From the stack: Life Sucks

I experienced a mounting sense of unease as I read Life Sucks (First Second), and it was only partly due to the increasing menace of the book’s events. Things do get tense as it goes along, but my discomfort stemmed from the fact that an amiable comic was becoming, if not precisely the kind of story it mocked, something I found equally deserving of disdain.

I should admit that I’m a hard sell for vampire stories to begin with, for many of the reasons creators Jessica Abel, Gabe Soria and Warren Pleece cite in the early going. I find the gloomy, self-pitying romanticism of many of them off-putting and outright dull, so anything that promises to take the wind out of those particular sails is generally welcome. (Joann Sfar’s Vampire Loves, also from First Second, is a winning example.)

Life Sucks starts well. Dave has been turned into a vampire because his sire needed someone to work the night shift at his convenience store, sticking Dave with a lifestyle he never chose and its depressing mechanics of servitude. He’s nauseated by blood, so he subsists on plasma, which leaves him without any of the physiological benefits vampirism can offer to the aggressive. He wasn’t exactly on the fast track before he was made, but now he faces a long, lonely lifetime of changing the dates on the milk and restocking the beef jerky display.

I’m fairly sure I could have read an entire graphic novel about Dave carping about his circumstances, hanging out with his friends, and getting badgered by his boss, Radu. (Radu has traded in capes and castles for track suits and entrepreneurship, abandoning Transylvania for California.) Dave is mopey, but at least he has reason to complain, and his friends are endearing.

Unfortunately, Abel and company decided at some point that a plot was necessary. And here’s where I encounter a problem with evaluating the book objectively, because it hinges on two devices that I always find particularly objectionable. One is when two characters place a bet on which of them can win the heart of a third. Once that element comes into play and a person is treated like a trophy, you’ve generally lost me, no matter how deservedly miserable the outcome is for the wagerers.

The second element that chafes is when a character lies or withholds information that could protect another character, especially if that kind of dishonesty serves no meaningful purpose. Mileage on whether the dishonesty in Life Sucks was necessary or at least in balance with the alternative will obviously vary, but it struck me as a choice made because there would have been no more story if it hadn’t been.

So I can’t say for sure if the presence of two driving bits of narrative that I can’t stand under just about any circumstances makes Life Sucks bad, or just bad for me. I do think the conclusion is bizarrely staged, with significant events described after the fact instead of actually rendered for readers (not that I yearned for it to be longer). And I do think Rosa, Dave’s inamorata, starts promisingly but ends up behaving in ways that drive plot instead of making sense. And I do think “I can barely stand to look at you” is an appallingly bad line of dialogue anywhere outside of a Barbara Stanwyck movie.

But overall, I just don’t know. Part of me feels that this book simply, empirically doesn’t work, but another part wonders if my personal biases are overtaking my judgment.

(This quasi-review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)

From the stack: Three Shadows

You can’t say you weren’t warned. Cyril Pedrosa’s Three Shadows (First Second) opens with a beautifully sad poem by Deborah Garrison, and the creator’s biography announces that the book was “born out of the agony of watching his close friends’ child die very young.” It’s a bit of an over-preparation, as Pedrosa frames that tragedy as a parable and illustrates it in a friendly, fanciful style.

He also avoids some pitfalls common to both the material and his approach to it. The central message of this kind of story – that the death of a child is hard to accept – is so obvious that it doesn’t even need to be argued. How, then, do you move your audience beyond simply prodding their shared anxieties and commonly held values? And when you dress that tragedy as a fable, how do you avoid flattening the experience even further?

Pedrosa manages by giving specificity to the family’s dynamic. They aren’t just Father, Mother, and Child. Louis, Lise and Joachim have routines and private jokes, and Pedrosa gives their life on a farm in the countryside easy, believable warmth. I liked them individually and as a unit before I was drawn into their misfortunes. That makes a difference, though the effect is more fleeting than it should be.

