Tagged: Andrew Wheeler

Review: ‘The Fart Party’ by Julia Wertz

Review: ‘The Fart Party’ by Julia Wertz

The Fart Party
By Julia Wertz
Atomic Book Company, May 2008, $13.95

Julia Wertz’s comics would be terribly juvenile if they weren’t wonderfully juvenile – little snippets of life from a young woman in San Francisco, obsessed with beer, cheese, bicycles and comics. (Not to mention the occasional outburst of cartoony violence.)

Wertz has been posting her autobiographical comics at www.fartparty.org for nearly three years now, with occasional published-on-actual-paper minicomics as well, but this is the first collection that sits comfortably on a shelf. It seems to collect roughly the first year of the online strips, when Wertz was living in San Francisco with her boyfriend, Oliver, though the book itself doesn’t say that, or have dates on any of the strips. (Wertz’s life has changed a bit since the time of these strips; she’s currently ensconced in Darkest Brooklyn.) The strips here do form something of an arc, and have a natural ending, which is rare for any collection of regularly published comics, from the web or anywhere else.

Wertz’s style is simple and cartoony, but springs out full-formed from the beginning of the book with all its rubber-armed, pointy-eyed, casually-violent energy. Wertz does include a couple of strips she created earlier, in a more conventionally “realistic” style. But she buries those strips in the middle of the book, and they’re definitely less distinctive than her current style. I’m sure the fine-art brigade will hate her work – as will the good-taste brigade, which is similar but not identical to the first brigade – but she’s a real cartoonist, and that’s something to be celebrated. There’s still room for improvement in her style; her faces are only intermittently expressive at this point, and the figures’ body language tends to huge, stagy gestures even when those aren’t appropriate.

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ComicMix Columns & Features for the Week Ending August 10, 2008

ComicMix Columns & Features for the Week Ending August 10, 2008

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  • August 10, 2008

Don’t bother me, I’m watching the ‘lympics.  As if I followed any of these sports at any other time.  We’ve had some good sports here in ComicMix too; here’s a bit of what they’ve done for you this past week:

Now will someone please put some proper shorts on those female volleyball players?

Manga Friday: Here We Go Again

Manga Friday: Here We Go Again

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  • August 8, 2008

 

This time around I have a volume two, a volume three, and a volume four – all in series that I’ve read at least some of the earlier books. Let’s see if I can still remember what went before – since manga often don’t have “who the heck are these people and what are they doing” pages – and whether they’re getting more or less interesting.

Kaze No Hana, Vol. 2
By Ushio Mizta and Akiyoshi Ohta
Yen Press, August 2008, $10.99

This is the series about an amnesiac teenage girl, Momoka, who is part of a family that wields magical swords to drive monsters away and protect their city. I reviewed the first volume in April, and had to admit then that there were too many characters with too few faces for me to keep them all straight.

Well, this time, we get even more characters, including another sword-wielding family that likes the monsters and wants to see them take over the earth or rampage through Tokyo or do whatever it is these particular monsters would do. Their leader is the cute girl Kurohime – and the only thing more dangerous than an old man in a Hong Kong movie is a cute girl in manga – and they have “sacred swords,” which are utterly different from the heroes’ “spiritual swords” in ways that perhaps don’t entirely translate well.

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ComicMix Columns & Features for the Week Ending August 3, 2008

ComicMix Columns & Features for the Week Ending August 3, 2008

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  • August 3, 2008

August?  August?  Where did July go?  As if anyone’s recovered from San Diego yet.  As the dog days approach, ComicMix is still barking up all the right trees with our regular columns and features; here’s what we’ve broughnt you this past week:

So cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of peace!

Manga Friday: Who Are You?

Manga Friday: Who Are You?

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  • August 1, 2008

This week we’ll be looking at three books with main characters who look like one thing, but are something else.

Nephilim, Vol. 1
By Anna Hanamaki
Aurora, May 2008, $10.95

On a continent with the unlikely name of Elwestland, two political powers – with the is-it-quitting-time-on-Friday-already? names of “The Empire” and “The Federation” – are in a long cold war, having split the land right down the middle. Oh, no, wait! There’s also a nearly impassable jungle right in that middle, conveniently separating the Empire from the Federation. And in that jungle live the mysterious, nomadic Nephilim.

