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From the stack: Tōnoharu

May 15, 2008 by

One of my favorite stories by David Sedaris describes an adolescent trip to a summer camp in Greece he took with his sister. There’s the hope that the journey will lead to reinvention and that the anxious, twisted geek he is will give way to someone sophisticated and comfortable in his skin. While his sister accomplishes this without apparent effort or consequence, Sedaris becomes more intensely himself. It’s a funny, poignant look at the tyranny of expectations.

Lars Martinson’s Tōnoharu (Pliant Press and Top Shelf) covers similar territory in graphic fashion. Daniel Wells has begun a year as a teaching assistant at a junior high school in rural Japan, and he has clear visions of what the outcomes will be… “Fluency in Japanese, adoring students and colleagues, a revolutionized curriculum…” It doesn’t work out that way, and no reasonable person could expect it would, but Daniel’s optimism is understandable. Who doesn’t harbor fantasies about the possibility of change in a new setting?

But even if Daniel was a different kind of person, more outgoing or visionary, the village of Tōnoharu isn’t fertile ground for adventure or transformation. It’s an average community, and its residents are courteous, but they have their own lives and needs. This leaves Daniel with the responsibility of adapting, and he’s not very good at that. Martinson is conscientious about keeping the onus on his protagonist; Daniel could embrace the experience and engage the people around him if he chose to do so.

At the same time, I like Daniel and can understand his perspective. He has just enough ambition to embark on this kind of adventure, but he doesn’t have to tools to take full advantage of it. Maybe I’m revealing too much about myself, but I never found his awkwardness that extreme; I found it funny, sure, but not out of scale.

Visually speaking, Martinson uses a fairly rigid grid pattern of panels that ends up looking like a well-organized photo album. It’s a good choice for this kind of material. He keeps his character designs loose and simple and their settings richly detailed and textured. I like that counterpoint a lot, and I always appreciate a strong sense of place in a comic.

One thing I did find odd about Tōnoharu was the overall packaging, which struck me as a little too handsome. The content here is the first part of a longer story. Engaging as it is page by page, it’s necessarily incomplete and doesn’t really take shape as an individual entertainment. The book’s hardcover treatment implies something complete to me; I might have chosen to release the individual chapters in a simpler format and saved the high-end production for an eventual collection. But really, excessive packaging is barely even a flaw, just a bit of contradicted expectations.

Martinson has delivered a fine first chapter to an engrossing, character-driven story. I’m looking forward to the next installment.

Filed under: From the stack, Top Shelf 2 Comments

From the stack: Life Sucks

May 12, 2008 by

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.)

Filed under: First Second, From the stack 3 Comments

The first hit's free

May 9, 2008 by

I missed Free Comic Book Day, but I managed to get my hands on a copy of Thomas F. Zahler’s Love and Capes #7 (Maerkle Press). As I understand it, one of the missions of Free Comic Book Day is to introduce people to comics they haven’t tried previously in the hopes of convincing them to purchase said comics in the future. Mission accomplished, Free Comic Book Day.

My favorite parts of super-hero comics have always been the in-between moments, the interpersonal soap opera that fills the gaps between big battles. Love and Capes is nothing but those in-between moments, following the developing relationship between a Superman type and a bookstore owner. In this issue, Mark (also known as the Crusader) is trying to figure out the right way to propose to Abby. He seeks advice from his parents, his colleagues, and Abby’s younger sister, Charlotte.

The first thing that struck me about the book is that it reads less like a comic book than a collection of individual strips. Just about each page is a romantic-comedy beat with its own punch line, moving the story forward but standing on its own. (It’s kind of like For Better or Worse without the icky gender and relationship dynamics.) The characters are sturdy and likeable enough to keep the rhythms from becoming repetitive.

I also found the book admirable in the way that it sticks to its mission. Some revisionist genre parodies can’t seem to resist becoming exactly the kind of story they’re tweaking, and that strikes me as defeating the purpose of providing an alternative. Love and Capes maintains its tone throughout, sort of a fusion of Mad About You and Astro City. (There’s one sequence where Abby keeps Mark company during monitor duty, which created a singularly unpleasant callback to another comic, but that’s hardly Zahler’s fault.)