Anyway, the plot: one day, Joachim sees three shadowy riders on the hill near their house. They fill him with anxiety that transfers to his parents as the shadows appear again and again. Louis goes into defense mode, and Lise tries to find out why the shadows have come. When she learns the answer, the parents experience a philosophical divide. Lise would like to cherish whatever time Joachim has left, but Louis panics and tries to take his son into hiding.

That argument – mournful acceptance versus a likely futile fight against the inevitable – could have made for a fascinating comic all on its own. I’m not sure that the book benefits from Pedrosa’s choice to focus on the father’s resistance. It marginalizes Lise, and it’s impossible to not resent Louis for robbing her of the scant time she has left with her son. Pedrosa is clearly conscious of that result, but I’m never fully persuaded that Louis did what he had to do or that the sequences that follow are sufficient compensation for Lise’s absence from the narrative.

When the book takes that turn, Louis’s struggle becomes a sort of ambient backdrop for treachery and disaster that never fully connect with the more compelling themes that Pedrosa established earlier. These sequences are beautifully drawn, and they have emotional punch, but they didn’t cohere into a whole story for me. Pedrosa is a marvelously skilled illustrator and a potent storyteller moment to moment; no chapter of Three Shadows is anything close to a waste of time, but the last half of the book never becomes the transforming quest that seemed to have been intended. It just confirms that Lise was right all along, but it never rewards her for that.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)

Summer reading

Okay, so Previews order forms are due tomorrow. I never promised to be timely, and there’s good stuff available.

I’ve made my feelings about Kaoru Mori’s Emma abundantly clear, so I’m excited the follow-up, Shirley (CMX). It’s a collection of shorts about English maids, and I’m sure it will be lovely. (Page 125.)

I’m not really the audience for books about making comics, but I admire the work of Jessica (La Perdida) Abel and Matt (Odds Off or, L’Amour Foutu) Madden enormously, so I’m sure Drawing Words & Writing Pictures (First Second) will be a valuable resource. (Page 291.)

Though I’m convinced there must be many more juicy and telling crimes from the Victorian era, Rick Geary’s shift to A Treasury of 20th Century Murder won’t keep me from greedily consuming The Lindbergh Child (NBM). Geary’s true-crime comics are some of the best reads out there. (Page 317.)

A new comic from Hope Larson is always cause for celebration. Simon & Schuster offers Chiggers, a tale of summer-camp complications between two best friends. (Page 332.)

There’s something about Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball books that puts me off, but I’ve liked what I’ve read of his silly, charming Dr. Slump. Viz rolls out another all-ages adventure, Cowa!, which has the added benefit of starring baby monsters. (Page 374.)

Enticing as the prospect of a new shot at Takehiko Inoue’s Slam Dunk is, I think I’m more excited about the impending arrival of his series, Real (Viz). It’s another sports series, this time about wheelchair basketball, and it won the Excellence Prize at the 2001 Japan Media Arts Festival. (Page 379.)

They aren’t exactly debuts, but I’m happy to see new installments of former ICE Kunion titles showing up in rotation from Yen Press. I’m particularly looking forward to the second volume of Soo Hee Park’s Goong, the tale of an ordinary girl set to marry a member of the royal family. (Page 382.)

Or as I like to call it, "Poverty Month"

It’s Manga Month again in Diamond’s Previews catalog, and there’s quite a mix of stuff for varied tastes. Oddly enough, there’s isn’t a Manga Month spread at the front pointing to items of particular interest or even any indication of the occasion on the cover, but why dwell?

Dark Horse has been making some interesting choices lately, stretching further and further out of its seinen mold. This month, they’re offering four books from Akiko Ikeda’s Dayan Collection series of children’s books featuring “the mischievous cat… and his woodland friends.” The illustrations look gorgeous. Dark Horse has a bunch of preview pages up at its site. (Pages 30 and 31.)

Del Rey really gets on the Manga Month bus. I’m most interested in the first volume of Faust, “a fiction magazine showcasing innovative short works by young authors. Deb Aoki interviewed Faust editor Katsushi Ota over at About.com not too long ago which really whetted my interest. (Page 256.)

