Tagged: Book-A-Day

Book-A-Day 2018 #331: The Swords of Heaven, The Flowers of Hell by Michael Moorcock & Howard Chaykin

Michael Moorcock has “ended” his Eternal Champion cycle many times over the past decades — I think he did it for the first time back in the late ’60s, when it was still almost entirely Elric and just a bit of those other guys. But none of those endings have taken; he’s come back time and time again for more stories of Elric in particular and other incarnations as well.

One of the earlier endings was in the mid-70s, after two “John Daker” novels, about an incarnation of the EC that remembered all of the other incarnations. Those felt like summings-up, and were a little heftier than some of the EC novels (Dorian Hawkmoon, I am looking at you). But of course a working writer will work, and he’ll come up with more ideas — particularly for the central project of his career.

So, in 1979, Moorcock, in whatever way and for whatever reason, wrote a treatment for a third Daker story, which he gave to Howard Chaykin, then very early in his career, to adapt and illustrate and turn into a graphic novel. (I don’t think that term existed yet, or at least wasn’t in wide use, but this was one of the first created-as-a-book comics in that first burst in the late ’70s.) It was published as The Swords of Heaven, The Flowers of Hell , missed its market almost entirely, and has been a sought-after collector’s item for Moorcock completists since then, but little-remembered otherwise.

But Titan is doing a big series of all of the Moorcock EC comics, in more-or-less uniform editions, so earlier this year they reissued Swords of Heaven into a market where it actually could find the intersection of Moorcock and Chaykin fans.

The best Eternal Champion stories have quirkier, less obviously heroic plotlines — particularly the Elric stories. But a whole lot of them from the ’60s and ’70s take that essential sword-and-sorcery plot — evil forces are threatening {insert place}, which is generally where {hero}’s love {hot girlfriend} lives, and often where he’s from, too, and so he must battle their {fiendish weapon} against overwhelming odds and win out in the end despite great losses to his forces and/or allies. Better versions of that story turn up the woe and bleakness; what made Moorcock’s epic fantasy stories distinctive was the attitude of his stories and protagonists — they’re depressive and tormented and unlucky and nearly incapable of happiness.

Doing the same story in comics form means less of the woe-is-me narration, which could be a positive or a negative, depending on your point of view. But it does tend to make Swords of Heaven a little flatter and less distinctive than an equivalent Moorcock novel. By this point in his career, Moorcock’s language was stronger, and often more of a draw, than his epic adventure plots. (His plots outside of epic adventure had gotten substantially better — this book came out only a year after one of his best novels, the World Fantasy-winning Gloriana, and just before a burst of interesting early-’80s novels including the Von Bek books.)

In this case, the transform table goes thus:

  • {insert place} = The Dream Marshes, a lush and rich land about to be invaded by the barbarians of the desert realm Hell on their way to invade an even richer land called Heaven, ruled by aristocratic assholes
  • {hero} = Urlik Skarsol, bodily dropped into the body of Lord Clen of the Dream Marches
  • {hot girlfriend} = Ermizhad, the wife of Erekose, which was our hero’s name three or four books ago, and who he’s trying to get back to in the sense that he pines for her and has no way to actually control his travels
  • {fiendish weapon} = mostly human-wave attacks, though they’re also the usual mix of inventively bloodthirsty and maniacal

So Swords of Heaven does have a faint whiff of the generic to me — not as much as the first Hawkmoon series, luckily, but less distinctive than the first two Daker novels The Eternal Champion and Phoenix in Obsidian. The names in particular are a bit on the nose, aside from the odd “Lord Clen.” Clen does not have a sword that steals souls, does not massacre his entire race, and does not lose his homeland or One True Love. He’s a smartish guy who wins a brutal war against an overwhelming enemy, though only after his side takes horrific losses. So, not entirely devoid of woe.

