Comic Book Resources

Robot reviews: The Photographer

The Photographer

The Photographer
by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefevre and Frederic Lemercier
First Second, 288 pages, $29.95.

We like to think that a trip to Europe or colorful tourist spot or even simply tooling around the North American continent makes us “well traveled.” We come back from our trip with our photos and souveniers and tell our friends and anyone else who’ll listen how broadening our trip was and how people are really just the same no matter where you go.

But there are countries in the world where you can get murdered for saying you don’t believe in God, or assaulted or worse for admitting that you’re over 30 years old and unmarried. There are places where the terrain is so inhospitable that merely staying out overnight can be a death sentence, and when you get lost, they don’t send out a search party. They just assume you’re dead.

This is the landscape, both geographical and cultural, brought to life in The Photographer, a stunning new graphic novel by Emmanuel Guibert, creator of last year’s equally impressive Alan’s War. Like the best journalistic pieces, it indelably captures a hostile but occasionally warm country at a unique period of time, where war and desolation has left its residents even more isolated than before.

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Robot Reviews: Huh, they still make comic books?

The Unwritten #1

The Unwritten #1
by Mike Carey and Peter Gross
Vertigo, $1.

I’ve always kind of wondered what it must be like for those who are famous merely because of their genetics, where your choices seem to consist of milk that connection for everything it’s worth or spend your entire life trying to extract yourself from those who are impressed because you share a last name with someone they’ve heard of.

Unwritten adds a nice twist to that dilemma. It’s main character, Tom Taylor, is the son of a novelist almost universally adored for a series of fantasy novels that bear an almost striking resemblance to the Harry Potter series. The father having disappeared, Tom spends his days signing books at conventions and trying to figure out how to stand apart from his father’s literary creation. The problem is, he may actually be his father’s literary creation, instead of a flesh and blood one, if you get my meaning.

Carey and Gross do a really solid job making Tom a sympathetic character and setting up his identity problems while tantalizingly hinting at other mysteries yet to be revealed. My only gripe is that I wish they had avoided the Potter mythos entirely — they ape it so much its distracting — and had instead opted to craft a more original fantasy world as a backdrop. Still, I’m eager to see how the series develops, and it’s been a long time since I’ve said that about any Vertigo comic.

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Robot Reviews: The Eternal Smile

The Eternal Smile

The Eternal Smile
by Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim
First Second, 176 pages, $16.95.

Ah the “twist” ending. Who can forget their first encounter with that well-used narrative device? For you perhaps it was The Twilight Zone or the films of M. Night Shyamalan. For me it was the revamped Alfred Hitchcock Presents back in the mid-80s. I stayed up late that night, expecting your usual man-accused-of-crime-he-didn’t-commit-type tale only to discover at the end that — OMG, Ned Beatty really was the killer all along! That revelation threw me into a paroxysm. Why, everything I had assumed up till then about the story was untrue! Now I had to completely re-examine my preconceived notions about genre fiction! Black was white! Up was down! Stories aren’t supposed to do that sort of thing, are they?

But of course, stories do that sort of thing all the time. Take for example, The Eternal Smile, the latest graphic novel from Gene Yan (American Born Chinese) and Derek Kirk Kim (Same Difference). It’s a collection of three short stories that, in one way or another, all rely upon some sort of twist ending or surprise reveal. How much you enjoy the book, therefore, really depends upon how fresh that narrative conceit is to you.

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Robot reviews: LoEG Century: 1910

Century: 1910

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol III: Century: 1910
by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
Top Shelf, 80 pages, $7.95.

Hey kids! Like Bertolt Brecht? I mean, do you really, really like Bertolt Brecht? As in “I know the entire book and lyrics to Happy End by heart and can recite them at a moment’s notice and better stand back because I’m going to do so right now?” ‘Cause that’s the only way you’re going to be able to enjoy Alan Moore’s latest comic!

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Robot reviews: Two from Toon Books

From 'Luke on the Loose'

Luke on the Loose
by Harry Bliss
Toon Books, 32 pages, $12.95.

