Tagged: small

Review: ‘Janes in Love’ by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second in a series of reviews of the five books coming out from DC’s Minx imprint this year. Previously, Van Jensen reviewed Rebecca Donner’s Burnout. -RM]

There’s a touch of classic teen lit like The Babysitters Club to Minx’s Plain Janes series of books, as it features the not-so-original plot of a disparate group of teenaged girls bonding together for a cause and surviving adolescence.

That the series, with the second installment Janes in Love ($9.99) out in September, transcends its genre owes to writer Cecil Castellucci, who takes the conventional setup and spins it in unconventional ways.

The group of friends – all named Jane – in this case unite for the cause of art, seeking to beautify their small town through subversive means. Picking up from the first installment, the main Jane is caught up at Valentine’s Day with affection for two boys and a lack of funds to continue her art.

While those seem simple enough problems, the true center of the book are the unresolved tensions from the terrorist attack in the first volume, which sends main Jane’s mother into a near-coma. Subtly, all the plot threads take a similar tone as the characters, teenagers and otherwise, struggle with fears and insecurities.

The subtle complexities of the characters are captured with reserved perfection by Castellucci and rendered with great skill by artist Jim Rugg, who wields a masterful command of expressions in each panel.

The two [[[Plain Janes]]] books not only have been the best of the books Minx has published thus far, but also among the very best of young adult fiction. Sure, the cover’s pink and has flowers on it, but this is a comic for just about everybody.

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.

Review: ‘The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch’

Review: ‘The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch’

Neil Gaiman has been too busy lately to write much for comics unless it’s an event — like 1602 or his curiously pointless Eternals miniseries — but there’s still an audience for his stories in the direct market. So what’s a poor comics publisher to do? Well, if it’s Dark Horse, what you do is get various folks to adapt Gaiman stories into comics and publish them as slim trade-paperback-sized hardcovers. So far, Michael Zulli did Creatures of the Night, John Bolton adapted Harlequin Valentine, and P. Craig Russell tackled Murder Mysteries. And now Zullis is back again for:

The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch
By Neil Gaiman, Michael Zulli, and Todd Klein
Dark Horse Books, May 2008, $13.95

Now, for most writers, “[[[The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch]]]” would be by far their longest title ever, but Gaiman is not most writers. He’s also responsible for “[[[Being An Experiment Upon Strictly Scientific Lines Assisted By Unwins LTD, Wine Merchants (Uckfield)]]]” ” [[[Forbidden Brides Of The Faceless Slaves In The Nameless House Of The Night Of Dread Desire]]],” ” [[[I Cthulhu: Or What’s A Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing In A Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47º 9′ S, Longitude 126º 43′ W)?]]],” and ” [[[Pages From A Journal Found In A Shoebox Left In A Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, And Louisville, Kentucky]]].” So “[[[Miss Finch]]]” may just be one of Gaiman’s more punchy and terse titles.

According to the Neil Gaiman Visual Bibliography — and why should we mistrust it? — “Miss Finch” is one of Gaiman’s more obscure stories, showing up in the program book for the convention Tropicon XVII and a magazine called Tales of the Unanticipated before turning up in one of his collections — though in a different one depending on which side of the Atlantic you live on.

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Review: ‘Too Cool To Be Forgotten’ by Alex Robinson

Review: ‘Too Cool To Be Forgotten’ by Alex Robinson

We’ve all occasionally wanted to go back in time — to fix something we screwed up the first time, to relive some particular time in our lives, or just to do something differently. But would we be able to do better the second time around? Alex Robinson’s new graphic novel — coming up in July from Top Shelf — asks exactly those questions.

Too Cool To Be Forgotten
By Alex Robinson
Top Shelf, July 2008, $14,95

In 2010, Andy Wicks is coming up on his fortieth birthday — he’s married with two daughters and working as a computer technician. And, to finally stop smoking, he agrees to his wife’s suggestion to get himself hypnotized.

He closes his eyes, listens to the doctor…and wakes up in his 15-year-old body, back in 1985. He soon decides that some kind of hypnotic construct — though he never internalizes that thought, or really acts as if it’s true — and that the whole scenario is designed to make him decide not to have his first cigarette, and thus stop smoking back up in his own time.

Now, I am a former science fiction editor, so I probably think about this stuff more than most people, but Andy never seems to really think through his situation, or quite decide how old he is. He never really thinks of himself as a 15-year-old; his self-image stays solidly middle-aged. But he also doesn’t think through the consequences of that — he thinks of other high-school students, who are exactly the same age he is, as “kids.”

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Happy Birthday: Parasite

Happy Birthday: Parasite

Maxwell Jensen was the classic, small-time crook before his own idiocy transformed him into something far greater.

Jensen was working at a plant attached to a research center and opened one of the storage containers, thinking it might contain the company’s payrolls. Instead the biohazardous extraterrestrial materials inside transformed him, staining his skin purple and giving him the power to absorb the powers of anyone he touched.

The Parasite, as Jensen dubbed himself, became one of Superman’s most dangerous foes, especially since Jensen could not only absorb Superman’s powers but also learned his secret identity.

Marvel Millie and Me

Marvel Millie and Me

  • News
  • April 29, 2008

So the third New York Comic Con is one for the annals and I have stopped twitching.