Chaykin is working in fully painted pages here, without a lot of black lines. The characters look like Chakyin people, but the overall look aims for more of a classic-illustration look, vaguely in the Howard Pyle vein. And that’s very appropriate for a very traditional adventure story like this one. It’s difficult to tell what of the writing is his and what is Moorcock’s, but it’s all plausible and sturdy, with no major problems.

This is not a great lost Eternal Champion story. It’s a pretty good late-70s EC story, that links Phoenix in Obsidian to 1986’s The Dragon in the Sword. That’s fine for me; it might be fine for you.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #329: Memoirs of a Very Stable Genius by Shannon Wheeler

Disclaimer No. 1: I’m not related to Shannon Wheeler, as far as I know. We both carry an ancient Anglo-Saxon name, and probably have at least one ancestor in common, somewhere in the misty dawn of time, but there are a lot of Wheelers in this world.

Disclaimer No. 2: Wheeler has a recent book about Our Current President, but this is not it. If that’s what you’re looking for, may I direct you to Sh*t My President Says ?

Memoirs of a Very Stable Genius  is a collection of Shannon Wheeler’s cartoons, both comics-format and single-panel. The supposed connection, according to the back cover, is that these are all “personal comics,” but I’m not sure what makes these single panel cartoons any more “personal” than, say, the ones in I Told You So  or I Don’t Get It  or I Thought You Would Be Funnier .

The longer stories all are autobiographical in some way or other, so they’re more obvious. But, if the single-panels all really do come out of Wheeler’s life somehow, it would have been good to have an introduction, or endnotes, or something to make those connections clear. Wheeler does have a fair number of mildly political cartoons, mostly reacting to the frighteningly authoritarian bent of the current US administration — but the majority are just regular single-panel stuff, from desert islands to couples (in bed, or on a couch, or out at a table) to kids to cocktail parties to crime (and superheroes) to death and cupids.

Well, we didn’t get that, so any reader will just say “huh, this cartoon of a guy and his pet fish on a desert island is personal. Wonder what that means?” to herself without getting any answer.

Also quirky and not entirely clear: the book is divided into a number of numbered chapters, without any indication of why or for what purpose. There may be a theme for each chapter, but, if so, I couldn’t detect any of them. Or they may be excuses to run Wheeler illustrations on the chapter-title pages without those having to be jokes.

The longer stories start with the opener, “Camp Micro-Penis,” about a boy with an unfortunately tiny male appendage who Wheeler knew as a boy at summer camp. Also included are the self-evident “My Meeting with Congressman John Lewis” and “How to Pack for a Trip” and “Paris ’89” and “San Diego Comic Con!” and “The Dirty Little Secret Origin of Comic Books” and “How to Sell a Love Doll.” Slightly less obvious are “Cubana” (about a 1996 trip to Cuba) and “Portugal” (ditto, year unspecified) and “The Urine Squirt Gun” (a Chekhovian story about Wheeler and his kid friends and a horrible weapon) and “Dog Bully” (A teachable moment with his kids) and “How to Choke Your Chicken” (in which Wheeler had to kill his ill egg-layer).

All of the long stories are amusing; all of the cartoons are at least amusing, and I laughed at a few of them. Wheeler has a nice cartoony style which works well in both formats, and a lot of this book is in color, too, which surprised me.

Given that he is a Wheeler, I was inclined to like this book anyway. But I can do that without any qualms: there’s a lot of good stuff here. I can’t judge the claims of “very stable” or “genius” from these works, but, what the hell! let’s let him claim that. He’s definitely not the worst person ever to do so.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #328: The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang

There was an era in books for younger readers where the standard message was to conform, to become just like everyone else was supposed to be, to follow the prescriptions of life and fit your feet to the path. And we all make fun of those books now, when we see them or think about them.

We’re in the opposite era now: the standard story is that what a person wants must be right, because that person wants it. And putting it that baldly obviously shows up the inherent problems, but we generally don’t worry about them. Tell kids they can do anything, we say. They’ll figure out all of the ways that isn’t true for themselves eventually; we don’t need to crush their dreams directly.

