When I’m reading a comic and it makes me laugh out loud, my partner almost always asks me if it’s Sgt. Frog. Call it the Keroro Effect. The latest book to trigger this has been Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga by Koji Aihara and Kentaro Takekuma (Viz). It’s cynical and vulgar and sick and wrong and hilarious and perfect. It’s even bizarrely instructive. There are titles on the shelves that seem like they’ve followed this manual religiously.

Wheedle and you shall receive: Lea Hernandez is publishing her 24-Hour work as a mini-comic. Details are here. Try and resist the tulip illustration. I dare you.

Did the world really need a rambling mash note to Kindaichi Case Files? Probably not, but it did make Michael May crave fried chicken.

I wish I could link directly to the full text of “What Lies Behind the Global Success of Manga?” from the Journal of Japanese Trade and Industry, but I found it through Lexis-Nexis. A shorter version can be found here. It tracks manga’s market evolution via a lengthy interview with Stuart Levy, founder of Tokyopop.

Comics are so suited to telling absurd, outsized adventures that I sometimes forget how effectively they can convey quieter, more human stories. Matt Madden’s Odds Off or, L’Amour Foutu (Highwater Books) is an excellent example of the latter category.

Odds Off is a lot like an independent film with an ensemble cast. Madden tracks the intersecting lives of a group of twenty-somethings as they live, work, and study in and around a university. They wrestle believably with ambition, culture, and relationships, comparing what they have with what they think they want. They have problems, but their struggles are all on a very relatable scale.

Take Shirin. She’s becoming increasingly unhappy as she prepares for medical school aptitude tests. Work is an exercise in everyday stupidity, whether its malicious gossip, inflexible authority, or unsolicited outbursts of conservative philosophy from co-workers. It’s actually driven her to take up smoking for the first time in her life, since the habit allows her to get away from her desk at regular intervals.

She’s got a boyfriend, Morgan, who’s cute, good-natured, and emotionally unavailable. He’s not a bad guy, and he loves Shirin, but it’s becoming obvious that he isn’t equipped to provide the kind of support she needs. And he’s becoming obsessed with what he perceives to be the simmering sexual tension in a French-language instructional program on television.

Then there’s Lance. He’s a gifted writing student, but he’s got a frustrating lack of social skills. He’s also been diagnosed with a bizarre (and possibly imaginary) ailment that prevents him from writing or reading while he’s taking his prescribed medication. Lance doesn’t know Shirin or Morgan, but he’s developed a painfully acute at-first-sight crush on Morgan.

Connecting Shirin and Lance is Chad, a cute, emotionally stable hipster. He’s friends with both and provides valuable service as an observant, clear-eyed sounding board. (He can also be relied on to sneak wine into dry campus celebrations.) Beyond being the thread that brings the parallel stories together, Chad’s a gregarious gossip. He’s an engaging vehicle for expository information delivered in an organic way.

Madden takes these people and their respective states of mind and articulates them in gentle, organic ways. He doesn’t underline anything, and he relies on the reader’s intelligence and empathy to identify the ways his cast connects and drifts apart. It’s an interesting kind of narrative minimalism that never seems sparse. Madden picks just the right moments in his characters’ lives to create a cohesive, affecting story.

While Odds Off can be very funny, it’s never uproarious. It’s comedy of recognition. There are plenty of moving moments, but you never hear the strings swell up. There’s a real sense of scale. That makes it sound muted, but that isn’t the case at all. Madden finds the richness and variety in his story while keeping total control of proportion and tone.

Madden’s illustrations are very much of a piece with his writing. His character designs are varied, but his cast looks like people you’d see on the street. He sticks with small panels that help punctuate the conversational nature of his script and keep things flowing. Relatively simple line work is used to fine emotional effect, too, and Odds Off isn’t without the occasional, unexpected moment of visual fancy. He folds in surprising bits of fantasy or brief, potent dream sequences without allowing them to become overwhelming. They’re nice grace notes that actually underline the emotional realism.

Odds Off is a terrific slice-of-life story, populated by challenging but ultimately sympathetic characters. Madden’s approach is low-key, but his work doesn’t lose any of its emotional impact as a result. It’s a real find.

(To see samples of Matt Madden’s work, visit his web site here.)

