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Review: ‘How to Love’ from Actus Comics

Review: ‘How to Love’ from Actus Comics

How to Love
By Batia Kolton, David Polonsky, Mira Friedmann, Itzik Rennert, Rutu Modan, and Yirmi Pinkus; translated by Ishai Mishory
Actus/distributed by Top Shelf, August 2008, $29.95

Actus is an Israeli comics collective that publishes one joint project annually; their members are the six contributors to this book. This book was published in Israel by Actus, but is being distributed on this side of the Atlantic by Top Shelf Comics. (And was translated by Ishai Mishory, implying that there was a prior edition in Hebrew.) It’s officially publishing in August, but I can’t find it on any of the US online booksellers, and I got my copy several months ago – so it’s anyone’s guess when it will show up in your local comics shop (if ever). Top Shelf is selling it directly, so there’s at least that way to get it.

[[[How to Love]]] has six stories, one by each of the contributors, each about twenty pages long. (The subtitle calls them “graphic novellas,” which stretches a bit too far for my taste – is there anything wrong with short stories?)

It opens with Batia Kolton’s “Summer Story,” in which pre-teen Dorit watches her nameless older neighbor kissing a boyfriend on the street, then has the neighbor accompany her family on a trip to the beach. It’s a very slice-of-life story; Dorit is clearly learning about relationships through the neighbor, but the story doesn’t get inside her head; we see everything from outside, so we don’t know what Dorit thinks about any of it. The art is a clean-line style, very reminiscent of Actus’s most famous member, Rutu Modan.

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‘Arrested Development’ Characters Sketchbook

‘Arrested Development’ Characters Sketchbook

Hidden within his massive, mind-numbingly comprehensive roundup of information about the looming San Diego Comic-Con International convention (which I intend to spotlight in at least one other post here on ComicMix), Tom Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter included a link to something semi-related to CCI but very interesting to me — and possibly quite a few other readers.

Shown here is one of a dozen sketches Zack Smith commissioned from comic book artists at the 2004 Wizard World Chicago convention. The sketches depict characters from the over-far-too-soon television series Arrested Development, which also happens to be one of my favorite series of the last 5-10 years.

You can get the full scoop on the series and information about its potential return over at the Arrested Development page on Wikipedia, but before you do, be sure to take a peek at James Kochalka’s sketch of Tobias (pictured here and played by David Cross in the series), as well as 11 other sketches of Arrested Development characters by artists such as Jill Thompson, Jeffrey Brown, Jim Rugg and other notable creators.

… Heck, even the foul-mouthed puppet, Franklin, has a sketch.

Happy Birthday: Mark Wheatley

Happy Birthday: Mark Wheatley

Born in 1954, Mark Wheatley has made a career of creating clever and innovative comic books. He is probably  best known for his 1984 First Comics series Mars, the 1994 Vertigo mini-series Breathtaker, and his Insight Studios series Radical Dreamer and Frankenstein Mobster, but his list of titles extends far beyond that impressive handful.

Wheatley founded Insight in 1978 as an illustration and photography source, but in 1980 Marc Hempel joined him and they expanded the studio to include comic books and comic book production work.

Wheatley has won numerous awards, including the Inkpot, the Speakeasy, the Gem, and the Mucker. In 2008 he was a guest lecturer at the Library of Congress. Wheatley currently runs Insight and writes and illustrates the series EZ Street for ComicMix.

Review: The Complete Peanuts, 1967 to 1968 by Charles M. Shulz

Review: The Complete Peanuts, 1967 to 1968 by Charles M. Shulz

The Complete Peanuts, 1967-1968
By Charles M. Schulz; foreword by John Waters
Fantagraphics, February 2008, $28.95

By 1967, [[[Peanuts]]] wasn’t just another comic strip in the local newspaper, it was a media phenomenon. The first TV special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, had won an Emmy amid universal acclaim two years earlier, and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown was about to open on Broadway. It was the epitome of mainstream entertainment – on May 24th, California Governor Ronald Reagan and the state legislature even proclaimed it “Charles Schulz Day.” The strip hadn’t quite hit its ‘70s mega-merchandising heyday, but it was getting there.

