some things that are too short and obscure and just plain pointless
to be immortalized in cold print. But, with magazines and newspapers running
around like the proverbial head-chopped chickens – all the while conveniently
neglecting to mention the fact that newspapers had the most profitable two
decades of their existence right up to a handful of years ago, and collectively
blew those profits on buying each other out and paying off the families who
were smart enough to take huge wads of cash and toddle off to do something less
glamorous, like badger sexing – webcomics are beginning to look like the only
good game in town, so even staid book publishers – like Del Rey, the science
fiction imprint of Ballantine, which, despite being part of the massive,
serious, Bertelsmann/Random House empire, has made buckets and bushels of money
over the past thirty years from [[[Garfield]]] books and even less likely drawn items – are surfing heavily from work, calling
it research, and drafting up big-boy contracts for cartoonists whose work has
only previously appeared in shining phosphor dots.

(And, now that that
sentence has cleared the riffraff out, let me get down to specifics.)

The house most active in snapping up webcomickers is the
comics publisher Dark Horse; I don’t believe they intended it that way, but
they’ve taken a strong line in signing up nearly all of the webcomic creators
that I read and appreciate on a regular basis. What does that leave for other
publishers? Well, it’s a big web, and God knows – despite my occasional
pretense otherwise – I’m not the Czar of Online Comics (though that would be a great job to have – mental note: give BHO a
call later to see if it’s possible), so there are almost certainly dozens of
damn good comics online that I don’t already read.

Which is a really roundabout way of saying
that I wasn’t familiar with [[[Goats]]] – even though Rosenberg has been doing it since the end of April 1997,
and the entire archives (including the strips reprinted in this book) are all
available online, costing no more than a few cents for electricity and an
attention span unusual in any web-surfer. If you don’t believe me, have a link – that goes back to the very first
strip, which, in usual daily-comics fashion, bears very little resemblance to
the strips reprinted here.

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Happy 40th Birthday, Andrew Wheeler!

Happy 40th Birthday, Andrew Wheeler!

We weren’t going to make a big fuss about it as certain people in the company are touchy about their own impending decrepitude, but since ComicMix reviewer Andrew Wheeler outed himself on his personal blog:

Today is the 40th birthday of the man who hides behind the very thin
mask of “G.B.H. Hornswoggler,” and it wouldn’t be blogging if I didn’t
crow loudly about pointless personal minutia. No congratulations are
necessary; all I did was manage not to die for another 365 days. (And I
hope to keep that streak up for a long time to come.)

So: I am
now officially old, and will soon be sitting in a folding chair next to
the highway, shaking my cane at passing cars and hollering at the local
kids to stay off my lawn. I hope to look more and more like a George Booth cartoon as time goes on; every man needs a hobby.

Dear heavens, you aren’t old. After all, I’m three months older than you, and I’m not old. Mike is the old altercocker in this firm. Feel free to go steal his cane.

Review: ‘Graphic Classics: Oscar Wilde’

Review: ‘Graphic Classics: Oscar Wilde’

Graphic Classics, Vol. 16: Oscar Wilde
Edited by Tom Pomplun
Eureka Productions, February 2009, $11.95

Graphic Classics has been adapting the work of famous dead authors – from H.P. Lovecraft to Rafael Sabatini – for at least five years, mostly focusing on the more popular (rather than literarily classy) writers. And that’s a good thing, since no one wants to see [[[Graphic Classics: Henry James]]]. (“The Face in the Carpet” is not nearly as exciting as the Lovecraft-style title might indicate.)

So this is the sixteenth volume in the series, which are all in the same vein: about 144 pages of comics adaptations of said dead writer’s work, usually with a few long adaptations and some shorter ones sprinkled in for spice. The creators involved are a mix of semi-familiar names and newer folks on their way up – this kind of project, obviously, doesn’t tend to attract top talent. (And is almost certainly better without the kind of compromises “top talent” requires.) Editor Tom Pomplun usually adapts at least one of the stories himself – and why shouldn’t he? It’s his series – and the adaptations sometimes tend to the talky, perhaps in an attempt to be slightly more educational.

(The series as a whole tries to walk the line between “good for you” and “good fun,” and individual stories fall on one side or the other of that divide, but I’ve found that the books as a whole generally are fun, if wordy. I’ve previously reviewed Bram Stoker, Mark Twain, and Fantasy Classics.)

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Manga Friday: The Dregs

Manga Friday: The Dregs

Manga Friday took a little holiday for the last couple of weeks, and it may take more holidays in the weeks to come. Looking back on my recent columns, I’ve said an awful lot of “and here’s the next volume in a series I’ve reviewed four times” and “this week’s books have nothing in common” – and neither of those are quite what I’d hoped. I think I’m reviewing too many of the same manga, too often, so I expect to cut back on Manga Friday substantially in 2009, unless I start seeing more different things.

I expect to keep reviewing stuff here on Fridays, but there may be somewhat less of the specifically Japanese/Korean stuff for a while. (Or possibly not – whenever I try to predict something like this, I’m usually wrong.) But I’ll save the name “Manga Friday” for when I’m looking at books that would be called manga by that legal construct, the “reasonable man.”

So, for this week, I have three books, arranged in ascending order of volume number:

The Manzai Comics
Story by Atsuko Asano; Art by Hizuru Imai
Aurora, January 2009, $10.95

This opens with an odd hint of yaoi, as large, athletic, energetic, popular student Takashi Akimoto begs small, weak, timid (generic manga hero Type 1) Ayumu Seta to “please go out with me” and “do it with me.” Takashi actually wants to form a manzai comedy team with Ayumu, but he’s either too dim or too focused on himself to actually say that for several pages.

