I am so glad middle school is far behind me. I even gladder my two sons are past those years as well, and that I don’t expect to have any other kids to shepherd through those years. And I don’t think it’s purely Schadenfreude when I read a story about middle-schoolers — but there might be an element of “thank ghod that’s long over.”

Brave is a middle-school story — about and mostly for middle-schoolers, though pitched so even adults (even us poor benighted adults) can enjoy it. It’s from Svetlana Chmakova, and is set in the same school as her previous graphic novel Awkward . It struck me as stronger and more emotionally resonant than Awkward was, but maybe that’s just me: I was a large, bullied middle-school boy who spent his time thinking about other things, so Jensen Graham’s story strikes a chord and reminds me of things I’d rather not remember.

(And I still think this school’s mania about clubs is a lot more from the Japanese manga school-story tradition — and maybe from actual Japanese school life, as far as I know — than it is from the way kids operate in the US today. But maybe there are a lot of super-club-centric middle schools out there that I’m not aware of?)

Jensen is the fictional version of that kid: too big, too distracted, too uninterested in what most kids care about, too easy to pick on. (A little more so than the real version of that kid, and a bit cartoony to make it funny as well as sad.) You might have been that kid at ten or twelve — I was, pretty much.

He doesn’t have any real friends as the book opens, but doesn’t really realize it — he’s part of the art club, and thinks of those kids as his friends even though they make fun of him and don’t include him in their activities. But, again, he’s distracted and unconnected, so he doesn’t notice that a lot of the time. Maybe it’s just him, maybe it’s a deeply-buried coping mechanism: it’s harder for people to hurt you if you don’t notice they’re trying to hurt you.

Jensen thinks of his school life as a video game — get through the level, avoid the monsters, and reach the treasure at the end (art club). But the monsters keep getting tougher, and he’s fallen behind in math, so he needs to get tutoring…in a group with one of his main bullies. (Unlike a lot of popular fiction, Chmakova doesn’t present Jensen’s school as having one big bully who eternally schemes to make his life hell — instead, like the real world, he has a lot of people who make fun of him a little and a few who get more nasty joy out of tormenting him whenever they have a chance. Nobody’s obsessed with Jensen; he’s just a convenient target.)

But, at the same time, he may be finding some people who could be real friends — or, at least, friendly. Like the taciturn athlete he’s been partnered with on a project in English. Or the students on the newspaper, who may be interested in Jensen as a subject for their bullying study, but also think of him as a real person and try to help him. As someone who was a geeky boy — and now has a couple of geeky sons his own — I wish that he found people who share some of his real interests, but he’s at least on the right path.

Brave is a more realistic bullying story than most: there’s no horribly nasty kid who can be easily defeated in the end, and the adult leadership of the school is often capricious and wrong from the kids’ point of view. But it shows people — kids, in particular — seeing things that are wrong and working together to make them better. Jensen’s new newspaper friends call out bad actors and publicize explanations of bad behavior, giving the less-engaged mass of kids tools to make their own lives better and to treat each other more fairly. It’s not just a good book on its own, but one that can do good in the world, if put in the hands of the right kids — I hope it will be.

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

Jennifer Hayden is a middle-aged New Jerseyan, telling stories here about her growing kids and family life — so why did it take me so long to get to a 2011 book so close to my own life and experience? (I’m generally all over that stuff: don’t we all love to be validated by art that reflects the way we see the world?)

Well, I did see her big graphic novel The Story of My Tits (spoiler alert: the story is cancer) a few years back, and I’ve had Underwire on my shelf at least since then. This book-a-day run gave me a good excuse to pull it down, and I realized this was a compilation — it collects a strip she did for Dean Haspiel’s ACT-I-VATE collective, strips done around the same time she was working on the big book.

So this book has thirty pieces — a few of them are full-page illustrations (generally of what I’d call “goddessy stuff,” which may be a consumer warning for some), but most are comics. The stories are mostly two or three pages long — a vignette or moment of her life, or a whimsical dream — but there’s also a ten-pager, “Girls’ Club,” about a Christmas party and a night staying at the title club, where her grandmother made posters years ago.

Each story is a little slice of life — Hayden focuses on domesticity, so it’s about moments with her two teen kids and husband, rather than work or the wider world. These are about what it’s like to be Jennifer Hayden, in the years 2008-2010, with a daughter who got amazingly sophisticated overnight and a son who’s ready to go off on his own. A few are flights of fancy, but still rooted in that normal life. Not big things, no. But the stuff that good lives, and good people, are made of.

Hayden has a heavily-detailed, ornate style with a cartoony edge — not a million miles away from Lynda Barry, but entirely its own thing. This is a small, quirky book of small, quirky stories — but all lives are small and quirky when you look at them close up. It’s just that most of us aren’t as good at Hayden at really looking at them.

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

I have a hard time telling if I’m supposed to take this seriously. I mean, the volume subtitle is “Fourgy,” and there’s a food truck, apparently a franchised operation, called “Wide Wiener,” with a humorously double-entendre theme song. But it also has a melodramatic comic-book plot, and a more kitchen-sinkly dramatic human story.