Those stories are also regularly about exceptional, unique people — coddled princesses and lost princes, prophesied heroes and fated liberators. Is that because we all believe we are princesses at heart, or because those are the people whose dreams aren’t crushed in the end?

Don’t get me wrong: it’s good to tell kids they have options, that they can aim for the stars. But I don’t think we’re telling them that 99% of them will fail, that the stars are out of their reach, and that they’ll, at some point, need to trim their sails to catch a wind that actually exists. And so I wonder about the diet of stories we’re giving them.

Jen Wang is telling a “be who you feel you need to be” story in her new graphic novel The Prince and the Dressmaker . And, in that Oscar Wilde sense, it’s fiction, so they can become those things. One of them, of course is a prince at the start, which gives one a certain leg up in the world: it’s easier to find your perfect self when you’re not struggling to put food in your belly and clothes on your back.

It’s also easier when you’re in something like a fairy tale, which this is. It’s set in “Paris, at the dawn of the modern era” — maybe the middle of the long quiet 19th century, maybe later, maybe earlier, but those “maybes” are the point. The Prince is Sebastian, of Belgium, who you will not find on the family tree of the actual Belgian monarchy. He’s in Paris for the summer with his aunt, a French Countess, and will have the usual round of balls and events for his sixteenth birthday.

The underlying reason why he’s in Paris: to choose a wife. His royal parents are fictional/modern enough to let him pick his own match (within reason, and from a carefully curated list of the right young European noblewomen), but they’re traditional/realistic enough to want to get the betrothal settled before much more time goes by. Sebastian isn’t terribly interested in this — is any fictional prince or princess ever happy to engage in the round of who-should-I-marry? — for reasons that will be very obvious very quickly.

Frances is a young woman from outside Paris, driven to become a dress designer. She’s working, at what seems to be a low level, in a high-end shop, and gets her chance with a last-minute design for the Prince’s first ball: the willful Lady Sophie Rohan ruined her dress riding and in a fit of pique asks Frances to make her “the devil’s wench.”

Frances is too green to realize actually doing this would be horrible for her fledgling career, and does it. The dress causes a scandal, and Frances is about to be fired when a mysterious man comes around, looking for the designer of the scandalous dress. He has an equally mysterious client who wants to hire that designer exclusively to design for her, and Frances jumps at the offer.

Of course, despite an initial attempt at anonymity, she soon learns her new client is Sebastian. But she wants to design, and Sebastian wants to wear exactly the kind of flashy, exciting dresses she wants to make. And, at first, it all goes well: Frances gets experience and confidence, and Sebastian gets to go out in public as Lady Crystallia and become a minor celebrity.

But Frances can’t advance professionally as “Lady Crystallia’s” dressmaker, because that would connect Crystallia to Sebastian. And Sebastian’s parents are demanding he spend more time wooing all of those young women, who he has no interest in or time for. (He’s spending his nights as Crystallia, and his days sleeping and recovering.) It all is going to smash, and it does.

Wang finds her way to a happy ending, and one that’s more in keeping with the time and her protagonists’ very different social positions than I expected. The Prince and the Dressmaker is much more successful than I was worried it could be; it is a book that tells the you-can-be-whatever-you-want lesson, but it doesn’t skimp on pointing out the hard work and sacrifices needed along the way. (Plus a fair bit of luck, a sympathetic creator, and no small bit of wealth and position — but that’s what makes it fiction.)

I should have expected that from the author of Koko Be Good , which had a similarly complex central male-female relationship that didn’t resolve in conventional ways and a more nuanced view of success and the pursuit thereof. Wang is also a fine cartoonist, particularly good here with crisp, openly emotional faces drawn with few lines and big expressive eyes. This is a book telling that currently-popular story, and in a way designed to appeal to young readers who want to believe that they’ll get all of their dreams — but it’s a fine book despite that.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #326: Lumberjanes, Vol. 5: Band Together by Stevenson, Watters, Leyh, Allen, Nowak & Laiho

There’s a point where, as a reviewer and critic, you either need to engage fully with your material or just walk away from it. Holding it at arm’s length doesn’t do anyone any good.