In addition to new volumes of lots of series I love, there’s also the debut of the Odd Thomas graphic novel, In Odd We Trust, by Dean Koontz and Queenie (The Dreaming) Chan. I haven’t read Koontz’s Odd Thomas novels, but it’s about a guy who talks to the dead, and it’s drawn by Chan, so I’m almost sure to like it. (Page 256.)

Drawn & Quarterly’s third collection of the works of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Good-Bye (Page 283), will undoubtedly get lots of well-deserved attention, but I’m more drawn to the possibilities of Seichi Hayashi’s Red Colored Elegy. It follows “the quietly melancholic lives of a young couple struggling to make ends meet” during “a politically turbulent and culturally vibrant decade that promised but failed to delivery new possibilities.” (Page 284.)

I’m only going by what Go! Comi’s solicitation tells me, but I like the concept behind Shino Taira and Yuki Ichiju’s Bogle, promising a contemporary teen-girl Robin Hood. (Page 293.)

Netcomics offers another title with a josei vibe, Wann’s Talking About. “Three lonely women in search of “happily ever after” in one modern city filled to the brim with difficult men.” (Page 316.)

That sound you just heard was probably Kate Dacey’s head exploding. Viz is offering a second edition of Rumiko Takahashi’s One-Pound Gospel, forbidden romance between a budding boxer and a beautiful nun. (Page 375.)

General head explosion will probably result from the announcement of two fat collections of Kazuo (The Drifting Classroom) Umezu’s Cat Eyed Boy. Horror fans will undoubtedly want to take note, as Umezu is an insanely gifted practitioner in this genre. Here’s some early, illustrated enthusiasm from Same Hat! Same Hat! The softcover books offer about 500 pages a piece for $24.99, but you can hack about a third off of that price if you pre-order at Amazon. (Page 377.)

In addition to a fair number of former Ice Kunion titles, Yen Press deliver’s the first volume of a manga that instantly hooks me with its title: Shoulder-a-Coffin, Kuro! by Satoko Kiyuduki. I don’t even care what it’s about. (Page 379.)

In the realm of comics not from Japan, there’s still plenty of interest. Phil and Kaja Foglio and Cheyenne Wright offer the seventh volume of Girl Genius: Agatha and the Voice of the Castle. I really enjoy this funny adventure series, which is also available online. (Page 203.)

Based on the strength of La Perdida, I’ll read just about anything by Jessica Abel, even if it’s about underemployed hipster vampires. Abel collaborates with Gabe Soria and Warren Pleece on Life Sucks from First Second. (Page 289.)

I really need to read Matthew Loux’s Sidescrollers (Oni Press), which has gotten tons of praise. Loux has a new book coming from Oni called Salt Water Taffy. The new quarterly series follows a bizarre family vacation to a small fishing port in Maine, and it looks like it will be a lot of fun. (Page 317.)

New comics from Hope Larson always make me happy. Her latest is Chiggers from Simon and Schuster, which promises friendship crises at summer camp. Larson is one of the most imaginative visual storytellers around, so it should offer an intriguing on familiar-sounding material. (Page 337.)

Upcoming 1/23/2008

Okay, I just have to say this. There’s no grief quite as unsettling and, frankly, often distasteful as nerd grief. To me, at least.

Now, on to this week’s comics releases.

AdHouse delivers the third issue of Fred Chao’s delightful Johnny Hiro, featuring a night at the opera and 47 Ronin Businessmen.

I don’t know how I’d feel if the protagonist of Masashi Tanaka’s Gon (CMX) actually ate baby penguins. He hasn’t (yet), so I’m looking forward to the third volume of this beautifully drawn manga. It promises vengeful baby wolf cubs, hungry piranha, and possibly psychedelic mushrooms.

Wow, two pamphlet comics in one week! The second comes from Fantagraphics in the form of the 10th issue of Linda Medley’s enchanting Castle Waiting. And hey, the revised Fantagraphics site has reasonably useful permalinks!