Mark and Abby may not be the most sharply etched of characters, but I like them. They’re functional adults in a believable relationship, and their individual qualities fuel the observational humor nicely. They’re also on equal footing; each has a life and work that they value, and they support and respect one another. Zahler’s cartoon-y illustrating style suits the material well, providing open, funny visuals.

What else can I say? It’s a charming, easygoing book about sympathetic people in weird circumstances. It uses those circumstances for comedy and contrast, but it doesn’t let them overwhelm the core charms of the story.

(A collection of the first six issues of the series is due out in November, and Zahler has put a large number of preview pages online.)

Filed under: From the stack 3 Comments

Arm fall off boy

May 5, 2008 by

One of the perils of reading classic comics is what I’d term the Grandpa Love Factor. By that I mean that everyone loves Grandpa because he’s Grandpa. We wouldn’t be where we are without him, and he was in The War, and he made sure his five children all went to college, and if he smells a little funny and repeats the same stories over and over again and accuses you of “backsass” when you ask him if he knows not to put a metal pie plate in the microwave, even when he’s about to do exactly that, well, he’s Grandpa, and by all that’s good and true, you will love him, because there is a special place in hell for the kind of ingrate that doesn’t.

I’m not saying that there are legions of creators who are viewed primarily through the prism of the Grandpa Love Factor, but I do wonder sometimes. Because when reading a classic comic by a creator widely acknowledged as a pioneer in the medium, the merest hint that I’m appreciating the context of the comic more than the comic itself makes me feel horribly guilty. (“Oh, no! I don’t love Grandpa, and I’m going to hell for it!”)

So I would once again like to express my appreciation for Osamu Tezuka, because I love reading his comics even more than I love the context of those comics. Because in addition to having been created by an undisputed master and trailblazer, I find them uncategorically, un-ironically entertaining.

I’m not going to say Dororo, recently released by Vertical, is the best example of Tezuka’s work available in English, and who knows where it ranks in his complete body of work, but it’s certainly a page-turner. It’s about a young man, Hyakkimaru, on a quest to get his body back. His power-hungry father sold the boy to demons before Hyakkimaru was even born, and only the intervention of a kindly doctor keeps the creepy, shapeless infant from death.

The doctor helps Hyakkimaru compensate for his shortcomings, and the lad sets off in search of his missing parts. Along the way, he meets a thieving urchin named Dororo who sets his sights on the valuable sword Hyakkimaru conceals under his prosthetic arm. Dororo is an imp and a brat, but he and Hyakkimaru form one of those oddball partnerships that crop up so often in fiction of every variety. This one stems at least partly from the fact that both have unbearably painful personal histories, so it’s a bit more persuasive than the average.

But Tezuka’s work is always more persuasive than average. His protagonists fall into a standard shônen quest rhythm, protecting the innocent from demonic machinations as they further their own goals, squabbling and bonding along the way. The landscape they inhabit has been ravaged by war, which heightens the suspicions of the people they encounter. The architecture may be familiar – varied perils result in incremental victories – but the tone is decidedly on the grim side. This isn’t the kind of bloodless action romp you might expect; the body count is shockingly high, and Tezuka doesn’t flinch from showing you what happens when someone swings a blade around. The heroes’ beneficiaries are more likely to respond with anxiety and ingratitude than a hot meal and a place to recover after their trials.

If that sounds like Tezuka’s abandoned his humanistic bent here, don’t worry. It’s hard to blame his townspeople for their failings of hospitality, given the deprivations they’ve endured. Hunger, violence, uncertainty, and a bunch of other war-driven ills have left them in survival mode, and neither Hyakkimaru nor Dororo inspire confidence or comfort.