Nephilim appear in one form by day and another by night – this may simply be swapping gender, but the text of the book doesn’t quite say that – and their night-form is the true one. (They’re fertile in that form, among other things.) But if an outsider sees a Nephilim in his/her true form – possibly only if the Nephilim is naked, but that doesn’t seem to be the important bit – The Curse declares that Nephilim must kill that outsider personally, or start to die slowly.

And our plot begins when the dashing Imperial soldier Colonel Sir Guyfeis S. Northenfield, who is also a top bounty hunter, a master of unarmed combat, and probably a deft hand at Parcheesi, too, is charging through that not-nearly-impassable-enough jungle on a mission to retrieve the fair Lady Lia, who has been kidnapped by perfidious Federal agents. He avoids or kills Federals by day, and has a quick run-in with a wandering Nephilim named Abel. (Rolling a fifteen or higher on the Random Encounter table, clearly.) That night, Abel is bathing in a stream, so Guy sneaks up to catch an eyeful – either unaware of the curse, secretly hot for the cute boy he thought Abel was, or just terminally nosy. He discovers Abel is “truly” (by night, at least) female, and she then tries, very badly, to kill him.

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Review: ‘Slow Storm’ by Danica Novgorodoff

Review: ‘Slow Storm’ by Danica Novgorodoff

Slow Storm
By Danica Novgorodoff
First Second, September 2008, $19.95

This is Novgorodoff’s first full-length graphic novel; she was an Eisner nominee last year for the one-shot [[[A Late Freeze]]]. She’s got an assured, pseudo-outsider art style, with big blocks of color and slablike faces, but her writing isn’t quite up to the same level yet. [[[Slow Storm]]] will be in stores in September, but comics stores and online retailers are, as always, already taking pre-orders.

Ursa Crain is a firefighter in Kentucky’s rural Oldham County who has a very confrontational, unpleasant relationship with her brother and coworker, the very thuddingly named Grim. (What kind of family names their two kids Ursa and Grim, anyway? Did they know their kids would be characters in a story with heavy symbolism?) These two siblings clearly don’t get along, but we don’t know why – and their sniping and digs don’t give us much of a clue. Grim also complains that his sister “looks like a moose,” as if he wants her to increase her sexual attractiveness – which doesn’t sound like any brother-sister relationship I know. (Particularly since the other firefighters – the ones not related to her – are already sexually harassing Ursa in their mild, Southern, good-ol-boy way.)

Rafael Jose Herrera Sifuentes (Rafi) is a stableboy from Mexico, living in Kentucky illegally upstairs in the stable where he works. He comes from horse country himself, but he could only live hand-to-mouth there, and so he got himself smuggled into the US to be able to send money back to his family. He had the usual bad experiences on the way – robbed by the coyotes taking him over the border, shot at by a racist rancher – and somehow settled into this Kentucky stable.

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Review: ‘The Country Nurse’ by Jeff Lemire

Review: ‘The Country Nurse’ by Jeff Lemire

Essex County Vol. 3: The Country Nurse
By Jeff Lemire
Top Shelf, October 2008, $9.95

The finale of the “[[[Essex County]]]” trilogy – which will be available in October, so start saving your pennies now – draws together the first two graphic novels in the series, but at the expense of not being as coherent as a story itself. It has two main plot threads – one set in the modern day, following the nurse of the title, and one in 1917.

The modern plot is similar to the frame story of the second volume, Ghost Stories – Anne Quenneville travels around this fictionalized corner of Ontario, Canada on her rounds one day, looking in on her usual patients and giving us some callbacks to those first two stories. (The kid Lester has given up his cape and mask; ex-hockey player Lou is toast.) It does pull together all of the strands of “Essex County” neatly and well, but that’s pretty much all it’s doing; there isn’t much in the way of events, just Anne meeting people we already know or will soon come to recognize.