This is my favorite title in the Toon Books line so far. Bliss, best known for his contribution to the New Yorker as well as children’s books like Diary of a Worm, delivers a great manic energy to this story of a boy who wanders away from his dad and ends up chasing pigeons all across New York City. I liked how the backgrounds where filled with Mad Magazine-like nonsense bits like having Tintin and Olive Oyl as aghast onlookers or the dog walker who was keeps getting pulled around the park. I liked Luke’s father’s nonchalance at losing his son and how his dialogue was frequently summed up as “boring dad talk.” I liked how Bliss uses long, horizontal panels to denote both setting and motion, as in an amusing sequence where Luke runs roughshod through an outdoor restaurant, interrupting a proposal in the process. Basically it’s speedy pace and refuse to take itself seriously or offer any sort of moral works in its favor and I think kids will get a few good belly laughs out of Luke’s adventures. I know I did.

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Robot reviews: The Color of Earth

The Color of Earth

The Color of Earth
By Kim Dong Hwa
First Second, 320 pages, $16.95.

This is one of the most sexually frank and at the same time coyest comics I have ever read. On the one hand it deals honestly and openly with the growing adolescent curiosity about sex and puberty in a manner that would get few Western cartoonists would dare to try, perhaps out of fear that they would then have to make a call to the CBLDF.

On the other hand, it’s all delivered in endless double-entendre, with the characters talking about flowers and persimmon seeds and whatnot, but you know what they’re really talking about — nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

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Robot reviews: Adventures in Cartooning

Adventures in Cartooning

Adventures in Cartooning
by James Sturm, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick Frost
First Second, $12.95.

Adventures in Cartooning is First Second’s attempt to offer a kids’ version last year’s big how-to book, Drawing Words, Writing Pictures. Produced by Center for Cartoon Studies’ co-founder James Sturm and two of his former students, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick Frost, it’s an engaging and informative book that nevertheless feels like it sacrifices learning for fun.

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Robot reviews: Funny, Misshapen Body and Sulk

Funny, Misshapen Body

Funny Misshapen Body
by Jeffrey Brown
Touchstone Books, 320 pages. $16

Sulk Vol. 1 & 2
by Jeffrey Brown
Top Shelf Productions, $7 each.

Jeffrey’s Brown’s latest memoir, Funny Misshapen Body, is a departure from his past autobiographical work. It’s a lot more straightforward, for one thing, even though it’s divided into a series of short vignettes and goes back and forth in time. A large part of that is due to the fact that he employs a first-person narration throughout the book that he’s avoided up till now. Perhaps that’s why this is one of his most assured and confident works to date. As much as I enjoyed Little Things, his last book for Touchstone, I think Body is a stronger work, perhaps because it’s more direct.

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Robot reviews: The Beats and Wizzywig

The Beats: A Graphic History

The Beats: A Graphic History
Text by Harvey Pekar and others. Art by Ed Piskor and others
Edited by Paul Buhle
Hill and Wang, 208 pages, $22.

The Beats is a supremely disappointing book, dry and dull where it should sparkle and enlighten. You would think it would be tough to make the lives and work of writers like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs seem uninteresting, but writer Harvey Pekar, artist Ed Piskor — along with other contributors like Joyce Brabner, Trina Robbins, Mary Fleener and Peter Kuper — seem more than up to the task.

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Robot Reviews: Del Rey sends ‘em and I critique ‘em

Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei

Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei: The Power of Negative Thinking Vol. 1
by Koji Kumeta
Del Rey, 192 pages, $10.99

It seems like just about every manga down the pike these days involves some awkward high school (or thereabouts) student who manages to overcome their anxiety and master their talent in what-have-you thanks to help from a caring, knowledgeable teacher.

To be honest, I’m more than a little sick of it, which is probably why I was drawn to Sayonara Zetsuobou-Sensei (”Goodbye, Mr. Despair”) since it snarkily inverts the premise by having a teacher who is a neurotic, suicidal wreck and advice usually consists of “give up and die.”

Unfortunately, Kumeta doesn’t really do enough with the premise to suit my tastes. Sayonara is a curiously calm, staid work, with a overly minimal, precise art style that makes the characters look like they belong on street signs instead of a manga. It doesn’t help much that this is a very Japanese-specific work. There’s a lot of references to Eastern pop culture, TV shows and the like that simply cannot translate well.