And I’m very aware that all of my posts about the great female-centric comic Lumberjanes — see my posts on volumes one and two and three  and four  — are about how I really can’t engage that deeply with a comic that is so centrally about being a girl and having friendships with other girls in a very girl-positive environment.

So I think this is the last time I’m going to read a Lumberjanes thing: they are good, and entirely a positive thing to have in the world, but I really don’t have a way into this material, and five books of searching is long enough.

Also, the stories collected in Lumberjanes, Vol. 5: Band Together  see a big shift in the creative team — Noelle Stevenson leaves as co-writer, to be replaced by Kat Leyh, and Brooke Allen hands over illustration duties to Carolyn Nowak. So this a a transitional moment anyway, which makes it better than most moments to transition myself quietly in the other direction.

Band Together starts with a single-issue flashback to the first day of camp, showing all five of our intrepid campers arriving, in the company of their various families, and pretty much immediately becoming best friends. It is fun and nice and sweet and very fluffy.

The rest of the book collects the three-issue story that introduced Leyh and Nowak as creators, in which our five intrepid best friends discover that there’s an entire civilization of mermaids in their local lake. (Lumberjanes has a lot of the qualities of a good animated TV series, primary among which is that the world is big and full of wonders, including ones that really should have been honkingly obvious before the point they appear.) Since Lumberjanes is about all-friendship-all-the-time (for female-identified persons), this story must of course be about our heroines mending a broken friendship among the hard-rocking merwomen.

That longer story is less fluffy, but it’s still very Lumberjanean (Lumberjaneite? Lumberjaneicious? Lumberjane-aroonie?) in its core positivity and sunny disposition. Even when one character becomes obsessed, she can be talked down (and mildly shamed) by her friends by merely mentioning that she wasn’t thinking enough about everyone else’s feelings.

Again, I think I’m going to leave Lumberjanes behind at this point. It is a very good thing with almost no points of congruity with my life or interests, and I’m trying to teach myself that I don’t need to worry about everything. Let’s see if I can learn.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #325: Promethea, Book 1 by Moore, Williams & Gray

Alan Moore famously has a love-hate relationship with superhero comics. Well, I mean, a lot of people love or hate superhero comics, and plenty do both. The difference is that superhero comics hates and loves Moore back.

In the late ’90s, after he’d cast a magic incantation cursing DC Comics and all of its wares, swearing never to work for them again under any circumstances, Moore started his own line of superhero comics, under the not-at-all-self-aggrandizing label of America’s Best Comics. And then his publisher sold the entire company to DC anyway, pretty much simultaneously with the launch of the ABC line.

(It’s almost enough to make one believe that deep Northamptonian magic doesn’t actually do anything!)

One of those ABC books was Promethea, with art by J.H. Williams II and Mick Gray. I read the first collection sometime in the early Aughts, and didn’t remember a whole lot about it. (I do remember that nothing I saw of America’s Best Comics, then or later, impressed me all that much. But I can be hard to impress when it comes to superhero stuff.) Since I’m reading giant stacks of comics-format books this year to feed the maw of Book-A-Day, I figured I might as well try Promethea, Book 1 again.

(I’m still not that impressed. This is not a surprise.)

Promethea the character is a legacy hero, one of many in Moore’s work — he’s been very fond of having his main character be one of a million versions of the same thing, from the Captain Britain multiverse to the Parliament of Trees. This time, the original of Promethea is a fourth-century girl in Egyptian Alexandria bodily transported to the realm of story by the god Thoth-Hermes, and somehow because of that gets to be the template for a series of mystically-powered superwomen starting at the end of the 19th century in the US. Since Moore always has miles of notes, I’m not going to ask what Promethea was doing for the intervening thirteen centuries, because he’d probably tell me in great detail in some tedious end-of-book text feature.