There’s nothing like a healthy dose of misanthropy to give a comic some kick. Lackluster World 1 (Gen: Eric Publishing) has just the right amount, mixed with mordant humor, lovely illustrations, and smart satire.

Fahrenheit Monahan, Lackluster World’s albino protagonist, works as a newspaper reporter and occasional op-ed writer, and he’d like very much to be left alone. He finds contemporary society painfully banal, and he tries to limit his place in it to that of caustic observer. Unfortunately, the people around him have other plans.

First, there’s his arrested frat-boy co-worker, Cog, who gives Fahrenheit nicknames like “Casper” and tries to drag him on drunken excursions with a pack of his beer-soaked kind. Worse are Fahrenheit’s siblings, older brother Kelvin and younger sister Celsius. Kelvin has a kind of glassy-eyed religious fervor, and he’s determined to introduce his brother to the wonders of faith. Celsius is relentlessly cheerful and enthusiastic; she doesn’t seem to care so much about Fahrenheit’s soul, but she wants him to have fun. Fahrenheit’s only reliable companion is his black cat, the somewhat aloof Mr. Mittens.

Fahrenheit’s frustrations come to a head on his birthday, when the various people determined to engage him converge. In a hilarious sequence, Kelvin and Celsius insist on celebrating their brother’s special day at an establishment called Smiley’s Play Place. Cog and his liquored-up posse stumble across the party, bringing their own vulgar fervor to the mix. A clown is present.

It’s all too much for Fahrenheit, and he takes steps to shake society out of its torpor (or maybe just unsettle it into shutting up for a spell). While it’s often difficult to sell a protagonist who’s fed up with the tediousness of it all, writer/illustrator Eric Adams makes it easy to see things from Fahrenheit’s point of view. He does this by leavening his lead character’s outrage with enough situational absurdity to fend off any sourness. Fahrenheit’s internal monologues could easily become overwritten or shrill, but Adams takes a restrained, character-based approach. The barbs are specific, and Fahrenheit’s perspective has a nice internal consistency and logic.

His work as an illustrator is equally impressive. Lackluster World has the appearance of a grim children’s book, which is just right for this material. Adams finds great variety in Fahrenheit’s persistent scowl and in the fixed grins of Kelvin and Celsius. His sense of composition is strong, too, and panel layouts are imaginative and varied. I’m not quite sure how he managed it, but Adams has also managed to make a black-and-white comic look like it employs a full palette of colors.

We all have moments when the people around us are just too much to stand and the world is exhausting. Lackluster World explores the comic possibilities of those moments as a sustained world view. It’s a very appealing and accomplished piece of satire.

(For more information on the title and to view sample pages, visit the Lackluster World web site here.)

The 2005 Harvey Award nominations have been posted at The Beat. If Marvel thought it was going to split the internet in half, they’re going to have to pull off something rather special to top the Harveys. Eightball and Identity Crisis nominated for the same award? Heads will explode!

I’m really happy to see Bryan Lee O’Malley (Scott Pilgrim, Lost at Sea) and Andy Runton (Owly) get lots of nominations. With Scott Pilgrim, Owly, and Craig Thompson’s lovely Carnet de Voyage taking slots in the Best Graphic Album of Original Work category, I don’t envy the voters who have to pick just one.

And what the hell does the comic industry have against Paul Gravett’s magnificent Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics? First the Eisners snubbed it in the Best Comic-Related Book category, now it fails to appear in the field for the Best Biographical, Historical, or Journalistic Presentation Harvey. (If nothing else, these exclusions give me more chances to say how terrific Gravett’s book is.)

Instead of taking deep breaths to calm myself over the injustice of it all, I can just pop over and look at Lea Hernandez’s 24-Hour Comic, Dangerous Beauty. She’s posted it in three parts here, here, and here. As Johanna noted on her blog, it would be mighty delightful if this was published as a mini-comic. The cumulative effect of the three very different acts is really something in an electronic version, but I think it would be even more effective in print.

Speaking of comics you can read for free, Dave Carter is turning May into Free Comic Book Month at Yet Another Comics Blog. Dave will be digging into his own collection to match up entrants with comics they haven’t tried but might like, which is such a cool idea that it almost makes me wish I weren’t so selfish and lazy.