Diverting as the big, bombastic moments are, they aren’t the be-all and end-all of Dororo. There are bits of low comedy that provide respite from the literal and figurative bloodletting. They’re in scale, generally driven by Dororo’s utter unwillingness to back down from any opposition. At the same time, that quality puts Dororo in genuine peril; scary, bad things aren’t just a feature of his past. One of the most striking things about the book is that no one feels safe, in spite of the familiarity of the plot mechanics. It’s that uncertainty – not entirely knowing how something’s going to turn out – that makes Tezuka’s work so readable and alive for me.

Grandpa Tezuka smells like lemon basil and tells embarrassing (but not creepy) stories about your Mom and always gives me five dollars and tells me to spend it on something useless. I love Grandpa Tezuka.

(Review based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)

Filed under: From the stack, Vertical 5 Comments

Take me to Chowder Bay

April 28, 2008 by

One of the phrases I overuse to describe comics I really like and admire is to say that they cohere. I don’t know if I’ve ever adequately explained what I mean by that, so I’ll take another shot at it.

What I basically mean is that all of the elements work together to achieve a specific, worthwhile effect. Plot, dialogue, characterization, illustration, tone – everything clicks into place. There can be discordance in the way the elements come together, and I think it’s generally preferable that there is some appealing, diverting clashing going on. (Look at how Fumi Yoshinaga’s lanky, sexy art jangles so pleasingly against her chatty, airy dialogue, or how Joann Sfar’s bursts of philosophizing amiably derail a conventional narrative.)

Added to the list of “books that cohere” is Matthew Loux’s Salt Water Taffy, due May 7, 2008, from Oni. It’s an all-ages comedy-adventure about young brothers on a family vacation to a decidedly unpromising seaside town. Jack and Benny discover that Chowder Bay, Maine, is a lot more interesting than it initially seems. I’m extremely reluctant to describe the plot in any more detail, because the fun of the book is discovering the town’s weird secrets with them.

I can say that I really, really love the look of this book. It just lopes along, visually speaking. The kids are charmingly gangly, and they seem to run everywhere. Character design and facial expressions are spot-on. The detailed settings are familiar but cozily odd, and the action sequences are clear and sharp.

Tone and timing are also just right. Loux is able to introduce likeable characters quickly and without fuss, and he can throw them into endearingly odd scenarios right off the bat. The comedy is very organic and very funny, which is no small feat for a story set in a quirky small town. There’s an overall feel of effortlessness, of everything falling serendipitously into place. It all just works.

What works best, I think, is that Loux gives the kids ownership of the weirdness. The discoveries are theirs, and grown-up skepticism only makes those discoveries more appealing. They’re rewarded for being open-minded. Boredom is vanquished; imagination and adventure win.

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

Filed under: From the stack, Oni 7 Comments

From the stack: Three Shadows

April 15, 2008 by

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.)

Filed under: First Second, From the stack 2 Comments

Pinky swear

April 4, 2008 by

It’s a little strange to constantly expect bloody criminal violence to erupt in a shôjo romantic comedy, but that’s the effect Kiyo Fujiwara’s Wild Ones (Viz) had on me. That it doesn’t is both a relief and a disappointment.

Sachie’s mother has died, and her future is uncertain until her maternal grandfather arrives to take Sachie into his home. Sachie had been told he was dead, so she’s understandably suspicious. She’s even more anxious when she realizes that Grandpa is the leader of a yakuza faction.

Now Sachie has a new school and a house full of tattooed, scarred toughs to deal with, along with the realization that her generally straightforward mother lied to her (for admittedly good reasons). The thugs all dote on her like she’s an adorable kitten they found out in the rain. Grandpa is a little aloof, but he obviously adored Sachie’s mother and seems to have transferred those affections to his granddaughter. And not all of Grandpa’s minions are leathery hoodlums.

Yes, there’s a boy, and his name is Rakuto. He’s class president at Sachie’s school, and Grandpa has given him the task of protecting Sachie. She finds Rakuto unnervingly devoted, and she’s not sure if it’s genuine or if he’s just following orders. He’s dreamy, sure, but is he sincere?