Our brand-new Promethea is Sophie Bangs — that name sounds much more like a camgirl than a superheroine, but OK — in a mildly science-utopian 1999, a slightly alternate comic-book-universey version of the real world her story was published into. She’s a college student researching the legend of Promethea, providing both the natural opportunity for a lot of infodumping and the reason why she gets saddled with the glowy caduceus staff and form-fitting bronze armor.

There are, of course, equally mystical evil people who want to snuff out this new Promethea before she comes into her full powers, and they try to do so. But most of the story here, from the first six issues of the Promethea comic, is an extended tour of the Immateria, the lands of story and myth, in the company of each of the recent dead Prometheas in turn.

That tour is not over at the end of this book; nothing is actually resolved by the last page here and Sophie/Promethea is heading out into a promised two more sections of the Immateria to learn more lessons from more dead predecessors. Why this is where the vast and cool intelligences of DC chose to end this particular book is beyond me; I suspect they believe that their target audience doesn’t understand the idea of stories “ending” anyway, and so don’t bother wasting time with such things.

But I am a well-known cynic.

Promethea is a perfectly adequate superhero comic, with powers and characters that make more sense than many of its competitors. Williams and Gray draw well, and get some inventive page designs out of it. You could certainly do worse than this.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #323: Julio’s Day by Gilbert Hernandez

I spend more time than is reasonable worrying if I’m doing things right. Even worse, often what I mean by “right” is “fitting the rules I made up myself, which I haven’t bothered to clearly codify.”

Obviously, a healthy person would not spend time on anything like that, but I am a blogger, and so clearly not that healthy.

So my first question after reading Gilbert Hernandez’s standalone 2013 graphic novel Julio’s Day  was whether it really counts as Love and Rockets. Oh, sure, two excerpts from it appeared first in the New Stories paperback series, but most of this story didn’t, and it has no connections with any of his other L&R work. (On the other side of the argument: a lot of his L&R work has no connection to the rest of his L&R work; he’s been more likely to go off on tangents than his brother Jaime.)

Since I’m writing this here now, you’ve probably already assumed that I decided it counted. And I did. But I had to worry the issue for a while first.

The next big question is whether it’s way too reductive to call Julio’s Day the story of the hundred-year-life of a completely closeted Mexican gay man. And that’s a nice label, but it doesn’t reflect what the book is actually about. Julio himself isn’t really all that central to his own story to begin with: he’s pretty colorless for a Gilbert Hernandez protagonist, overshadowed his entire life by the more vibrant members of his family.

As usual for Hernandez, “vibrant” is not at all the same thing as “positive.” Julio’s uncle Juan is one of the most distinctive characters here, and he’s a deeply damaged person, compelling to sneak away with baby boys and do unspecified things with them. The rest of Julio’s family, and the few others they interact with, are quirky in similar Gilbert Hernandez ways, but Julio himself remains transparent, the void at the center of his own story.

Like Palomar, this town is somewhere in Latin America. Also like Palomar, Hernandez will not be any more specific than that. Julio’s life matches pretty closely to the twentieth century, from small bits of internal evidence, but that’s all background: Julio is not involved in any great issues, and barely any small issues. He just lives here, for a long time, while other things happen around him, mostly far away.

There’s a hundred pages of incidents and no real overall plot: this is a story of episodes, moments over a hundred years when Julio was there to witness them. (Or was somewhere else: the two pieces published in L&R follow other members of his family on journeys, first his father and then his grand-nephew.)

In typical Hernandez fashion, there are bizarre, horrifying diseases and deaths, and many random, mostly unhappy events — a long life in a Gilbert Hernandez story is a sequence of sad and shocking moments, ended only by death.

The title is ironic at best, as well: not only is this the story of a hundred years, not a single day, but Julio never really had a day, either literally or metaphorically. His grand-nephew poses that question to him near the end, and that’s the source for the title — but Julio was never in the right time or place to seize that day, and maybe was never the person who could have seized that day.