(Apparently – I have no personal knowledge of this, but several references agree – the dominant form of comedy in Japan is manzai, two-person acts, rather than sketch comedy or stand-up or improv. Think Abbot & Costello or Crosby & Hope.)

Ayumu is not just an ordinary shy boy – well, he’s a manga hero, so you know there’s got to be some horribly dramatic thing in his past – he considers himself responsible for the car-crash death of his father and older sister because he was clinically depressed (and completely untreated as well). So he has the standard “I just want to be normal” complex of the dweeby manga hero in spades.

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YA Friday: ‘Chiggers’ and ‘Thoreau at Walden’

YA Friday: ‘Chiggers’ and ‘Thoreau at Walden’

Manga are temporarily in short supply around here, so the usual “Manga Friday” slot is being taken by a close cousin. (Think of this as just another wacky hijink, Patty Duke Show-style.) Instead of manga, I have two books for younger readers that came out earlier in 2008, one very clearly for girls, and the other more gender-neutral.

Chiggers
By Hope Larson
Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Ginee Seo Books, June 2008, $17.99 (hardcover) and $9.99 (paperback)

Chiggers is set at a summer camp, and the major characters are all tween girls. (If I’ve figured it out correctly, they’re all in eighth grade.) The viewpoint character is Abby – she’s the first one to arrive in her cabin, this year, and ends up a little out of step with her cabin-mates. (Larson doesn’t tell the reader this – she doesn’t have any narration – but we see Abby nonplussed several times by her very-slightly-more-worldly friends.

Abby’s first bunkmate leaves very quickly, due to chiggers. (Look ‘em up, if you don’t know. And be glad you don’t live in the same places they do.) And she gets a new bunkmate: Shasta, who all the other girls quickly decide they don’t like. Shasta’s a little full of herself – she’s on medication, can’t do a lot of camp activities, got hit by lightning, is one-eighth Cherokee, has an older Internet boyfriend – but Abby genuinely likes Shasta.

Chiggers is low-key; there are no major events. (Even by the overly-dramatic standards of a twelve-year-old girl.) Abby and Shasta meet, become friend, squabble, make up. Abby also meets a boy who thinks she looks like a half-elf – and I’m afraid I can remember a time in my own life when I would have thought that was a nice thing to say to someone. (Luckily, Abby takes it the right way.)

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Manga Friday: Games & Doctors & Sex

Manga Friday: Games & Doctors & Sex

It’s getting harder and harder to find books for this column that go together in any meaningful way. And how do I deal with that problem? Why, by utterly ignoring the problem and throwing together whatever books happen to be lying around. Here, I’ll show you how that works…

Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning, Vol. 5
Story by Kyo Shirodaira; Art by Eita Mizuno
Yen Press, October 2008, $10.99

For the long version of the backstory of this series, see my earlier reviews of Vol. 4, Vol. 3, and Vol. 2.

The short version: there are “Blade Children” – teenagers who were abducted and had a rib removed (and probably had other things done to them, starting with psychological conditioning), and who form some kind of secret society. And there’s a teenage boy who is almost always called “Little Brother” – by people who are not, in any way, related to him, and because his now-vanished older brother was a genius, special and wonderful and better than his little brother ever could be in every way imaginable – who keeps getting caught up in their convoluted schemes, which generally involve logical puzzles, death traps, and lots of posturing about who is smarter than whom.

At this point, it’s becoming clear that the Blade Children have serious divisions in their ranks, since one group of BCs is sending an assassin against the local Japanese BCs that we’ve been watching torment – and be defeated by – Little Brother repeatedly over the last few books. (Of course, as is typical in modern manga for teenagers, everyone who matters in the entire world is a teenager.)

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Review: ‘ACME Novelty Library, No. 19’ by Chris Ware

Review: ‘ACME Novelty Library, No. 19’ by Chris Ware

ACME Novelty Library, No. 19
By Chris Ware
Drawn & Quarterly, October 2008, $15.95

First of all, it’s just struck me how odd it is that the cartoonist universally referred to as “Chris Ware” is only credited as “F.C. Ware” – and that in tiny indicia and similar eye-straining matter – in his own stories and publications. One might almost posit a crippling social phobia or overwhelming shyness on the cartoonist’s part, a personality much like his usual viewpoint characters. (But then one remembers never to assume an artist is anything like his creations; it’s rarely useful.)

The last annual issue of [[[ACME Novelty Library]]]number eighteen, for those who have difficulty counting backwards – collected the “Building Stories” sequence, mostly from The New York Times Magazine’s “Funny Papers” sections, but this volume returns to “Rusty Brown,” the long story that ran through most of issues sixteen and seventeen and does not seem to be done yet. These pages, a typically arch and distanced note by Ware informs us, “originally appeared in somewhat different form in the pages of [[[The Chicago Reader]]] between 2002-2004, and thus should not be interpreted as an artistic response to recent criticisms and/or reviews of this periodical.”

This time the focus isn’t on the title character, but on his father Woody – first, through a dramatization of a science-fiction story by Woody (luridly, but honestly, titled “[[[The Seeing Eye Dogs of Mars]]]”) and then through a sequence of events in Woody’s life as a young man in the ‘50s, fresh out of school and working as an obituary writer on a newspaper. Those events do lead to the writing of “[[[Seeing Eye]]],” and, near the end, back to the frame story of Rusty’s youth in the 1970s.

Do I need to tell you that young Woody Brown is painfully shy, ridiculously introverted, barely in control of his emotions, socially inept, clueless when it comes to the most basic patterns of living in a society, and completely unable to make any of his thoughts or feelings clear in any form of communication under any circumstances? Or did you already assume that when I mentioned that he was the main character in a Chris Ware comic?

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