Everything that actually happens in the comic is pleasant enough. The thugs are actually pretty loveable in a ridiculous way, as when they try and find an appropriate birthday gift for the girl. Sachie’s ambivalence about Rakuto is credible and hits some nice emotional notes. But gangster-story expectations kept distracting me.

Fujiwara tends to gloss over Grandpa’s business, which left me to look for traces of it on the fringes. Rakuto explains that Grandpa took him in after his father succumbed to bad debts, and that all of the men in the house arrived under similar circumstances. It’s supposed to illustrate Grandpa’s unlikely benevolence, but it just led me to suspect that he killed all of their parents and took in the boy children to swell his ranks.

It’s not that I want Grandpa’s elegant compound to be riddled with rival gunfire, or for undercover investigators to try and turn Sachie between classes. I’m not sure what it would do to the amiability of the rest of the narrative. But the absence of actual criminal behavior in a criminal milieu is undeniably odd; it’s like a werewolf story where none of the chapters take place during the full moon.

Okay, maybe I do want a few shootouts and undercover stings.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher. And yes, I know that gun control is extraordinarily strict in Japan and that a shootout is extremely unlikely. You know what I mean.)

Filed under: From the stack, Viz 3 Comments

I bought a Secret

April 3, 2008 by

Well, that was a disappointment. The first issue of Marvel’s Secret Invasion mini-series wasn’t nearly as dreadful as I’d hoped. It’s not good by any standard I currently hold for comics, but it’s far from the stupidest thing I’ve ever read.

What struck me most about it was that all of the soap opera is political instead of interpersonal. Tension comes from differences in philosophy or the suspicion that people they don’t like are Skrulls. (Nobody catches his or her breath long enough to say, “Well, that would explain why you’ve been such an ass for the last three crossovers.”) I miss the days when characters could spew scathing, entirely personal reproaches at each other while fending off alien invaders.

The plot moves surprisingly quickly, with a number of minor characters revealed to be Skrulls, several big explosions, and a handful of other twists of varying levels of impact. With so much stuff happening, there isn’t much room for dialogue to turn execrable. The notable exceptions are scenes with super-geniuses Reed Richards, Tony Stark and Hank Pym. Brian Bendis seems more interested in making everyone talk in a way that he thinks is conversationally natural, so smart people don’t quite come across with that quality intact.

I seem to be in the minority in being generally unimpressed with the pencils of Leinil Francis Yu. It’s hard to create a palpable sense of paranoia when the portrayal of character acting is so weak. Facial expressions are more blank than intriguingly ambiguous. His style and storytelling seem too sketchy for the big set pieces. With so many characters in play and so much happening, an emphasis on clarity and detail would seem to be in order.

For me, the overall effect of reading the book was what I always imagined would result from attending a high-school reunion. It was vaguely interesting to check in with a group that used to matter intensely, but I’m not going to go out of my way to keep up with them.

I will admit that the big reveal that concludes the comic is intriguing enough to incline me to follow what happens in the series through message board conversations, though not actually by means of buying more comics. (If anyone chooses to start an annotations blog, for example, please let me know.) Spoiler-rich link after the cut.

See, this is the kind of thing that I think would be meaningless to the casual reader who’s absorbed the title’s hype but is a virtual buffet for the dedicated Marvel fan. If even, say, two of the characters portrayed in this splash are the genuine articles as opposed to Skrull feints, then there are genuine possibilities of the “Everything you know is wrong” variety. With a good third of the characters rendered here, I can come up with a healthy list of things i wish had never happened to them. While it’s probably 95% misdirecting tease, I have to give Bendis credit for putting at least part of the joke on himself. He wrote a good 70% of the stories I wish could be wiped out of the Scarlet Witch’s personal canon. That doesn’t constitute actual story-generated interest so much as residual fanboy wistfulness, mind you.