So I suspect it’s meant to be just barely serious enough, so that creators Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky can continue to make silly sex jokes to their hearts’ content but that the whole thing doesn’t descend into farce. And I guess that’s OK with me: after all, this is the story of two young lovers who discover they can stop time when they orgasm.

(That is a sillier superpower than, say, Spider-Man’s, but of more immediate use to most people’s lives. And not all that much sillier, to be honest.)

So, here we are with the fourth collection of Sex Criminals, which is indeed subtitled Fourgy . We got here, in case you’re unfamiliar and need to brush up, from the unnamed first volume and Two Worlds, One Cop and Three the Hard Way .

Sex Criminals is, at this point, already at least halfway to being a Marvel Max comic — the sex is mostly tasteful and 90% hetero, with no on-panel insertions, and the cast is roughly half superheroes. Just classify orgasm-based metahuman abilities as a mutant power and Bamf! you’re there. Oh, there aren’t any big fight scenes yet, but just wait. Everything in mainstream comics eventually becomes about superheroes, no matter how hard it fights the pull.

Ostensibly, this is the story of Suzie and Jon’s relationship — which goes through some serious ups and downs this time out — but we’re really here because we want to see them finally have it out with Kegelface’s Sex Cops. (Note: her name is not Kegelface and her guys are not actually sex cops.) Sadly, that doesn’t actually happen here — as I said above, the fight scene is still on the way. Given what Sex Criminals is about, it might be more of a fuck scene anyway.

This is goofy and it can be hard to take seriously, even when it wants you to. It’s definitely fun, and it’s a different take on wild talents, I’ll say that much — not quite as different as it could have been, but I already made the superhero/black-hole comparison. If you’ve avoided it so far, I can say that it’s still weird and quirky, and that it is not trying to titillate you. And it is about Sex Criminals, and they are interesting people, with more characterization than usual for either a comic book about sex or one about strange powers.

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

“Aw, this is a sequel to somethin’!”
 – Crow T. Robot

I never read Kings in Disguise. On the Ropes is a sequel to Kings in Disguise. So anyone who is looking for a comparison to Kings in Disguise will be disappointed. Anyone wondering how many consecutive sentences I cram Kings in Disguise into, though, may be intrigued.

Kings in Disguise was a comics series by James Vance and Dan E. Burr, published by Kitchen Sink Press over several years in the mid-’80s and eventually collected into book form. Telling the story of plucky Depression orphan Fred Block, Kings in Disguise was critically lauded, winning both the Eisner and Harvey awards. Luckily, we’re not here to talk about Kings in Disguise. Because, as I said, I never read Kings in Disguise.

To repeat: On the Ropes is a sequel to Kings in Disguise, set about five years later. Since — and this will, I hope, be the last time I mention this — I never read Kings in Disguise, I’m not entirely certain which flashbacks in On the Ropes are to the earlier story and which are to things that happened after that story ended. I think Fred lost a leg in a freight-car-hopping accident after Kings in Disguise, but I could be wrong. Anyway, he’s now 17, and it’s 1937, and he’s working as the assistant to an escape artist in a WPA circus traveling the small cities of Illinois. [1]

Fred is also a labor organizer, or at least associated with a group of organizers trying to get together a major strike against steel mills across the Rust Belt (then still moderately shiny, at least for the bosses). In particular, he has a small but vital role in that organizing effort, which will cause him danger and distress.

His boss is Gordon Corey, who I’m afraid is that semi-cliche, the escape artist who yearns to die. Gordon also has secrets in his past, which would-be novelist Fred will ferret out as he tries to ingratiate himself with a female stringer who he thinks can help him with his writing and maybe make some introductions to help him get published.

The narrative also follows, in parallel, two very nasty men — one smaller, smarter, and fond of a knife, the other big and strong but not quite as stupid as you’d expect — who are employed by the usual shadowy rich people to do some union-busting, and who rack up a serious body count along the way. This element feels pretty melodramatic; they kill more people than is plausible for traveling freelancers — they need to be more solidly plugged into a specific power structure to have the cover-ups of multiple murders in multiple places be reasonable, even in a deeply corrupt time and place.

Again, I didn’t read Kings in Disguise; I can’t compare the two. This is a solidly lefty book about labor agitation in hard times, with a melodramatic plot and a certain stretching for meaning, which I didn’t find entirely convincing. My understanding is that it did not take twenty-five years to create — Kings in Disguise was published as a complete work in 1988 and On the Ropes came out as an original graphic novel in 2013 — but Burr’s art sometimes varies from page to page, making me wonder how long it did take. (He also sometimes draws different characters in slightly different styles in the same panel, which is mildly surprising — I couldn’t figure out if there was a specific artistic purpose there.)

On the Ropes is a solid, historically grounded graphic novel, shining a light on a piece of history a lot of people have forgotten now. (A lot of working people in this country, in particular, have forgotten how much blood people like them shed to get unions, as they run headlong away from them into the cold embrace of corporate generosity.) I don’t think it’s a masterpiece, but it’s worth reading for people interested in the period, the creators, or the subject. And, of course, for anyone looking for comics about actual people in real-world situations, of which there are always fewer than there should be.

[1] Note that this is the first sentence in this review not to mention Kings in Disguise. I could have kept it up, if I wanted. I’m not proud. Or tired.

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