The other plot starts off about young Lawrence Lebeuf, a twelve-year-old orphan at an isolated orphanage deep in the woods. (Was it really common to have orphanages out in the middle of nowhere, staffed only by a nun and a caretaker? I guess it exemplifies “out of sight, out of mind.”) The orphanage is run by Sister Margaret, and the caretaker is a scruffy man named Charles Gerrard. Lawrence is something of a protégé of Charles’s; he’s the oldest of the orphans and Charles talks to him quite a bit about what he should do when he soon leaves the orphanage.

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Review: ‘Swallow Me Whole” by Nate Powell

Review: ‘Swallow Me Whole” by Nate Powell

Swallow Me Whole
By Nate Powell
Top Shelf, September 2008, $19.95

Ruth and Perry are stepsiblings, somewhere in the South – people say “shoore” for “sure,” biology teachers can’t even say the word “evolution,” and the kids’ slowly-dying, live-in grandmother is called “Memaw.” It also seems to be sometime in the late ‘80s, from the clothes and the music and the hair.

And they’re both – how should I put this? Oh, let’s use the jargon – both are very far from neurotypical. Perry hallucinates a tiny wizard who makes him draw incessantly for “missions.” And Ruth may even be schizophrenic: she hears voices and feels patterns in everything around her, particularly with insect swarms. She has a huge collection of insects in jars in her room; she’s stolen at least some of them from school, but it’s not clear where they all came from. When she finally has a break at school and is taken to the nurse’s office, the school cop immediately assumes she’s high and starts loudly questioning her about drugs – she doesn’t get diagnosed has obsessive-compulsive for several days.

[[[Swallow Me Whole]]] is a slow, swirling, uneasy book, centered mostly on Ruth and her efforts to live in the world – talking to her Memaw, getting a work-study job at the museum, trying not to be swallowed up by the massive swarms of insects that comfort her and that may, or may not, be real. (Don’t decide either way until you get to the end.) It begins with a few short scenes set about five years earlier, when Ruth and Perry are both pre-teens and Memaw’s hospitalization ends with her moving in with them and their parents. From there, it’s hard to say how much time Swallow Me Whole covers, since there are no external markers. They go to school but we don’t see school begin or end for the summer. We don’t see the seasons change. Scenes could be separated by a day or three months. It’s all now; it’s all happening, like life, one thing after another after another.

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ComicMix Columns & Features for the Week Ending July 27, 2008

ComicMix Columns & Features for the Week Ending July 27, 2008

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  • July 28, 2008

With so much news coming out of San Diego from ComicMix HQ (at booth #3208) and elsewhere, it’s my job back here in New York to make sure all our regular columns and features don’t get lost in the hype! Here’s your weekly one-stop shopping source for all our exclusive goodies:

So, I hear there’s a convention going on this weekend…

Manga Friday: ‘Me and the Devil Blues’

Manga Friday: ‘Me and the Devil Blues’

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  • July 25, 2008

It’s unofficially been Blues & Jazz week here in my reviews – and, if you’re wondering how Erotic Comics fit in there, you don’t know what the word “Jazz” means. So, for Manga Friday, here’s the first book in a series that retells the life of blues legend Robert Johnson from a very different perspective.

Me and the Devil Blues, Vol. 1
By Akira Hiaramoto
Del Rey Manga, July 2008, $19.95

If you know anything about Robert Johnson – the archetypal bluesman, who came out of nowhere to record 24 songs and then die young – it’s that he sold his soul to the devil, one night at a Mississippi crossroads, to get his amazing ability to play and sing. Is it true? Well, it’s a damn good story, and that’s what matters most.

Speaking of damn good stories, Akira Hiramoto weaves one here, drawing from the legends and few known facts of Johnson’s life and bringing in careful research on the rural Mississippi of the ‘30s, plus his own speculation and fiction. In a life as full of holes and mysteries as Johnson’s, the only way to tell a story is to make it up.

Hiramoto starts his story in 1929 with a young man called RJ, who works on a plantation, dreams of becoming a bluesman (though he’s not very good at singing or guitar playing), is harried by his domineering sister Bessie, and loved by his pregnant wife Virginia. He sneaks off to the local juke joint just about every night, to drink, talk with his friends, and hear the blues. He keeps trying to play, but never gets far – he really is lousy. The traveling bluesman Son House tries to explain to RJ what the blues is, but RJ doesn’t quite get it.

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