Does that make Julio’s Day a cautionary tale? It’s not focused enough for that, and I think Hernandez would deny that impulse — he’s never been one to make a single lesson with a story. Gilbert Hernandez stories aim for the complexity and confusion of real life: too many things happening to too many people to turn it into a single narrative, and all of the lessons possible in there somewhere.

And I suspect Julio’s Day is the kind of book that rewards multiple readings, to trace the connections, personal and visual, over this long century, from the moment Julio opens his mouth to be born until the moment his mouth hangs open in death.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #322: The Martian Confederacy, Vol. 2: From Mars With Love by Jason McNamara & Paige Braddock

I read the first volume of Martian Confederacy nine years ago, around the time it came out, but clearly didn’t love it enough to jump into the second book any time quickly.

But time wounds all heels, and, during a business trip recently, I remembered that I had The Martian Confederacy, Vol. 2: From Mars With Love  on a device, and so read it to keep the Book-A-Day streak going. (If you think that “streak” is filled with the book equivalent of a lot of bloop singles, well, you’re not wrong.) As with the first book, it’s written by Jason McNamara and drawn by Paige Braddock, and both of them will probably be very surprised to see this post pop up if they have the usual Google ego-searches active. (I’m sure they’ve done plenty of other stuff since this, and I like to believe that everyone gets better, too.)

Martian Confederacy has a veneer of seriousness and drama, but it’s a loose, ramshackle construction that fights against that seriousness every step of the way. (I called it “the Dukes of Hazard on Mars” the first time around, and I stand by that.)

As the cover gives away, central this time is a love story between our somewhat lunkish (but good-hearted) hero Boone and Lou, his android roommate (platonically, up to this point). They set off to investigate the abduction of the children of a friend of Lou’s — there’s a big hole in the side of their trailer and everything — and end up being shanghaied by the Alcalde into investigating a wider problem, and breaking his rules to get off the planet and find the culprits.

You see — and you’ll want to be sitting down for this — there’s a planet-wide child theft ring, which nobody has heard about for some reason, and the Alcalde (corrupt, the only law/government on the entire planet, no apparent thugs to actually enforce his edicts but he acts like someone will do what he decrees) tells Boone and Lou that they need to solve the problem before he (the Alcalde) comes back from his honeymoon. Oh, and they’re specifically ordered not to leave the planet, though the instant they start to think it about, it’s clear the kids were all kidnapped to somewhere other than Mars.

That’s how From Mars, With Love is the whole way: superficially plausible as long as you don’t think about anything for even a second, and full of very durable cliches mixed with random oddities. (The Alcalde’s new wife is two women, connected upside-down at the torso, and they flip around semi-randomly, taking over the personality and activity of the single person they seem to be legally.) The universe is pretty crapsack — slavery (at least of non-human sentients) is legal, kidnapping kids is pretty common, and everything is pretty beat-up and junky. And the plot is the usual combination of fighting and let-me-tell-you-what’s-really-happening, with the kind of ending you’d expect from a story like this.

I have a feeling the creators took it a bit more seriously than I did, but that’s OK: you should commit to the things you’re doing. As far as I can tell, this is where the series ended — two collections of outlaw medium-future adventures, sticking it to The Man on the red planet. It’s unique, I’ll give it that: it’s definitely one of a kind.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #321: The New York Four by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly

Hey, remember Minx? (Don’t worry, a lot of people don’t.)

DC Comics launched that imprint in 2007 to great fanfare, with a raft of interesting creators (many from outside the comic-shop) world and a focus on fiction for teen girls that was unusual for comics of the modern era. It flopped in barely a year, though: that’s why you might not remember it.

Other companies, before and since, have published plenty of very successful books for this audience — I need only mention the name Raina Telgemeier. But DC didn’t manage to do it: maybe because they were too locked into their usual distribution channels, maybe because “DC Comics” turned off those girls, maybe because the stars just weren’t right. But it did flop.