At the same time, not all that far from Schulz’s Santa Rosa home, Berkley was roiling with anti-war fervor and the Summer of Love had hit San Francisco. Peanuts had been seen as an edgy, almost countercultural strip in the early 1950s, but those days were long past, and Peanuts was the Establishment. In those days, you were with the pigs or with the longhairs, right? And where did Peanuts stand?

From the evidence here, Peanuts stood where it had always stood: on its own, only rarely commenting on specific issues of the day (such as the “bird-hippie” who would become Woodstock in another year or two), but talking around those issues in ways that most of America could laugh at… some more uncomfortably than others. Schulz was never one to declare himself on one side of an issue or the other; he’d just write and draw his cartoons, and let others make their interpretations.

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The Ghost of Wertham, by Mike Gold

The Ghost of Wertham, by Mike Gold

As comics fans, we should always be on the frontlines of the war to protect freedom of expression.

After all, it was our medium that was forced into a severe case of arrested development for a decade. Beginning in late 1940s and led by mascot psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, the Saturday Evening Post and the Readers Digest, comic book creators became seen as nothing less than child molesters and the medium was pressured into “Comics Code Authority” censorship and became trapped in its “childish claptrap” image for a generation. Hundreds of cartoonists, publishers, editors, and engravers lost their jobs; those that were among the fortunate few who remained gainfully employed told their neighbors they were “commercial artists” or some such lest they be chased out of suburbia by an angry mob.

For the past 20 years we’ve had a dangerous clown in the Senate who, when he’s not trying to get our armed forces to blast every Moslem in the middle east into smithereens (yep; it’s Memorial Day, so let’s honor our brave men and women by bringing them home from Iraq) is busy trying to raise our nation’s children on behalf of their evidently incompetent parents. Sadly, I’m talking about one of my own senators,

“independent” Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a man no more independent than Karl Rove or Dick Cheney.

Senator Joe has actually threatened artistic creators with government censorship if they do not bow to his whims. Yeah, I know, I already compared him to Rove and Cheney so telling you he wipes his ass with the Bill of Rights is kind of redundant. Joe’s spent the past two decades – and our tax money – intimidating the forces that produce video games, movies and music he doesn’t appreciate, all the time hiding under the Great Flag of Cowards, the one that reads “save the children!” Now, he’s turned his attention to YouTube.

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Happy Silver Anniversary, Return of the Jedi!

Happy Silver Anniversary, Return of the Jedi!

Twenty-five years ago today (and six years after the original Star Wars opened) the summer movie season of 1983 blew wide open with the finale to the Star Wars saga — if you don’t count the re-releases, the three movie prequels, the multiple animated series, the books, the comics, oh, you get the idea.

And what do we remember from the film? Do we remember the escape from the Sarlaac? Do we remember the light saber duel between (spoiler) father and son? Do we remember Leia’s slave girl outfit?

Well, of course we remember the outfit. But we also remember the true heroes of the film, as memorialized here:

 

 

I think I speak for everyone here at ComicMix when I say, "yub yub".

Stuart Gordon’s ‘Stuck’ Unstuck, by Michael H. Price

Stuart Gordon’s ‘Stuck’ Unstuck, by Michael H. Price

 

A general release has been too long in coming for Stuck, Stuart Gordon’s mordant and mournful film about a traffic accident and its criminal aftermath. I began picking up on the raves shortly after a film-critic comrade, Joe Leydon, caught the picture at 2007’s Toronto Film Festival and published a favorable review in the show-biz tradepaper Variety. Joe suggested a “carefully calibrated theatrical rollout” but added: “… difficult to tell whether [the] sardonically edgy pic will reach many mainstream auds before fast-forwarding to homevid.”

Now comes word of a Dallas opening, June 6, for Stuck – three months after a well-received showing at the American Film Institute/Dallas Festival. ThinkFilm, the distributor, keeps hedging about an opening in nearby Fort Worth. I have pressed for a film-fest slot or a commercial engagement in Fort Worth because that is where my newspaper’s core readership dwells. And because Stuck owes its dire inspiration to a real-world ordeal that took place in Fort Worth.

“Why, we couldn’t show a movie like that in Fort Worth’s very own film festival,” one leading light of the FW-based Lone Star Film Society told me last fall after I had recommended Stuck as a centerpiece for a November 2007 event. “We’re here ‘To Preserve and Present the Art of the Moving Image’ – just as our Mission Statement declares – not to dredge up any horrible memories.”