I did like the running gag about the girl who keeps flashing her fruit-patterned panties. That was funny.

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Robot reviews: A Drifting Life

A Drifting Life
by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Drawn and Quarterly, 840 pages, $29.95.

Several of the initial reviews of this doorstop of a memoir have focused on its more revelatory, historical aspects — how it takes us back to a time and place we Westerners know little about, namely the birth of the manga industry and the subsequent rise of gekiga.

That’s certainly a valid approach to the work. I know that a good part of the book’s enjoyment for me hinged on author Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s depictions of the intricacies and politics of the then-budding industry, even if I didn’t know every single person by name in the story or got all the references.

But what ultimately propelled me through the book and what compels me to recommend it is nothing more or less than its basic bildungsroman qualities. At its heart, A Drifting Life is the simple story of a young man discovering his talent and by extension his place in the world. It’s told in as direct and plain a manner as possible, but still full of energy and passion.

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Robot reviews: Miss Don’t Touch Me

Miss Don't Touch Me

Miss Don’t Touch Me
by Hubert & Kerascoet
NBM, 96 pages, $14.95.

Miss Don’t Touch Me is a fairly conventional sex/murder mystery thriller from France, which is interesting (at least from my perspective) since it’s rendered in an art style that owes quite a bit to Joann Sfar, Dupuy & Bebarian and what I’ll tentatively call the “new wave” of cartoonists that eschewed traditional genres (sci-fi, noir, etc.) in favor of more “personal” and experimental work.

But while the comic may use a modern style to tell a familiar story, that doesn’t make it any way rote or dull. In fact, it’s a pretty engaging, entertaining thriller that while it may not necessarily surprise, delights nevertheless.

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Robot reviews: Humbug

Humbug

Humbug
by Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Will Elder, Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth
Fantagraphics Books, 476 pages, $60.

It’s very easy with a book of this nature to engage in wild hyperbole. “The most important publishing project of the year! No, the decade!” one wants to type. “There won’t be a better collection out this year!” “If I had to choose between breathing and reading this book, I’d choose the latter!!” “You’re a fool if you don’t buy this book, you hear me? A fool!”

And yet, how else to talk about a project of this nature, a large collection of work featuring some of the most stellar cartoonists of their day, originally edited by one of the most important and influential humorists (and I really don’t think this is hyperbole here — I’d put him up there with Richard Pryor in terms of significance) of the 20th century? Regardless of the bad economy, it’s got to say something incredibly positive about the current state of the industry that Fantagraphics sees publishing a book this massive and to a certain extent obscure as a viable financial venture.

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Robot reviews: These stories are totally true

American Elf Book Three

Ah, the autobiographical comic. Is there a genre more maligned and misunderstood. Apart from superhero comics I mean.

It’s a genre that tends to get lumped together as “too much of the same thing,” a criticism I really don’t agree with. Two recent autobiographical diary comics — Little Nothings: The Prisoner Syndrome by Lewis Trondheim and American Elf Book Three by James Kochalka –  for example are very similar in execution and style (both are diary comics) but very different in what they reveal and the ways they present themselves to the reader.

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Robot Reviews: Three from D&Q

Nicolas

Drawn and Quarterly recently released three small, slim graphic novels, all dealing with similar themes of loss, death and the human experience, though they vary widely in approach.

Nicolas
by Pascal Girard
Drawn and Quarterly, 64 pages, $9.95.

Aching with regret and longing, Nicolas is Girard’s chronicle of personal grief following the death of his younger brother. Rather than delve into any sort of lengthy or more traditional narrative, he chooses instead to lay out his autobiographical story in stark, short vignettes, utilizing a crisp, minimalist style that’s completely devoid of background or extemporaneous detail.

Overall it’s a smart choice and it really helps the book feel intimate and personal. As Girard moves from childhood to adulthood he attempts to give a rounded portrait of his behavior and doesn’t attempt to portray himself as a wounded angel. He’s selfish and self-absorbed and not necessarily above using his tragic story to help him get attention, particularly from women. More significantly, however, is how his inner thoughts and behavior ring true for anyone who had to attend a family funeral as a young child.

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