I’m still making my way through the haul from the Pittsburgh Comicon, and I’m learning that Ed Cunard is more than just an evil imp who encourages overspending. He was particularly encouraging at one dealer’s box of five-dollar graphic novels, and those purchases have turned out to be a gold mine of good reading. (Plus, I keep hearing Ed say, “You should get that!” whenever I look at them.) Highlights have been Chynna Clugston-Major’s screwball romantic comedy Scooter Girl (Oni) and Gabrielle Bell’s varied, accomplished collection of mini-comics, When I’m Old and Other Stories (Alternative Comics). The “to review” pile… it grows ever taller!

The following spoils certain plot developments from Captain America 5. If you haven’t read it but plan to, turn back!

I am clearly a ghoulish person, because every time I think about what I learned about Bucky Barnes in Captain America 5, I grin. Sometimes I even laugh out loud.

For those of you who don’t follow the book, writer Ed Brubaker has revealed Bucky’s true function as Captain America’s sidekick. Bucky Barnes, beneath his boyish innocence, was a highly trained killing machine. While Cap was giving inspiring speeches to the troops, Bucky was sneaking past the front lines, slitting throats and gunning down advanced guards. Cap couldn’t get his hands bloody and maintain his inspirational image, so he sent a kid to do it.

I don’t know why that idea tickles me so much. It might be the perverse logic of it. It might be the way it answers the long-standing question of whether Cap actually made it through World War II without killing anyone. It might even be the way it’s such a perfect thematic sibling to Gwen Stacy’s lusty romp with the Green Goblin.

Some people have noted, I think quite correctly, that the idea of teen sidekicks isn’t one that benefits from careful scrutiny. The argument goes that it’s hard to endorse an adult knowingly putting a child (or at least a minor) in real peril. And situations don’t get much more perilous than the front lines of World War II, so Cap and his military handlers could easily look criminally irresponsible for letting Bucky tag along at all.

But this revelation has a weirdly beautiful insanity to it. Bucky is one of those characters whose value has been that he’s dead, and that Cap feels badly about that. I’ve never seen a flashback story featuring Bucky where he made any kind of impression. (I admit that I haven’t read too many, and I don’t follow Captain America’s adventures too closely, because he bores me.) He’s never been a character so much as an emotionally charged headstone.

Now, everything we knew about Bucky was wrong! (Yes, I usually hate that as a narrative device. Consider this the exception.) He was a black-ops machine, stealthily offing the opposition as easily as he cried, “Jeepers, Cap!” (Okay, maybe I’m inserting the “Jeepers,” but you know what I mean.) It makes an odd kind of sense, but it’s inexplicably, morbidly hilarious at the same time.

As I said, Cap doesn’t really do a thing for me. I’m enjoying Brubaker’s run so far, but I wouldn’t be picking up the title if I didn’t generally admire Brubaker’s work (and that of artists Steve Epting and Michael Lark). So I’m curious to see how this development will go down with readers who actually are Cap fans. Because he does seem to inspire a great deal of reader loyalty, and some of those loyal readers are real purists about what they think Cap will and will not do. I’m actually kind of surprised I haven’t seen more of a reaction already, though I may be looking in the wrong places. (And maybe they’re waiting to see if this twist is just a side effect of Cap’s apparently unreliable memory.)

But the image of Bucky skulking through undergrowth with a big knife in his teeth, waiting to slit someone from ear to ear, is an image that makes me happy for reasons I simply cannot explain. It’s nuts, and I just love it. I know it’s wrong, but I just don’t care.

It’s not you, Sharknife. It’s me.

I’m just too old for you. We’re at different places in our lives. You must sense it too.

Sure, you’re stylish. Maybe you’re too stylish for an old codger like me.

Sure, I appreciate that you’ve chosen to appropriate a video-game aesthetic as a storytelling device. I love video games! I can see the craft and skill involved in pulling that off!

Maybe my tired old eyes just can’t absorb all this narrative invention, the kinetic action, the captured moment/screenshot qualities that drive the long, long, long fight scenes.

Okay, maybe it’s not entirely me.

Incompatibility takes two, and while you’ve got a lot going for you, I think most of it is flash. Tricked-out visuals only go so far when the characters are somewhat underdeveloped and the plot is kind of threadbare.

