Tagged: novel

Review: ‘Young Liars’ #1

I covered a handful of new series debuting this week in my Weekly Haul column earlier this week, but one new series slipped past. Thanks to the kind folks at DC then for sending over the first issue of David Lapham’s Young Liars, one of the more puzzling series to come around lately.

It’s not that Young Liars reinvents the wheel. It’s actually very similar to another new Vertigo series, The Vinyl Underground, in that both follow spunky young hedonists. The narrator is Danny, a Texas kid who moved up to New York to be a rockstar and failed miserably. But the central character is Sadie, an heiress who took a bullet to the head and lived, although the wound removed every inhibition she had.

The first issue is mostly set in a club, with Sadie alternating between dancing and beating the holy living snot out of people as Danny fills us in on the backstory. The gist is that Sadie’s dad and some unsavory characters are all tracking her down, and unpleasantness is about to meet this small group of friends.

While I was pretty disappointed with [[[The Vinyl Underground]]], [[[Young Liars]]] has at least piqued my interest. More than anything, I’m curious where Lapham is headed, but that’s based more on his past work than on the content of this issue. It’s more of a collection of fun pieces than a cohesive story so far, and it pales next to Lapham’s excellent Silverfish graphic novel from last year.

File this one under too soon to tell.

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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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Super Spy

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Super Spy

The life of a spy is a cramped, paranoid, fear-ridden thing, not one of derring-do and adventure. Matt Kindt knows that well. His second graphic novel Super Spy is set during World War II, in England, France, Spain, and other places, and features a large cast drawn from all the nations of the European theater. Some of the spies use fancy gadgets and many of them have a mystique about them, but they’re all mortal, all prone to making mistakes, all caught up in something much larger and more deadly than themselves.

The production design of Super Spy might lead the reader to expect one kind of story – the front cover shows a woman, crouching, with circles explaining bits of spy paraphernalia and events in her career. The back similarly depicts a man. Both are obviously cramped, forced into an uncomfortable position, with their hands at the edges of the cover – perhaps the walls are closing in on them? It’s a strong visual metaphor both for the life of spying – constrained, constricted, having ones life shoved into a box – and for the hardships of WW II itself. So far, so accurate. But the cover also hints that this will be a story primarily about these two people. We don’t know their names on the cover, but the tags on “his” picture refer to “her,” and to their shared experiences.

Super Spy is not the story of two people; there are at least six major characters, of whom these two are only the ones we meet first. These two are not even necessarily the most important characters. And, given the dangers of spying in wartime, it’s wise not to get too attached to any character in this book. Kindt knows that spycraft is a very dangerous profession, and he shows us all of those dangers.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: James Sturm’s America

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: James Sturm’s America

 

The first thing to note is that America collects three previously-published stories: [[[The Revival]]], [[[Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight]]], and [[[The Golem’s Mighty Swing]]]. Sturm’s end-notes don’t make it clear where the 24-page Revival or the 44-page [[[Hundreds of Feet]]] were originally published, but [[[Golem]]] was a stand-alone graphic novel from Drawn & Quarterly in 2001. So if you’re a huge James Sturm fan – and there have to be a couple of them – you probably have all of this already.

Enough with the consumer report, though – what about the stories? All three are historical fiction, set in little-examined, unspectacular times in America. There are no wars, no famous people – none of the usual hoo-hah of historical stories. Sturm concentrates on ordinary people living ordinary lives, in what were fairly ordinary times for the people living them.

[[[The Revival]]] is set in eastern Kentucky in 1801 – as the first caption helpfully tells us. A married couple, Joseph and Sarah Bainbridge, are traveling to Caine Ridge to see the revival preacher Elijah Young. They arrive in the camp, meeting a niece, and are soon caught up in the religious fervor. They do see Young preach, on their second night there, but I don’t think I should tell you what Joseph and Sarah are praying for, nor whether they get it.

[[[Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight]]] takes place at the other end of the nineteenth century in a gold mine, presumably in California. A group of locals slaughter the Chinese workers running the mine and take it over – but it’s still not very successful. Tensions rise between the owners and the workers, exacerbated by the discovery that one dying, incoherent miner is secretly rich.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Kampung Boy & Town Boy

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Kampung Boy & Town Boy

It can be a bit disconcerting to discover that whole comics industries exist in previously unsuspected places. We all know about the large French-Belgian comics market, and of course the massive world of Japanese manga, but who suspected that there was a great Malaysian cartoonist?