I’ve covered most of the Minx books randomly here — Re-Gifters and ClubbingThe Plain Janes and Good as Lily, Janes sequel Janes in Love , Kimmie66 , Water Baby , Confessions of a Blabbermouth , and Emiko Superstar  in a quick way during my Eisner-judging frenzy. But one of the Minx books I didn’t manage to read at the time was The New York Four, a graphic novel about four young women, all first-year students at New York University, by writer Brian Wood and artist Ryan Kelly.

But somehow, without realizing the connection, I had a publicity copy (in electronic form) of the Dark Horse book The New York Four , from 2014, which also included the aborted sequel The New York Five, which was done for Minx but never published by them. (And I mean literally not realizing; I figured it out while starting to type this.)

But now I’ve knocked off one more Minx: I think the only ones I haven’t seen now are Burnout and Token.

The New York Four (the original graphic novel) was also, in a way, a follow-up to Local , a Brian Wood/Ryan Kelly comic about an aimless young woman from a year or so before. But this one is more obviously made for the teen set: every one of these four women has A Problem, presumably one that some segment of the target audience would relate to. (I don’t think it was that mercenary, but we do have The Catfished Girl, and The Stalker, and The Sugar-Daddy Chaser, and The Outer-Borough Slut, if you want to be reductive.) The first story focuses almost exclusively on The Catfished Girl, Riley, who is also said to be a bookworm (we don’t see this) from a demanding family whose older sister ran away for mysterious reasons seven years before. The other three are supporting characters in the Riley story in Four, though the slightly shorter Five is more balanced. A different structure, one that let each woman have an independent story that the others supported, might have been better, but even this structure didn’t make it out into public unscathed, so I’m not really complaining.

The characterization is thoughtful but tends to be one-note — each of the Four is mostly her issue, which is underlined by one of the organizing principles of both Four and Five: they’re all taking part in an unlikely get-college-kids-to-take-high-school-exams-regularly program, which is also inexplicably well-paid, and they have to meet regularly with a psychiatrist as part of this program. It’s entirely possible that Wood is basing this fictional program on something similar or identical in the real world, but it seemed incredibly bizarre and unlikely to me, a convoluted way to get his characters into reality-TV style “tell your story into the camera” moments.

Kelly’s art is lush and detailed, with all of the people distinctive and real. He gives this book a lot of depth, down to body language — look at main character Riley on the cover! can’t you tell a lot about her just from that? — and facial expressions.

But it feels like there’s just too much here, and Wood ends up giving short shrift to the fact that these women are in college — we barely see them in class, and they don’t interact with other students at all. I suspect that he had a novel’s worth of ideas for a novella-length story. And I can’t help but compare it to the John Allison-written Giant Days , which started slightly later and was in pamphlet-format comics originally, which let it give each of its (only three) young women the spotlight in turn.

There’s a lot of good in The New York Four, and it could have been better if it and Minx had been a success: I expect Wood and Kelly would have done further stories, and maybe even followed these women all the way to graduation. Oh, well. Failure is the way of the world…and that’s a lesson you can also get by reading The New York Four.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #318: Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament edited by Anonymous

This book came out of a particular moment, and a particular place — England, in the mid-80s, during one of its periodic frenzies about “offensive” material in comics form. But it’s more generally applicable, to any nation that claims a heritage from an Abrahamaic religion (which includes, I’ bet, 95%+ of the people reading this.)

It’s a book that was created to make a point. An obvious one, for people who actually knew the truth, but Bible-thumpers are regularly ignorant of many of the horrible lessons contained in the thing they thump.

The title gives it away, of course: Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament . All the murder and rape and war and human sacrifice and “take my virgin daughters instead of my male guest” that can be crammed into 68 pages, by a crew of major and semi-major names from the independent UK scene at the time. The book was edited and assembled by someone, but that person is never named — it’s some editor at Knockabout Publications at the time, but I have no idea who that is.

To be blunt, Outrageous Tales is pointedly saying the the source of a lot of people’s moral compass is full of horrible lessons and shocking stories and thoroughly evil deeds, many of them very much in the name of You Know Who. (Almost as if it were a collection of legends from a savage group of desert tribes from more than a thousand years!)