Filed under: From the stack, Marvel 2 Comments

Slack and slash

March 19, 2008 by

Lars Brown’s North World (Oni Press), a collection of Brown’s webcomic, is a sometimes frustrating collection of strengths and weaknesses. Brown displays some good instincts in the development of concepts and characters, but his grasp on pacing and structure needs work.

He’s constructed some concurrent narrative elements that are mutually supportive in smart ways. Young adventurer Conrad wants to move to the next level of his profession; he’s stuck at the “giant beasts” plateau and wants to face the kind of menaces that “get the bards to come to [him] for a story.” Just such a challenge comes his way, but it forces him to return to his hometown after an absence of several years, just in time for his ex-girlfriend’s wedding. He’s also estranged from his family to some degree, particularly his disapproving father.

So Conrad is juggling career issues, possibly unwanted romantic closure, and unfinished emotional business that ties into his autonomy as an adult. The book has promising architecture, thematically linked but tonally varied. Unfortunately, I don’t think Brown is enough of a juggler to keep things in balance. There’s a lack of focus. It’s a book where everything almost works, but the storytelling is nowhere near as tight as it needs to be to succeed.

Conrad is a promising protagonist, and he’s at a believable impasse between adolescent self-indulgence and fully realized adulthood. Conrad isn’t so immature that he can’t listen to people who care about him, like his father, but he’s not so confident that he can figure out when his ex is jerking him around. (She’s always jerking him around in punishing, passive-aggressive ways, flirtatiously flaunting her current happiness when she isn’t trying to reel him back in.) It’s unclear as to whether a life as a bard-magnet adventurer would be Conrad’s best happy ending, and that’s all to the good. (He’d definitely be better off if he bought his ex a nice place setting and skipped the wedding.)

But Brown can’t quite seem to shape scenes in ways that give the story momentum. Sequences always feel like they’ve run too long, to the point that the concurrent narrative elements lose energy. A subplot that could have been illuminating and even mildly amusing – Conrad runs afoul with some present-day punks who are just as obnoxious as he used to be – goes on for what seems like forever. The subplot provides some fight sequences, but those aren’t really Brown’s forte as an illustrator, so they don’t really serve to change the pace of the proceedings.

It’s a book that’s badly in need of some rigorous editing. I don’t mind a story unfolding casually when that approach serves it, but there’s too much going on in North World to allow this much lingering. It’s somewhat against my nature for me to call for fewer slices of life and more plot, but this story needs to move farther and faster than it does.

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

(Updated to note that I can type the same wrong thing over and over, even though some part of my brain knows better. I don’t know where “Caleb” came from.)

Filed under: From the stack, Oni 2 Comments

From the stack: Little Nothings

March 3, 2008 by

The thing about observational humor is that it all depends on the person doing the observing. Everyone has his or her own standards for who constitutes good company, and I can’t think of better than Lewis Trondheim, at least based on Little Nothings: The Curse of the Umbrella (NBM).

The one-page cartoons illustrating Trondheim’s everyday observations and encounters are really delightful – witty, astute, low-key, sweet, and polished, but never fussy. He doesn’t seem to be in love with the sound of his own voice, and he doesn’t abandon his instincts as a storyteller because the content is casual and unstructured. It’s just so perfectly in scale, and the ultimate effect is one of effortlessness.

It’s also gorgeous. Trondheim renders everyone as gently cartoonish animals, but his facial expressions are pricelessly on point. Watching exasperation, consternation, bemusement, shock and contentment light up his menagerie is a constant source of delight in miniature. Since many of the sequences focus on his travels, there are some gorgeously rendered settings as well. The use of color is remarkably rich throughout, whether Trondheim is rendering a castle in Scotland or just letting his beaky avatar pop out of the frame.

I just can’t say enough good things about this book. It’s charming, funny and sincere without being saccharine or remotely self-involved. There are plenty of cartoonists who have tried to strike this kind of personal, conversational tone, but I’ve rarely been so disappointed to see the conversation end.

Filed under: From the stack, NBM 5 Comments
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