Wait, make that three floppies, all of which I love! The 19th issue of Jimmy Gownley’s funny, observant Amelia Rules! arrives via Renaissance Press.

Honorable mentions

Okay, back on the subject of the Young Adult Library Services Association’s 2008 choices of Great Graphic Novels for Teens: It’s been too long since I was a part of the teen demographic for me to pretend to know what they might like, but I think it’s a really good list of recommended reading for adults, so it makes me happy.

Instead of picking through the list of selections, I thought I would look back at the nominations and see what didn’t make the cut. I was kind of startled to find some of my very favorite books in that category (because I’m egotistical), so I thought I’d put together a runners-up list of books that I think are well worth a read:

  • Abouet, Marguerite, Clement Oubrerie. Aya. Drawn and Quarterly. My review here.
  • Chantler, Scott. The Annotated Northwest Passage. Oni Press. My reviews of the paperback installments of the series here, here and here.
  • Morinaga, Ai. My Heavenly Hockey Club. Del Rey. My review of the first volume here.
  • Sfar, Joann. The Professor’s Daughter. Roaring Brook Press / First Second. My short review of the book here.
  • Tanaka, Masashi. Gon. DC Comics, CMX. My review here, and a much more persuasive critique here.
  • Vining, James. First in Space. Oni Press. My review here. (Honestly, I can see how there was only room for one “innocent animal shot into space” story on the list, and I’m sure Laika is brilliant, but it looks like the kind of book that would depress me for weeks.)
  • And a couple of books that I haven’t read yet, but really should:

  • Lat. Town Boy. Roaring Brook Press / First Second.
  • Shiga, Jason. Bookhunter. Sparkplug Comics.
  • I think I’m taking the Lat books for granted, knowing that I can almost always swing by a Barnes & Noble and pick one up. As for Bookhunter, I’m hoping an upcoming trip to a city with a good comics shop will allow me to correct that particular lapse. I’m sure I’ll be able to snag a copy of Sidescrollers, too, which did make the 2008 cut.

    The year in fun (2007)

    From a fun comics standpoint, 2007 was absolutely awesome. You know how I know? I had a hard time keeping the list below to 26 items. Okay, it’s an arbitrary number, and I could have just listed everything, but I thought I would make a stab at some pretense of discernment.

    I’m not saying these are the best comics of 2007, though I’d put several in that category. I’m never entirely comfortable with that label, because I haven’t read everything and worry that my tastes are too narrow to make a reasonable stab at such a project anyways. But I have no trouble telling which comics I had a lot of fun reading, so here they are.

    (Doesn’t the jump create a breathtaking level of suspense? Well, doesn’t it?)

    (Updated because I can’t keep my years straight.)