It’s kind of hard to talk frankly like this, because you’re so eager to please. You have energy to spare, but it all seems unfocused. There’s not much depth to you, and I know that’s a geezer’s criticism, but I’m not asking for too much. I just want a moment or two of consequence. I want the novelty to give way, even briefly, to some heart.

And the way you talk! You’re trying so hard to sound hip that you’ve circled all the way back to square again. Stop adding the letter “z” to everything! Stop randomly throwing words together so they sound manga-esque!

I’m sorry. This isn’t going how I’d hoped. Maybe we should just call it a night. You were never meant for me, and I shouldn’t hold that against you.

Don’t worry. I picked up the tab.

I love books on tape, and I always like to have one in the car. There are some I can listen to over and over again, even when the book isn’t a particular favorite, but because the reader does so well. I can listen to Jim Dale read the Harry Potter books again and again. (That’s funny, because I never want to hear Jim Dale sing anything again. His vocalizing from the cast album of Barnum reminds me of Michael Crawford’s, and that isn’t a good thing, in my opinion.)

One of my favorite readers is Barbara Rosenblat, who’s recorded many of the Amelia Peabody mysteries by Elizabeth Peters. She’s one of those readers who just precisely captures the way I hear the voices when I read the book, and it’s great fun to listen to her bring the cast to life. Her Amelia is just note-perfect: bossy, self-assured, impatient, funny, sly.

Now, the book I’ve currently got in the car is one that I haven’t actually read in print version, The Egyptologist, by Arthur Phillips. It might be entertaining on paper, but the audio version is… well… it’s agony. There are handful of readers on it, and one of them, who gives voice to an Australian private detective, is… well, let’s just say I can’t make it through ten CDs of it. There’s no way.

So when Kevin Melrose linked to an interview with Susanna Clarke, author of the sublime Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, I made a mental note to check the library to see if they had a copy of the audio version. And I looked up the audio version on-line. It’s read by Simon Prebble.

Simon Prebble is one of the readers on The Egyptologist. But I don’t know if he’s the one who’s hurting me with the down-under gumshoe shtick. So, has anyone out there listened to the audio version of Jonathan Strange? Is it any good? The sanity you preserve may be mine.

Ed Cunard has posted some of the truly awesome dalmatian sketches he’s collected over the years. Ed also claims that he’s not much of a shopper, which may or may not be true. But he’s undeniably a highly skilled bad influence. Every time I look at my stack of purchases, I hear Ed’s voice urging, “You should get that.” He’s like the Bad Idea Bears from Avenue Q, though I grudgingly admit his advice usually turns out pretty well.

Thanks to whoever nominated me for a Squiddy Award.

This week’s Flipped went up yesterday. Yes, I’m still picking at the CMX scab.

Looking at this week’s list of comics is kind of dispiriting until I make my way down to the manga and see new volumes of Case Closed and Whistle! from Viz and Sgt. Frog from Tokyopop. And the shopkeep assured me up in Pittsburgh that Oni’s Sharknife is nestled safely in my file. (It isn’t like I’m starving for reading material to begin with, now that I think about it.)

(Edited for spelling crimes against spotted dogs.)

Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Lost at Sea (Oni) is one of those books that I’m almost afraid to review. This is going to sound like coffee house blather, but the work has a weird kind of purity that makes me reluctant to dissect it. O’Malley so perfectly and seemingly effortlessly captures a certain state of mind that it seems nitpicky to try and figure out how he’s managed it.

But it’s also one of those books where just saying that it’s a wonderful comic and I loved it doesn’t feel inadequate. It’s exactly the kind of graphic novel I want to read: smart, funny, observant, expressive, driven by character, and making fluid use of a distinct visual style.

Lost at Sea doesn’t so much tell a story as it follows a train of thought. Eighteen-year-old Raleigh has caught a ride home to Canada from California with three of her high-school classmates. The trio is close in a cantankerous, shorthand way that manages to accentuate Raleigh’s feelings of isolation and disconnectedness. And she really doesn’t need much help in that area.

Raleigh suspects that she doesn’t have a soul, and she ponders that a lot. As her fellow passengers tease each other in spiky, familiar ways, Raleigh looks inward. Her mind wanders to moments of connection in her own life, but she can’t seem to draw any comfort from them, because they all have accompanying moments of loss: her parents divorcing, her best friend moving away, being moved to a gifted class only to resent the fact that she isn’t special any more.