“Yeah, well,” I answered – once that “yeah, well” injunction kicks in, any such exchange is doomed to deteriorate – “an occasional reminder might do us all some sobering good. And besides, the film uses the local case only as a springboard. Changes the locale and fictionalizes a lot. More an inspiration than an explicit reflection.”

“I’d be careful how I used that term, ‘inspiration,’ if I were you,” came the reply. “Anyone who would find inspiration in such a ghastly occurrence has no business being allowed to make movies.” (Guardians of the Culture, take note.)

 

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My Week Without Comics, by Martha Thomases

My Week Without Comics, by Martha Thomases

You may have noticed that my quick wit and adorable charm were missing from this site for a few days last week. From May 11 through May 19, I was away on vacation. It was the first time my sweetie and I have been away alone together for more than a few days since our son was born.

Not that we haven’t been on any vacations. We’ve had great times with the boy (who, riding horses with Holly Gaiman at Walt Disney World, sang the entire soundtrack to The Lion King), and with family and friends. But I hadn’t had any time alone to roll in my sweet baby’s arms, and we needed it.

To be a real vacation, a trip should totally take you away from your regular life. It should provide experiences that are different from the day-to-day, and that help you look at the world anew. We had a few days to ourselves on our tenth wedding anniversary, in 1990, when we biked through the Finger Lakes area in New York. It was so much fun that we explored doing something like that again. Spending a week on a bicycle, riding through small towns and countryside with a group of strangers, seemed about as foreign to crowded Manhattan as it was possible to get. We decided to take the train back and forth, so we kept our energy use down and kept the money in the USA. Less guilt!

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Review: ‘Burnout’ by Rebecca Donner

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a series of reviews of the five books coming out from DC’s Minx imprint this year.]

There is something almost daringly simplistic about Burnout ($9.99), as the central character Danni directly narrates her own story of teenage love and angst. No surprise, then, that fire is the central imagery to the book, unapologetic flames that do nothing but burn.

The first comics work of Rebecca Donner, who’s published work in nearly every other medium, Burnout finds Danni and her mom relocating to a remote locale, a forresting town. It’s quiet, aside from the drunken shouting of her mom’s new boyfriend.

The boyfriend’s son, Haskell, is the smoldering love interest, a young man angry at the world and especially at loggers, whom he attacks with near-thoughtless contempt. As Danni falls into a crush on Haskell she also falls into his world of ecoterrorism, and Donner turns the heat up even more.

A few times, the story becomes overly cute and childish, but by and large it is a stern book, as self-serious as the teenagers it describes. That’s not meant as criticism — Donner very effectively translates the caged sensation of youth, and the struggles (often misguided) to break free.

Minx books are at their best when they speak honestly with their intended audience of adolescent girls, and while the message of Burnout isn’t a happy-go-lucky one, it is honest. For that and much more, it’s a story that lingers in the mind, like the sharp pain of a burn.

[NOTE: I recently chatted with Donner about the book over at CBR.]

Van Jensen is a former crime reporter turned comic book journalist. Every Wednesday, he braves Atlanta traffic to visit Oxford Comics, where he reads a whole mess of books for his weekly reviews. Van’s blog can be found at graphicfiction.wordpress.com.

Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Van Jensen directly at van (dot) jensen (at) gmail (dot) com.

 

Webcomic News Roundup: Anders Loves Maria, Wigu, Octopus Pie…

Webcomic News Roundup: Anders Loves Maria, Wigu, Octopus Pie…

Confession time: I’ve been remiss in my attention to the webcomics scene lately, as evidenced by my failure to note a few news items from the world of digital comics. In no meaningful order, you should be aware of the following:

After a brief hiatus, Rene Engström resumed work on her wonderful webcomic Anders Loves Maria last week. From the first batch of episodes following the break, I think it’s safe to assume that Engström spent some portion of her time off reacquainting herself with Mario, Princess Peach and the Nintendo family.

Yesterday marked the return of Wigu, Jeffrey Rowland’s fantasy webcomic that provides a great complement to Overcompensating, the personal journal-style webcomic he’s produced for quite some time now. Rowland mentioned that he’d be returning to Wigu in my interview with him a few months back, so it’s nice to see the plan come together. Oh, and it was also Rowland’s birthday yesterday, so belated wishes from the crew here at ComicMix, Jeffrey.

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