  • 10, 20, and 30, by Morim Kang (Netcomics): Korean josei, basically, following three women of different ages and temperaments as they manage romance (or the lack of it), work (or the lack of it) and family (or an excess of it).
  • Aya, by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie (Drawn & Quarterly): In my defense, this came out really early in 2007, so I must have been confused and thought it was on last year’s version of this list. Because seriously, it’s one of the best graphic novels of the year and delightfully fun to boot. A sensible, ambitious young woman in the prosperous Ivory Coast of late 1970s keeps her head as the people around her leap into amusing, romantic misalliances.
  • Azumanga Daioh Omnibus, by Kyohiko Azuma (ADV): It’s tough to pick which delights me more: the resumption of publication of Azuma’s Yotsuba&!, or this big fat bargain collection of his very funny comic strips about a group of high-school girls and their eccentric teachers.
  • Black Metal, by Rick Spears and Chuck BB (Oni): Antisocial metal-heads discover their secret destiny while playing old vinyl backwards. Very funny, with appropriately and appealingly crude visuals.
  • Bloody Benders, The, by Rick Geary (NBM): I should probably feel some kind of regret that Geary will never run out of gruesome tales to fuel his Treasury of Victorian Murder series. I don’t, because they’re consistently brilliant, informative, insightful, and unsettling. For the high-minded voyeur in all of us.
  • Empowered, by Adam Warren (Dark Horse): Warren is amazingly skilled at walking a thin, frayed tightrope between lurid spandex cheesecake and a witty repudiation of the same. Terrific characters and genuinely funny, imaginative takes on potentially repetitive scenarios make all the difference.
  • Flower of Life, by Fumi Yoshinaga (Digital Manga): When people bemoan the fact that so many manga titles center on the trials and tribulations of high school students, they can’t be talking about this one, can they? I’m just going to come right out and say it: it’s every bit as good as Antique Bakery, which means it’s absolutely great.
  • Gin Tama, by Hideaki Sorachi (Viz): This one’s all about attitude: coarse, goofy, hyperactive attitude. A fallen samurai takes odd jobs in a world that’s handed the keys to alien invaders. There’s enough canny satire to balance out the low-brow antics, making this book a very pleasant surprise.
  • Glister, by Andi Watson (Image): A really delightful combination of fantasy, manor-house comedy, and singularly British sensibility. This book manages to have a warm heart and a tounge planted firmly in its cheek.
  • Honey and Clover, by Chica Umino (Viz): Okay, so this goofy, romantic tale of students at an art college is still being serialized in Shojo Beat and hasn’t come out in individual volumes yet. It’s hilarious.
  • Johnny Hiro, by Fred Chao (AdHouse): In a year that offered more genre mash-up comics than I can count, this was probably my favorite for the underlying realism of the young couple at its center. Giant monsters and ninja sous-chefs are just part of the challenges urban life presents to Johnny and Mayumi.
  • Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip Book Two, by Tove Jansson (Drawn & Quarterly): Everyone knows these strips are timeless, international treasures, right? And that Drawn & Quarterly deserves some kind of cultural prize for getting them back in print? Okay, just checking.
  • My Heavenly Hockey Club, by Ai Morinaga (Del Rey): Under the flimsiest pretext of sports manga lurks a goofy love letter to two of my favorite deadly sins, sloth and gluttony. Easily the best screwball comedy that came out last year.
  • Northwest Passage: The Annotated Collection, by Scott Chantler (Oni): A handsomely produced collection of one of my favorite comics of 2006, featuring treachery and adventure in colonial Canada.
  • Parasyte, by Hitoshi Iwaaki (Del Rey): Okay, so the art is dated and, well, frankly just plain bad in a lot of ways. (Many of the high-school girls in the cast look like they’re pushing 40.) But there’s just something about a boy and the shape-shifting parasite that’s taken over his hand that warms my heart.
  • The Professor’s Daughter, by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert (First Second): There are certainly better, beefier works by Sfar, but this is still charming, beautiful stuff, with Sfar’s endearingly cranky voice getting a lovely rendering from Guibert.
  • Re-Gifters, by Mike Carey, Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel (Minx): A snazzy little story of romance, martial arts and self-esteem that avoids every single Afterschool Special pitfall through solid characterization, tight storytelling and spiffy art.
  • Ride Home, The, by Joey Weiser (AdHouse): I have yet to find a gnome living in my car, but maybe it just knows I’m on to it thanks to this charming, all-ages adventure about embracing change.
  • Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, by Bryan Lee O’Malley (Oni): This series of a young slacker in love just gets better and better, which hardly seems possible. Great characters, a spot-on kind of magical realism, and plenty of twists and turns to keep things fresh and moving.
  • Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil, by Jeff Smith (DC): The Mary Marvel sequences are enough to put this on a Decade in Fun list, but Smith’s re-imagining of the origin of Captain Marvel is delightful from top to bottom.
  • Shortcomings, by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly): Not all comics about whiny losers who are unable to sustain interpersonal relationships are intolerable. Some, like this one, are absolutely delightful and have what may be the year’s best dialogue.
  • Suppli, by Mari Okazaki (Tokyopop): Damnation, how did this one slip under my radar for so long? In this beautifully drawn josei title, an advertising executive throws herself into work after the end of her seven-year relationship. It’s exactly the kind of book tons of people have been begging for: funny, intelligent, moving and grown up.
  • Umbrella Academy, The: Apocalypse Suite, by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá (Dark Horse): It’s hardly the first comic to portray the super-team as a dysfunctional family, or maybe even the 50th, but it’s a clever, fast-paced, wonderfully illustrated example all the same.
  • Venus in Love, by Yuki Nakaji (CMX): Aside from the novelty of its college setting (as opposed to the shôjo standard, high school), this book has ample low-key charm. A straight girl and a gay guy become friendly rivals when they realize they have a crush on the same classmate.
  • Welcome to the N.H.K., by Tatsuhiko Takimoto (Tokyopop): I can take or leave the manga this novel inspired, but the source material is tremendously appealing reading. It’s like if David Sedaris wrote a novel about straight, dysfunctional Japanese people.
  • Wild Adapter, by Kazuya Minekura (Tokyopop): Charismatic, emotionally damaged boys pose their way through the stations of the noir cross. Mostly style, but what style, and a reasonable amount of substance to keep you from feeling entirely frivolous. (If frivolity isn’t a worry, you can easily ignore the substance.)
  • Upcoming 10/10