Well, there is, and his name is Lat. He’s been working in comics since the late ‘60s, but his work has never been published in the US before. His stories first appeared weekly in the newspaper [[[Berita Minggu]]] when he was thirteen years old, and he was awarded the prestigious Malaysian honorific title Datuk in 1994. (Think something along the lines of “Sir” or “Lord.”) According to Wikipedia, Lat’s real name is Mohammed Nor Khalid, and much of his work seems to be political or topical cartoons for the major Malaysian newspaper [[[New Straits Times]]]. (The Wikipedia entry has a list of his titles, and many of them sound like compilations of previously published work.)

Kampung Boy seems to have been his first standalone graphic novel, and begins his autobiography; Town Boy continues the story from the point Kampung Boy leaves off, and brings him up nearly to the end of his schooling. Kampung Boy is laid out more like a children’s book than like comics; the art spreads across the pages, accompanied by hand-lettered text set like captions. There are no panel borders, and only the occasional word balloon. [[[Town Boy]]] starts off in the same style, but turns into more traditional comics for much of its length, with long stretches laid out as panels with word balloons. The difference is that the purely narrated sections – all of Kampung Boy, and the parts of Town Boy covering general information or longer stretches of time – are done in the first style, while detailed, dialogue-intensive scenes need the immediacy of balloons and borders.

Kampung Boy begins like a traditional autobiography: Lat is born on the first page. The rest of the book chronicles his life in a very rural village, or kampung, up to about the age of ten, when he is sent off to a boarding school in the town of Ipoh. The details of his life are exotic, but the rhythms of rural life, and of boyhood, are very familiar and well captured. Lat may be a Muslim boy on the other side of the world, in a region that farms rubber and mines tin, but the life of a boy in a village, falling asleep during lessons in a small school and swimming with his friends in the river, is not all that different from Mark Twain’s childhood.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Shock! Horror!

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Shock! Horror!

Halloween decorations are beginning to show up in stores, and the air had a decided chill today in my neck of the woods – so I guess the time is ripe to look at a couple of horror-tinged graphic novels for the fall.

Angel Skin is an original GN and apparently the first published comics work of its creators, Christian Westerlund and Robert Nazeby Herzig. (By the way, I’m tentatively assuming that the two are writer and artist, respectively, but the book itself doesn’t specify their roles.) It’s a dark afterlife fantasy, beginning with the suicide of our young protagonist, Joshua Barker. He then finds himself in a gloomy city that is, in most respects, identical to the world he lived in before his death.

The story moves on from there in somewhat predictable ways; Joshua is important and special, for some reason unspecified in the book, and is the focus of several people and factions who want to find God, for their own purposes. There’s a bit of melodramatic action, but much more specifying and emoting. The general consensus of the characters is that life is essentially hell. (See Bruce Eric Kaplan’s cartoon book Edmund and Rosemary Go To Hell, which I reviewed on my personal blog a couple of months back for a somewhat more nuanced version of the same general idea.) I’m afraid I’m no longer a teenager, so Angel Skin’s primary appeal passed me by, but it was never embarrassing or puerile. (And that’s saying a lot about a Goth afterlife fantasy; it could very easily have slid into the sophomoric, but it never does.) It’s mostly a story for Goths and other depressive young people, I think, and the ending isn’t quite as uplifting as I think it’s supposed to be, but Angel Skin is a serviceable GN, and quite good for anyone’s first professional work.

The really interesting aspect of Angel Skin, though, is the art. I don’t know which of the creators is responsible, but the style changes greatly from page to page, and even on a single page. Sometimes the figures have an animation-derived flatness, with blocks of solid color of grays filling in black outlines, while other times the figures are painted (or perhaps drawn in colored pencils?) or sketched in pencil lines. The background art style similarly changes, and doesn’t necessarily match the foreground. In fact, characters don’t stay in the same style, and the several styles often uneasily co-exist in one panel. I wasn’t able to work out any coherent reason for the changes – it doesn’t seem to relate to anything thematic in the story, or having to do with location, emotional states, or anything else I could think of – so I have to assume that it was simply done for artistic whim.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Laika

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Laika

This graphic novel is pretty good just on its own terms, but it’s an excellent object lesson. If you know of anyone who thinks that comics are essentially limited in scope to brightly-clad folks punching each other with great vigor, this will help to expand their horizons. It’s the story of Laika, a Russian dog who was the first living creature from Earth deliberately sent outside the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s an impressively-researched story braiding a fictional back-story for Laika (and several other characters I believe are also fictionalized) with the story of the “Chief Designer” of the early Russian space program, Sergei Korolev. And all that is told in comics, and, I suspect, primarily aimed at the grade 6-12 audience.