She tries to pinpoint the moment when her soul went missing, but she’s smart enough to know that life isn’t that linear, that what seems like a pattern may just be coincidence and that memory is at least partly, if not mostly, perception. Perception plays a big role in Lost at Sea. Raleigh seems to assume that her dilemma is obvious, and that the people around her must know on some level that she’s missing something. It makes her reluctant to connect with the people around her, even as their perceptions of her draw them closer.

Raleigh is so eighteen. A million thoughts swirl through her head, and she’s determined to make sense of them. At the same time, she recognizes the virtual impossibility of that aim. She can’t quite allow herself to articulate what she wants or what she feels, because the possibility of rejection or misunderstanding is always looming. She thinks she’s the weirdest person in the world.

It’s a fairly universal state of mind, but O’Malley portrays it articulate, sensitive ways that are entirely specific to his protagonist. He gives Raleigh a barbed, revealing stream-of-consciousness narration that never becomes tiresome. It’s not some dreary poetry journal; it’s the often jumbled thinking of a smart young woman who doesn’t know if she’s actually in crisis or is really just like everyone else, or which of those states would be less comforting.

O’Malley has given Raleigh the perfect companions for both the road trip and the head trip. Short-tempered Ian, above-it-all Dave, and blunt, funny Steph are all outgoing in ways Raleigh finds both baffling and attractive. I’m very impressed with O’Malley’s skill at portraying the kind of warm, casual friendship on display here and in Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life. It’s almost more effective here, as the threesome’s rapport has to be convincing to shake Raleigh out of her mental loop.

I can’t help but think of Lost at Sea and Scott Pilgrim together, if only because they’re so distinctly accomplished. While Scott Pilgrim is dizzily entertaining and surprising, Lost at Sea offers quieter, more contemplative pleasures. O’Malley has real emotional range, but his work seems effortless. It’s seamless, like it just arrived whole on the page. But it doesn’t have any slickness to it. Everything seems connected, part of a warm, organic whole.

I wish I were better at talking about the visual elements of comic storytelling, because I feel like I end up using the same, limited vocabulary over and over. For lack of my own words, I’ll just have to lift something Bill Randall said about Osamu Tezuka in The Comics Journal Special Edition 5: “The unique vocabulary of cartooning, with its exaggerations and simplifications, its playful lines and caricature, can embrace the whole of human experience.” That sums up my aesthetic response to O’Malley’s visuals much better than anything I could come up with, so we’ll leave it there.

Lost at Sea is a wonderful comic. I loved it.

So we went to a performance of Carmina Burana this afternoon. And I have to wonder sometimes if people don’t actually intentionally go to cultural events so much as just get kidnapped from their homes and wake dazed in a theatre somewhere. Because people are so damned rude I could lose my mind.

I know everyone in the world has made these requests, but all the same:

1. Turn off your phone. No. Turn it off. The performance is an hour and ten minutes. You’ll live.
2. Do you really think your child wants to go see Carmina Burana? Is any cultural enlightenment he or she might pick up (entirely by osmosis, I’m guessing) worth the undying enmity of your fellow concert-goers as they grind their teeth when your kid asks, “Is it almost over?” for the seventy-fifth time?
3. Again, it’s only an hour and ten minutes. You can hold it. Stop popping out of your seat like a prairie dog.
4. That’s nice that your kid is in the children’s choir, but you’re sitting roughly a quarter of a mile from the stage, so the picture won’t turn out anyways, and you all just blinded the timpanist when your flashes went off at once.
5. It’s a program. It’s not a Triple A map. It’s not origami paper. Put it down.
6. Shut up. Seriously.
7. If you really feel like you need to unwrap a hard candy, could you do it during one of the loud, fast passages instead of during the soprano’s solo?
8. When people glare at you the first time you unwrap a hard candy during the soprano’s solo, the solution is not to do it again during the second soprano solo, only more deliberately. Because you know what? Unwrapping a hard candy slowly and carefully is actually louder than the way you just did it.
9. No one is making you sit here and listen to music. By the same token, no one cares if you act like an inconsiderate boob when you’re in your own home watching television. Think about it.