    Just because Jason Thompson’s Manga: The Complete Guide (Del Rey) is clearly the must-buy item on this week’s ComicList doesn’t mean it’s the only item worth mentioning.

    If it weren’t for the Guide, the pick of the week might be the fifth volume of Kiyohiko Azuma’s absolutely delightful Yotsuba&! (ADV). Cardboard robot battles! A trip to the beach! Grapes! What more do you need?

    Yes, they hunger for brains, but how do zombies really feel? Someone must have already asked this, but nothing comes to mind. This archly emo look at undead eaters of human flesh comes in the form of J. Marc Schmidt’s Eating Steve from Slave Labor Graphics. I’ve heard good things about Schmidt’s Egg Story, and the Eating Steve preview has some nice bits in it.)

    I’m curious about CMX’s new wave of titles aimed at mature readers, particularly Kanako Inuki’s Presents. The excerpt that ran in a CMX sampler over the summer wasn’t too inspiring, but John Jakala’s review convinces me that it’s definitely worth a look. (But I really love “comeuppance theater.” “Tonight on ‘When Bad Things Happen to People Who Totally Deserve Them…”)

    Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings (Drawn & Quarterly) has gotten great reviews all over the place, so I’m sure I’ll take a look at it at some point. I’m guessing it will be all over chain bookstores, and the right convergence of opportunity and discount will arise somewhere down the line.

    How have I managed to go this long without reading Lat’s Kampung Boy (First Second), even in the face of universal critical acclaim? And now the follow-up, Town Boy, is due. Must… catch… up! (Not with the help of Amazon, though. They have one of those “buy both” offers that actually allows you to pay about 75 cents more for the two titles than you would if you just added them to your cart individually, which leads me to believe that the buy-two pricing hasn’t caught up with the individual costs.)

    Beyond lots of Fruits Basket product (which I hasten to note that I heartily endorse, because the series is very moving and surprising), Tokyopop offers two books that I’m eagerly anticipating. The first is the debut volume of Kozue Amano’s Aqua, which sounds lovely. There’s also the second volume of Yuji Iwahara’s King of Thorn. The first installment didn’t quite reach the heights of Iwahara’s Chikyu Misaki (CMX), but it was very solid, and it’s Iwahara, so I’ll happily stick around on the assumption that it will reach those heights eventually.

    The excerpt from Yearbook Stories: 1976-78 that ran in Top Shelf’s Seasonal Sampler was extremely likable, so I’ll definitely look for it the next time I’m in a big city with a comic shop with a wide selection. It’s written by Top Shelf honcho Chris Staros and illustrated by Bo Hampton and Rich Tommaso.