It was, at its Saturday afternoon height, a cauldron of mad, chaotic energy. (And wasn’t it dangerous? Couldn’t all that energy, confined and concentrated by four walls, affect the hearts of atoms and cause the forces that bind them together to disintegrate us all into quarks that would join the neutrinos in spewing through the universe?) That’s okay, for me, in small doses, and maybe in large doses for you, especially if you’re young and new to the megacon scene.

I won’t bother describing the event for you. If you frequent this site, you probably already have all pertinent information. Instead, a tiny, personal note:

Every one of the panels on which I sat was interesting and, I was happy to see, well-attended, which hasn’t always been the case in huge cons, where it sometimes seems that the exchange of currency is more important than honoring and discussing and learning about an art form. But the absolute, stone, hands-down high point came early, on Friday night, when I shared a stage with Peter Sanderson, who moderated, and Gary Freidrich, Joe Sinnott, and Stan Goldberg. Except for Peter, we were all veterans of Marvel’s early days, before the company became Marvel Entertainment and attached its logo to vastly expensive motion pictures, soon to play at a multiplex near you, back when it just published comic books – all kinds of comic books, not just the superhero kind – and there were no multiplexes in which to show ridiculously costly films, even if such films had existed.

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Review: ‘Three Shadows’ by Cyril Pedrosa

Review: ‘Three Shadows’ by Cyril Pedrosa

This book will break your heart; I warn you now.

Three Shadows
Cyril Pedrosa
First Second, 2008, $15.95

Louis and Lise are farmers somewhere quiet and untouched, doting parents to their small son Joachim. Their life is bucolic, idyllic: “Back then…life was simple and sweet. Everything was simple and sweet…The taste of cherries, the cool shade, the fresh smell of the river… That was how we lived, in a vale among the hills…sheltered from storms…Ignorant of the world, as though on an island…Peaceful and untroubled…Then everything changed.”

Three figures appear ominously one evening, on horseback at the horizon. Somehow, everyone knows that they’re trouble, but they can’t be confronted. They disappear into the mist, into the distance. Joachim’s dog Diego disappears, and the shadows use his barking to lure the boy – and almost get him.

So Lise goes to the nearest big town to consult with Mistress Pike, whose sign reads “Midwife. Exorcist. Sympathetic Ear.” The truth is what they fear most: the shadows have come for Joachim. And they’re not going to stop.

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Review: Jughead’s Double Digest #138

Review: Jughead’s Double Digest #138

So there I was, at Midtown Comics, one of New York City’s better-racked shops, trying to find something my wife was looking for. That’s the only way you could get me into a comics shop on a Tuesday, the day before the new stuff is put on the shelves. Since I was there, I looked at everything else as well… and came across [[[Jughead’s Double Digest #138]]], a beneath-the-radar book that some will find of note.

This is the issue before the beginning of their latest “new-look” story, this time drawn by my pals Joe Staton and Al Milgrom, so I gave it a second glance. Above the logo, in type too small to be visible in the reproduction I cribbed from Archie’s website, is the phrase “Collectors (sic) Issue Featuring Jughead #1, 1949.” The cover art promised a story where the 2008 Jughead meets up with his 1949 counterpart. The one who only owned one shirt.

Unless you’ve been scouring the ComicMix comments sections lately, it is possible you are unaware that the Archie line is one of the best-selling newsstand comics ventures of our time. In fact, since their digests are available at most supermarket checkouts, they provide an unparalleled portal into the world of comics. Because their content appeals to readers of all sexes and age groups, they appeal to a group Marvel and DC barely acknowledge: the younger reader.

I should point out that Archie is also the last of the publishing houses still controlled by the family of its original owners. That comes across quite clearly in their editorial content, which is quite respectful of its roots.

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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.

Government Recalls Spider-Man Cups

Government Recalls Spider-Man Cups

  • News
  • February 19, 2008

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued a recall of 6,600 Spider-Man water bottles sold exclusively at Sears last summer. These bottles carry a sufficient risk of choking, as the screws under the lid can come loose and fall into the cup.

Even though these items haven’t been sold for some time, the news is significant as many were purchased by and for fans old and young. Quite frankly, they look sort of cool. So if you’ve got ’em, you might want to take them out of service and put them on a shelf beyond the reach of small children who are not endowed with the powers and proportionate strength of a spider.

More info here.

Donald Trump, Gene Simmons & Goofy!

Donald Trump, Gene Simmons & Goofy!

The tradition of late night TV hosts is a rich one here in the U.S. but today ComicMix Radio takes you across the boarder for a preview of a show that has been around for at least a couple of decades. Meet Ed (he’s the sock puppet) and Red (that would be the girl) from Ed & Red’s Night Party, which is now accessible here – and wait until you hear about their comic connections.

And, on this Thanksgiving Day, we’ve got:

•  Dynamic Forces digging up The Adolescent Hamsters

•  GI Joe getting his Baroness

•  Donald Trump, Gene Simmons & Goofy, all headed back to the small and big screens

Have a great holiday. We’ll talk to you again late Saturday from the floor of The Mid-Ohio Con in Columbus. Until then, drop the drumstick and Press The Button!

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