I’m not familiar with Adadzis’s work, but the note on him in [[[Laika]]] calls him an editorial consultant who “creates words and pictures for a living and loves both equally.” According to his website, muck of his work has been for children, especially recently, though he did something called Millennium Fever (with Duncan Fegredo) for Vertigo in 1995 and [[[Children of the Voyager]]] (with Paul Johnson) for Marvel in 1993.

Laika is a dense book; we start off with a flashback to Korolev’s release from the gulag in 1939, stop briefly at the first successful Sputnik launch in 1957, and then dive back into a long account of the life of a dog. (Who, as we all can guess, eventually becomes Laika.) This graphic novel is about two hundred pages long, and each page has about ten small panels, in shifting grids with occasional snippets of white space. And there’s quite a lot of dialogue along the way, in what I’m tempted to call the Russian manner. It’s not a quick read by any means, and the panels can get quite cramped at times. It’s never difficult to read, but there is an awful lot here. Those who judge books by how much time they take to read should enjoy Laika.

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DENNIS O’NEIL: “No wizard left behind”

DENNIS O’NEIL: “No wizard left behind”

  • News
  • July 24, 2007

At the end of last week’s exciting episode, the cute schoolteacher and I were involved in a tense debate about which showing of the new Harry Potter movie we would attend. (Yes, we media people do have lives that throb with excitement.)

We decided, and went.

The schoolteacher, who really does carry Potter devotion to an extreme, at least in one Muggle’s opinion, was enthralled. The Muggle – me – thought it was a pretty good summer flick. I’m a Muggle who can enjoy some good, old-fashioned, British Acting-with-a-capital A, and the Potters are full of A-list thespians. (There may be a pun in there somewhere, but, trust me, it’s not worth the effort needed to find it.) I think British movie acting is still partly influenced by its grandiloquent, stage-bound forebears, and that makes it appropriate to material that is the antithesis of realism, much as Brando’s naturalistic Method acting was appropriate to Tennessee Williams’s realism.

But the Pottery pleasure the teacher and I could share equally began when Dolores Umbridge entered the story. Miss Umbridge, splendidly embodied by a pink-clad Imelda Staunton, is an educational bureaucrat whose saccharine exterior conceals a heart of bile. She’s a stooge for the local politicians whose mission is to insist on a largely useless curriculum and on tests which accomplish nothing except make it impossible for real educators to do their jobs.

“No wizard left behind,” I whispered to the schoolteacher, who nodded vigorously.

I don’t know much about J.K. Rowling, Potter’s creator, but I do know that she must have been writing the novel on which the current movie is based about seven years ago, and that she works and lives in England. Those facts make it unlikely that in conjuring up Miss Umbridge she was commenting on and/or satirizing the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind farce. So maybe art was anticipating life. Whatever the reason, Miss Umbridge could step from fantasy into the real life milieu of those involved in the president’s – ahem – educational efforts and feel right at home.

Spoiler alert!

Miss Umbridge gets hers, though it appears that she survives to be rotten another day, and I rejoiced. I think schadenfreude is a pretty crummy emotion when it’s directed toward people we know, but it’s perfectly acceptable, and maybe even expected – maybe even desirable – when aimed at creatures of the imagination. And despite what the schoolteacher might want to believe, J.K. Rowling does write fiction.

RECOMMENDED READING: The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore.

Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of comic books like Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern and/or Green Arrow, and The Shadow, as well as all kinds of novels, stories and articles.

From the ComicMix mailbox

From the ComicMix mailbox

  • News
  • February 18, 2007

The great thing about suddenly being inundated with folks sending in introductions and announcement is all the cool stuff you find in the process!  Let’s get to the pass-alongs then, shall we?

  • Not only do the folks at Bonus.com have their own webcomic (The Paranormals, written by Mr. Raven Brown and drawn by Ronnie Werner), but visitors can try their hand at creating their own comics and avatars.  Time-sucker alert!
  • Congratulations to Robert Tinnell and Bo Hampton, whose graphic novel Sight Unseen (Bo’s first in eight years) tied in the voting for best horror comic/graphic novel for 2006 at Rue Morgue Magazine!
  • Richard Schenkman invites us to check out his current project, Jerome Bixby’s Man From Earth.  Neat website and intriguing plotline – I love me those immortal William Katts!

Got something you want to crow about?  Use our handy-dandy Contact Us form at the bottom of this page!

Len Wein – Thumbs up on 300

300Len Wein went to a preview of the movie based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300, and has a very positive review of it up on his blog. "The story is one of history’s great tales of heroism and sacrifice and this film definitely does it justice… One word of caution, though: this film is as graphically violent as any I’ve seen."

Graphic violence, from a Frank Miller graphic novel? How unexpected!

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