    Even factoring out the extra volumes of Naruto, Viz sure has a heck of a lot of product moving this week. Some of it, like Strawberry 100%, is resolutely awful, in my opinion. Some offerings, like new volumes of Bleach and Nana, are as welcome as sweater weather.

    Yen Press rolls out three licensed titles, all of which sound like fairly standard bookstore fare, and none of which quite grab my attention the way With the Light did. I do like teen detective stories, so I’ll probably give Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning a look. Or maybe not, after reading Katherine Dacey-Tsuei’s take on the book. It’s not like I don’t have plenty of other options.

    Upcoming 9/6

    Why am I more lethargic after a three-day weekend than I was before? I have only a vague grasp of what day it currently is and whether I need to put the trash out, but I know that comics will be arriving at some point, because the ComicList tells me so.

    The local comic shop has stopped ordering shelf copies of almost every manga series and unloaded its back stock. Plenty of people still pre-order, though I think the chain bookstores in the area have presented more competition than the management wants to wrangle. So it’s one of those comic shops, pretty much, though it’s still useful as an order point for things that won’t readily show up in bookstores.

    One of the few series that get shelf copies is MPD Psycho by Eiji Otsuka and Sho-U Tajima (Dark Horse). This is handy, because I’m not quite ready to commit to putting the series on my reserve list. The first volume neared my upper limit of lurid violence, but it was intriguing enough to keep me reading for another volume.

    I managed to enjoy First in Space (Oni), even though animals in peril make me even more uncomfortable than dismembered humans. I’m not sure I’ll have the emotional fortitude for Laika by Nick Abadzis (First Second). It looks terrific, and I’ll definitely keep it in mind for one of those days when I’m in the mood for a good cry, but the current emotional barometer readings suggest that now isn’t the time.

    It had to happen sometime. After a long string of good choices, Go! Comi has finally picked a couple of licenses that really don’t work for me. This week sees the launch of Takeru Kirishima’s Kanna and Ryo Takagi’s The Devil Within. Kanna has some gripping scenes, but it doesn’t hang together as well as I’d like. (And twenty-something men reacting with varying degrees of inappropriateness to an eight-year-old girl will never sit well with me. Sorry.) As for The Devil Within, you know how super-deformed art sequences can sometimes be a happy break from pages of rich visual detail and emotional nuance, and can sometimes look like the manga-ka was just trying to turn his or her pages in on time? I strongly suspect the latter in this case, and the story and characters just aren’t engaging enough for me to overlook the inconsistent, rather ugly art.

    (On the other hand, Hideyuki Kurata’s Train + Train just gets better and better. The series still isn’t taking advantage of the visual possibilities of its premise, but the characters and scenarios are gaining considerable emotional weight as things progress. It doesn’t come out this week, but the experience of saying negative things about Go! Comi’s catalog was odd enough that I had to compensate somehow.)

    Previews review

    There’s plenty of joy in the latest Previews catalog, and while orders are due many places today, timeliness issues have never stopped me before.

    ADV delivers the fifth volume of Kiyohiko Azuma’s absolutely wonderful Yotsuba&! (Page 215, AUG07 2389). I would link to the information on ADV’s web site, if such a wondrous thing existed in this day and age, so you’ll just have to settle for Amazon’s listing.

    More Fumi Yoshinaga is always worth noting, and Digital Manga delivers with Garden of Dreams, a shôjo title set in Victorian England (Page 280, AUG07, 3580).

    The easy pick of the month is the second volume of Moomin: The Complete Tove Jannson Comic Strip from Drawn & Quarterly (Page 286, AUG07, 3600). It’s glorious, timeless stuff, and it’s been beautifully packaged.

    Lots of people loved Lat’s Kampung Boy, and :01 follows up with Town Boy (Page 289, AUG07 3662). If you missed out on Kampung Boy, that’s available for re-order as well (AUG07 3663).

    If you aren’t already delirious, there’s more Andy Runton with the fourth volume of Owly: Don’t Be Afraid (or A Time to Be Brave) from Top Shelf (Page 354, AUG07 4028).