So Neil Gaiman writes a long section adapting a whole bunch of the book of Judges — one of the ones that doesn’t come up much in the modern day, since it’s full of horrible things and the main lesson is “do what God says or die horribly, and maybe die horribly even if you do” — turning it into something very much like an EC Comic. Mike Matthews does the very twisted “host” art for the opening and closing sections, with other artists (including Dave McKean) doing the bits in the middle.

Other greatest hits of the Bible include an Alan Moore/Hunt Emerson take on a long list of “kill people who have fucked in this incorrect way” from Leviticus, with Emerson gleefully depicting a rapidly shrinking Israelite tribe killing their fellow tribesmen who broke each rule in turn. Kim Deitch does a straight adaptation of the book of Job, without any of the rib-nudging of many of the other stories, and it’s still horrifying, since Job’s is a horrifying story. Brian Bolland has Elisha cursing forty-two boys to be eaten by bears for calling him “Baldy,” and Dave Gibbons turns the angels of Sodom and Gomorrah into something like aliens. (Which, in retrospect, seems to be slightly off-message.)

There are a few other stories tucked into the niches in between, but it’s not a long book — only 68 pages, as I said. And it is all pretty much the same tone: can you believe what’s in this old book of laws and stories?

I can believe it, but I am the guy who won the Bible Olympics as a teen two years running. (It was a very liberal church, so this material was never an emphasis — but what teen boy isn’t fascinated with the horrible Old Testament stuff?) You may not need this book to learn this lesson. In fact, that’s the real problem with Outrageous Tales: the people who most need to learn this lesson will never learn it from a book like this.

But most lessons are like that, aren’t they? If they were easy, they wouldn’t be real lessons.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #311: Look Back and Laugh: Journal Comics by Liz Prince

I do like titles that end with “by {insert author};” they save me time and space on my post titles. Perhaps I should do a year where I only read books like that.

(I rely on you readers to talk me out of patently stupid ideas like that one.)

I have a feeling Liz Prince has a more interesting and full cartooning career than I’ve managed to keep up with: I can be obtuse like that. I have read and liked her books Tomboy  and Alone Forever , but I bet there’s more out there. I should probably take a look.

But right now I’m here to tell you about Look Back and Laugh , a collection of her journal comics from 2016. If I have this right, Prince started a Patreon sometime around then, and one of the rewards was a monthly printed collection of daily diary strips. (I’m not clear why she didn’t just put them online daily and password-protect them for backers, but I bet the reason has something to do with the romance of ‘zines.) She also seems to have at least sometimes gotten behind on “daily” comics and had to catch up by doing a week at a time, which is totally endearing and something I’d be likely to do if I was in a similar circumstance.

(Assuming a world in which I could actually draw, obviously. Which is not this world.)

Look Back collects those 366 comics, along with a new comic-strip introduction by Prince, and they’re very much journal comics — mostly done in a quiet moment at the end of the day, sometimes about one big thing that happened that day, sometimes about two or four little things that happened, and sometimes about how she can’t think of anything particularly notable that happened. This was a pretty eventful year for Prince and her partner Kyle (I didn’t see a last name for him in the comics; I presume Prince’s audience already knows who he is): they got married, they bought a house, and they moved from outside Boston up to Portland, Maine. (Those latter two are obviously related.)

But, mostly, it’s about what she did that day. That’s the joy of journal comics: they’re about the everyday and the mundane. Some days are sitting and drawing, some are frenzied cleaning the new house and trying to find that one random thing in a sea of packed boxes. This turned out to be a good year for Prince to start making journal comics about, but the hidden secret is that they’re all good years.

Prince is working on a small canvas here, and trying to fit in enough words to explain what’s going on. But even with those constraints, she has a bouncy, cartoony style and a good eye to lock in how she draws the people in her life. You may not be interested in anyone’s journal comics, and that’s fine — but, if you are, Liz Prince does them really well.

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